Things You Didn't Know About Hitler That Will Blow Your Mind

A new book tells the history of the ancient world through women. Here author Daisy Dunn explores what they had to say about their own sexuality – flying in the face of misogynist male stereotypes.

According to Semonides of Amorgos, a male poet working in Greece in the 7th Century BC, there are 10 main kinds of women. There are women who are like pigs, because they prefer eating to cleaning; women who resemble foxes, as they are peculiarly observant; donkey-women who are sexually promiscuous; dog-women, marked for their disobedience. There are stormy sea-women, greedy Earth-women, thieving weasel-women, lazy horse-women, unattractive ape-women, and – the one good kind – hard-working bee-women.

Of all the women described in this list, which pulsates with the misogyny of the time, those so-called sexually promiscuous "donkey-women" are perhaps the most mysterious.

Historical accounts from the ancient world tend to reveal the cloistered nature of women's lives. In Greece, women were usually veiled in public, and in Rome, they had "guardians" (ordinarily their father or husband) to supervise their movements and handling of property. Was the concept of the lusty woman pure male fantasy? Or were women of the ancient world more interested in sex than is generally believed?

As I learned while researching my new book The Missing Thread, the first history of the ancient world to be written through women, we have to look hard if we want to uncover what women really thought about sex.

So far were ancient women from flinching at the sight of erotica that some were even buried with it

The majority of the surviving sources were written by men who were prone to exaggerate women's sexual habits in one direction or the other. Some went to such lengths to emphasize a woman's virtue that they made her seem almost saintly and inhuman. Others purposely presented women as sexually voracious as a means of blackening their characters. If we took these descriptions at face value, we would come to the conclusion that women in the ancient world were either all chaste, or sex-mad. Fortunately, it is possible to peer into the hearts of some classical women, who provide a far deeper view of female sexuality.