Vestal virgins and wandering wombs

Daily life for women in Ancient Greece and Rome left much to be desired, as this terrific study shows

480pp, W&N, T £19.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP £25, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

“Women were invented to make men’s lives more difficult.” With characteristic style and wit, Daisy Dunn opens her new book by quoting Hesiod. As this misogynistic Greek farmer-poet put it in his Works and Days, some time around 700BC, “let no woman deceive your mind with her shapely bottom and wheedling conversation – it’s your barn she is seeking”. Avarice was only part of the problem, apparently,

along with gluttony, drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, superstition, lack of foresight and irrationality. Women were descended from Pandora, and she had the mind of a treacherous dog, because Zeus had created her as a punishment for men.

Women, gender and sexuality in the Classical world have been the subjects of much scholarly endeavour in recent years. Many of the results have been turgidly unreadable, sometimes driven more by contemporary Western concerns rather than a desire to illuminate the past; a few exhibit an insane evangelistic fervour, as if studying ancient sexuality will somehow lead to a modern bedroom utopia. In The Missing Thread, Dunn wisely

avoids being drawn into this strange looking-glass world. “This is not a book about women,” she writes, “but a history of antiquity written through women.”

As such, this is mainstream history – political, social, economic and cultural – that doesn’t pretend that men weren’t almost always in charge, but rather pushes the Alexanders and Caesars slightly to the sides, so that “light may fall on the clearing to reveal the women in their shadow”. So Dunn’s telling of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome (218-201 BC) focuses on Imilce, Hannibal’s wife; Busa, who provided aid to the Romans defeated at Cannae; the Oppian Law that limited the freedom of Roman women; the con“specialist