YouSaid · the spoken record

Daisy Dunn

lines on the record: 33
first: 2024-08-03
most recent: 2024-08-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh, thank you, thank you, I really, I hope if it does find a good audience among male readers as well as female readers for that reason.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are in the minority. You don't have many women. That, I think, where my interest lay in particular is not just only on these extraordinary women, but on the women who are actually kind of left behind during wartime. So you have women, for example, I didn't realize this until I started researching this book, that women were responsible for partially funding the Punic Wars, these great wars that were fought between Rome and Carthage across several centuries. So they're doing their bit and they're being forced to do their bit, but we just don't often hear about it because they're not the sort of heroic Leonidas on the front line.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try to draw out Stop the Wars that women were involved with, so Fulvia and then if you're thinking about Macedon as well, sort of the mother of Alexander the Great, there was sort of the wars that followed Alexander's death.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you find this sort of slight reluctance on Tester's part to attribute any kind of successful action by women, particularly on a military level.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is true, I think, if you think of Agrippina, the elder in particular in Tastus as really interesting exactly as you say. You sort of find she has a very key role in the military. She's the mother of the future emperor Caligula, and she's there on the banks of the Rhine. And Tastus clearly isn't very keen on this. He quotes supposedly Tiberius saying, well, what roles are there left for the men when women go around along the front lines of the army and carrying around their children in front of all the soldiers? What's left them to do, which I think probably reflects Tacitus' own role. But at the same time, he clearly used a lost source now by Pliny the Elder, and Pliny the Elder seems to have been actually quite impressed, I think, by Agrippina the Elder, sort of giving direction, stopping these men from mutinying after the death of Augustus.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That night sleeping with men, being so insatiable that should challenge a prostitute to see who could sleep with more men in a 24 hour window and then winning. I mean, it's quite sort of absurd descriptions that you get of women. They stick in the mind and you remember these women for the wrong reasons. But then on the other side, you do have these women like Fulvia, who we've forgotten because they maybe haven't been written about in quite the same sort of salacious way.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. No, that's really, I think you're quite right. I think Fulvia is someone who's just kind of passed beneath our radar unjustifiably, really. There are a few bits where you might come across her and you think, I mean, she's notoriously said to have spat on the decapitated head of Cicero and stuck her hairpins into his tongue. That's a memorable episode. Probably not true. But other than that, in terms of political work, her work in this war, they aren't noticed. And I want to sort of draw attention to that because I think it does seem very different from the mentioned Messalina. She's the third wife of the Emperor Claudius. I mean, her record is absolutely horrendous in the sources, for she is openly described as being a prostitute on the side of being an emperor. She painting her nipples gold, putting on a blonde wig, going out to the broth.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More likely actually that she was trying to do her best to strengthen his hand politically against his two political rivals in the alliance that he had forged. But she just received no thanks for it whatsoever.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't and it says it in quite a slangy way as well the Latins landica landica we don't come across that word very very often it's quite sort of slangy it's very explicit it's very rude and we find other ones say you know I'm aiming at Octavian's arsehole you know you have these very you think of sort of you know the Second World War and bombs and sort of messages written on them here we've got a very very early example of this but it just shows that Fulvia again we've got a woman being blamed for the war and I think Mark Antony certainly blamed her for the war because this war was one that she lost she then went to meet up with him in Greece as she died a short time later but Mark Anthony seemed to have shown her no thanks whatsoever for her efforts to try and because I think this is the thing people historians said oh well she's doing this she's fighting this war in order to try and get him to come home to release him from the clutches of Cleopatra her love rival but I think it's it's just as likely and”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During the siege, she's described as actually holding on to a sword and addressing the troops and getting reinforcements when the tide turned and when Octavian's forces were getting the upper hand. And I think you can read the literary sources about this and think, oh my blood doesn't seem very likely that a woman would be doing that, you know, seems a bit exaggerated. But then you come across the archaeology and that's what's really fascinating because we have from Perugia the site of the siege a number of the bullets which were released by slingshot and targeted at both sides. And some of these actually referenced Fulvia herself. It's a particularly notorious one. It says, I'm aiming for Fulvia's clitoris.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Rome, which sort of looked like an amphitheatre, but then it could be separated out to forms of two D shaped theatres for two separate performances at once. He died in battle, so she was wounded again. And it was then that she married Mark Antony. And she was married to Mark Antony during the time that he was having his affair with Cleopatra in the east. And she really did everything she could to champion him within the political alliance he had forged with Octavian Augustus. And while he was away she became particularly notorious for stirring up a war, she teamed up with Marcantonese brother, so she and her brother in law actually were responsible for a siege that took place as known as the Peruzine War and was fought between 1941 and 40. And BC.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Clodius died as really when Fulvia then came into her own and became a figure of some renown, in Rome because he was killed in a brawl against his political enemy Milo. And Fulvia actually had his bloodied corpse put on display in Rome, which wasn't expected at all. She actually allowed the body to be carried out. There was a sort of makeshift cremation of the body and the fire actually got out of hand and spread into the Senate house and did a lot of damage. So she really stirred up purposely ill feeling against Milo and the political enemies of her late husband. So she was widowed young. She was then married to another politician who was probably best known.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fulvia is astonishing, and I can't believe that she's not better known considering her achievements and her life, that she lived in parallel with Cleopatra. So she was first of all married to Clodius, Publius Clodius Polca, who was quite notorious demagogue in ancient Rome. He comes up in Catholic's poetry because he was the brother of Clodia, who some see as the woman behind lesbia, Catullus' love interest. And he was a real sort of troublemaker around the time that he got married to Fulvia. He found himself in court, accused of infiltrating the Bonadea, which is a women's zoni religious festival. He was dressed up as a woman and he was ejected as a result of that. But Fulvia seems to have taken to him very, very quickly and the sources say that they were inseparable as a couple. And they had two children.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so, but I mean, it is quite sort of frightening when you read it, particularly they say that at the onset of puberty, a lot of girls were showing signs of sort of mental instability. And the prescription for this was essentially get the maradoff as quickly as possible so that they can have sex. So because otherwise I had this sort of accumulation of menstrual blood. That was another theory, which would drive them crazy. And so they needed to sort of, you know, grew up and then they'd get past this sort of, so this idea of the womb and the mind being tied very, very closely together really persists through history.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Described as hysterical. But the Greeks, in particular, there was a real medical basis for this, and they believed it was just completely essential that women had their wombs watered by semen specifically on a regular basis because otherwise they would go mad. And you find this quite sort of clearly quite opportunistic advice, I think.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a theory that we find in the Hippocratic corpus, which is a collection of medical writings, and most of them date to about the 5th century BC, but some older, some are younger, and they kind of get gathered together. And a lot of the ideas actually persist through time. And the wandering womb is one of the most important ideas to be contained within these works. And what it meant was essentially we have doctors in the ancient world telling women that they needed to have sex regularly because if they didn't, their wombs would dry out and would go wandering around the body in search of moisture elsewhere, and the movement of this womb, the wandering of the womb around the body was believed to cause a type of madness known as hysteria. We know of hysteria through history women are constantly being”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A free way, and you have these women emerging as sort of characters as kind of fan fatale characters emerging in Rome. And so that was the sort of popular image in which he sort of forged his political career. And I think he feels a certain pressure to stamp down on that and to reverse it.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's quite right. I think that's really sort of important to remember. There was a strong political dimension in terms of him trying to gain support. I mean, he was an impossible position. Really, he had established this mode of one man rule, which is the one thing that Romans were terrified of. You know, they didn't initially want to enter anything like a dictatorship or an autocracy or live under a monarchy. They had kings hundreds of years earlier, but they'd had a republic. Octavian Augustus was having to convince the people that actually he wasn't a figure to be feared. He was going to be sort of answering all their concerns. And he needed to be as popular as possible. And I think he was also very conscious that he'd grown up in this very sort of cosmopolitan Rome in which you have sort of all the poets, you know, you have Ovid, you have Catullus, you have Propersius, but it's all these people writing about sex and relationships and women in”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the reality in Rome. Of course, I mean, he himself carried on with lots of different women. It was definitely one rule for some people and not for other people. But this legislation did create a sort of”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The flip side when you look at Augustus in particular, he had this crazy vision of putting women back to a period that probably didn't really exist except in his own head, which is to say that he thought that women were becoming too free. In his time, he thought they were being promiscuous, they weren't having enough children, he wanted to make them sort of loyal mothers and wives and to cut back their freedom. So he introduced this raft of legislation to encourage marriage to make a daughtery punishable by exile or worse. It became a sort of a legal problem. So this was intended to limit women's freedoms and it was based, I think, on a slight misunderstanding.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a key figure, and this kind of established a passion for later Roman women in the court. So we find a lot of the Roman empress as being extremely powerful and written about a lot more than Roman women had been to date.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's right. It depends slightly in which class of women you were. So if you were in the court of one of the Roman emperors, such as Augustus, women seem to have operated a lot of power behind the scenes. I think of Olivia in particular, played so wonderfully by Sean Phillips back in the Robert Gray's production. But even in the literary sources, we look at Tastus, you look at Suetonius, we find Livia doing a lot and not just behind the scenes. I mean, she was sort of meeting with people from abroad and people had a sort of request to say someone's life if someone's up for a death penalty they might come to her, people seeking Roman citizenship might approach her. She had a significant role in diplomacy. She travelled with Augustus. She was in direct correspondence with the sister of Herod.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because then you get on that same sort of theme, you get Robert Graves then coming up with the idea that Homer was a woman as well, which again is quite an extreme view to take. You're thinking actually, you know, you've got someone there attributing the greatest work of literature in the Western world to a woman. That's quite something for Robert Grays to be saying he wasn't the first one. He was of going on these little pieces of evidence which are completely spurious. Samuel Butler had done the same thing. You have this idea that the Odyssey at least was composed by a woman rather than a man. And maybe that is, as you say, something to do with the world in which they were born into.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Direction. And it seems that the position of women was eroded to a certain degree. And I think that was a concerted effort on that part to make a new beginning to sort of forge their own identity. And when people are forging their own identity, they do tend to try and reverse what's happened before them. And we see this time, time, time and again through ancient history, even with individual rulers, when you look later to the Roman period, you look at emperors trying to do something different to make a new record, to change the record of their predecessor. So it's just a pattern of history. And this is why you just don't have anything like linear progress. Like you talk about there's not some great line of things getting better. It's very, very up and down. But I think that's what makes history so interesting.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the women in that coachure are very, very visible, they're very present in a lot of the artistic representations, a lot of the frescoes, the men are just the sort of crowd of people. They're not sort of individually painted. Whereas the women are shown as individuals. You have representations of women on throne-like seats with people paying them court. They're clearly significant to some degree and we're heavily reliant on the artistic evidence because there's no writing from linear, from, I'm going to say there's linear A, which we haven't really properly deciphered, but there's no kind of extended literary evidence. It won't help us to understand Minera and Crete. So we're looking at the archaeological record. The Mycenaeans, who were these early Greeks, they succeeded the Minoans on Crete and elsewhere. And they seem to have absorbed certain aspects of their culture, but also to have taken it in quite different ways.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a question of each culture that develops. I mean, with every new age, you get new ideas. And there are people who are really keen to reverse a situation of what's come before them and to make a new start. And often when you get a new start, you get a concerted effort to change the situation of women. And I think it with the Minoans in particular and the Mycenaeans, we're seeing something a lot like that. With Minoan Crete, we're talking really, really early ancient history. We're talking about the Bronze Age on Crete and the Minoans oversaw this tremendous palace culture, if you think of Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos. We're talking about that.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They really seem to speak to those women, so it would be nice to think that those women were actually there to hear what was being said.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is because I think this is what has been one of the long questions that people ask were women ever at the theatre to see all these plays considering Greek tragedies and Greek comedies are quite concerned with female power. I mean, would their women be in the audience? For much of the time we think, well, probably not. But during the Peloponnesian War, it was the population of Athens became so thin on the ground in most of the men were away fighting. So who were all these plays being put on for? These plays were still being put on. And I think I like to believe that certain women were actually invited in to watch these plays. We can't tell. We haven't got evidence either way, but it just seems to me, I think, particularly with plays like that, which really do attempt to represent the female reality. They feel like experience of war.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the Acropolis. It's kind of an extension, it's a real sort of pushing reality to the extreme in this play. And the sex strike actually works. And there is this great figure of reconciliation who comes in. And it's completely successful. So the women actually, when the day.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How harsh it is for women during wartime in particular. She said, well, men can return from war and then still marry during this long war for women, on the other hand. There are many, many virgins who will remain virgins because by the time the men get back, the women will be deemed too old to marry and to procreate. So there's a whole sort of lost generation of women. So we get these kind of very serious sentiments infiltrating this comedy. And Lysistrator, the main character we believe is based on a real historical woman who was a priestess in Athens called Lysimachi in the same period. So even though this completely over-the-top quite farcical comedy which women actually take over the Acropolis, there is a kind of serious parallel to it. You actually did have a woman operating power.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an amazing place, so it's put on as a comedy by Aristophanes in the late 5th century BC. And it's essentially about a woman and a group of women organizing a sex strike in order to try to persuade their husbands to agree peace terms during the Peloponnesian War, which is a real conflict fought between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies across several decades. On the one side, this is quite ridiculous. These women are presented as being really, really quiet, hot and bothered and put out at having to give up their pleasure just for the sake of trying to persuade their husbands just to put down their weapons. So you have these ridiculously kind of insatiable women on the stage. Then the other, it kind of turns in this slightly more serious direction. And you have Lysistrata, the title character, talking about actually”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The theatre was the one place in which men were entertaining the possibility of what it would be like if their sort of freedoms were extended to women. And they're trying to show people what wouldn't it be absolutely disastrous if this was the case. Look at what would happen. If women did actually have the same freedoms and rights as we did. So this is why you have this great discrepancy between women on the stage or the female characters on the stage played by men and women in reality.”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just not seen as applicable. It's not seen as relevant. It doesn't seem to pass into the thought processes of most of the men who are writing or sort of governing in that period that this freedom should extend to women as well. It just doesn't occur to them. What we do find, which I think is the most interesting aspect of this, is this is also the era in which the great comedies and the great tragedies were put on. In these plays, in the Greek plays of thinking also Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschynus said slightly earlier on, the women are a lot more interesting as characters than the men. And I think what's going on a lot of the time is we see women actually being quite powerful in these plays, but the result of them having this power is shown to be incredibly destructive. So I think that”
2024-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Women Who Shaped the Ancient World, with Daisy Dunn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT