Pamphile of Epidauros: A Female Ancient Greek Historian

Nearly all the historical writings that have survived from ancient Greece and Rome were written by men. Women’s voices in the historical record are few and far between. We do, however, know that there was, in fact, an extraordinarily prolific female ancient Greek historian named Pamphile of Epidauros, who lived in Greece in around the middle of the first century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Pamphile is known to have written a lengthy compilation of interesting historical anecdotes derived from various sources titled Historical Commentaries, an epitome of the writings of the historian Ktesias of Knidos (fl. c. 400 BCE), a work titled On Controversies that seems to have been perhaps a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Sexual Pleasures, which seems to have been a sex manual. Sadly, everything or almost everything she wrote has been lost.

Pamphile is a truly monumental figure in the history of Greek historiography, not only because she is the only female ancient Greek historian about whom we have any significant information, but also because she seems to have been an especially important author in the development of the genre of “miscellaneous history,” which focused on retelling interesting anecdotes from earlier authors and became very popular in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries CE.

Pamphile of Epidauros—not the only ancient female historian

Before I talk about Pamphile of Epidauros and her work in greater depth, I would like to clarify that she was probably not the first and certainly not the only female ancient historian. Notably, there are reports of at least one other ancient Greek female historian named Nikoboule, who is said to have written a biography of Alexander the Great.

Unfortunately, the only record we have of Nikoboule are a couple extremely brief paraphrases of her work by the Greek writer Athenaios of Naukratis (lived c. late second century – c. early third century CE) in his work The Learned Banqueters 10.434c and 12.537d. Both times Athenaios cites her, he does so for information about Alexander’s drinking habits.

The first time Athenaios cites Nikoboule, he inserts a remark insinuating that he does not really believe that she wrote the work attributed to her. Athenaios gives no indication as to why he believes that someone else wrote the work, but many modern scholars have taken his remark as evidence that the work was actually written by a man.

I, however, think that this is merely an example of the all-too-frequent sexist tendency in classical scholarship to assume that works attributed to a woman must have actually been written by a man, under the assumption that no woman could possibly have written such works. This tendency is, sadly, still very much alive.

Unfortunately, we have absolutely no information whatsoever about who Nikoboule was or where and when she lived, since she is never mentioned anywhere in any surviving text other than in those two very brief passages from Athenaios. She could have realistically lived anywhere in the Greek-speaking world anytime between the late fourth century BCE and the second century CE.

There was also an ancient female Chinese historian named Ban Zhao (lived c. 49 – c. 120 CE), who seems to have been a younger contemporary of Pamphile of Epidauros. Ban Zhao’s brother Ban Gu is known for having written most of the Hànshū, or Book of the Former Han. After Ban Gu died in the year 92 CE, Ban Zhao completed her brother’s work. She also wrote numerous treatises of her own, some of which have survived, including a treatise titled Nǚjiè, or Lessons for Women.

Pamphile of Epidauros, then, is not unique for merely being an ancient female historian. She is, however, still unique, because she is the only ancient female historian who wrote in the Greek language about whom we have any significant information.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Wushuang Pu, a book of woodcut prints made by the painter Jin Shi in the year 1694, depicting what the artist imagined Ban Zhao might have looked like

Ancient works that cite Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries

Pamphile’s best known work in antiquity seems to have been a work titled Ἱστορικὰ Ὑπομνήματα, or Historical Commentaries. In ancient times, works of literature that were too long to fit on a single roll of papyrus or parchment were divided into biblia, with each biblion being a single roll. A single biblion was typically about the length of maybe three of four chapters in a modern printed book. Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries is known to have been divided into thirty-three biblia, meaning it was quite a lengthy work. (For comparison, the Iliad and the Odyssey are each divided into twenty-four biblia.)

Although the Historical Commentaries has been lost, we know of its existence because multiple male ancient authors who had access to it cite it extensively in their own writings that have survived. Most notably, the Roman miscellanist Aulus Gellius (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) cites it extensively in his work Attic Nights and the Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios (fl. c. third century CE) cites it extensively in his work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.

These citations reveal some of the kinds of anecdotes that Pamphile told in her Historical Commentaries. For instance, here is a passage from Diogenes Laërtios’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 2.5.24–25 that cites Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries for an anecdote or several anecdotes about the Athenian philosopher Socrates. The passage reads as follows, as translated by R. D. Hicks:

“He was a man of great independence and dignity of character. Pamphile in the seventh book of her Commentaries tells how Alkibiades once offered him a large site on which to build a house; but he replied, ‘Suppose, then, I wanted shoes and you offered me a whole hide to make a pair with, would it not be ridiculous in me to take it?’”

“Often when he looked at the multitude of wares exposed for sale, he would say to himself, ‘How many things I can do without!’ And he would continually recite the lines:”

“‘The purple robe and silver’s shine
more fits an actor’s need than mine.​’”

“He showed his contempt for Archelaos of Makedonia and Skopas of Kranon and Eurylochos of Larissa by refusing to accept their presents or to go to their court. He was so orderly in his way of life that on several occasions when pestilence broke out in Athens he was the only man who escaped infection.”

It is unclear exactly how much of this passage comes from Pamphile, but certainly at least the first anecdote given here is from her. There are many other passages like this in Aulus Gellius and Diogenes Laërtios’s works.

ABOVE: Frontispiece illustration to a 1706 Latin edition of Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights showing what the artist imagined he might have looked like (left) and frontispiece illustration to a 1688 edition of Diogenes Laërtios’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers showing what the artist imagined he might have looked like (right)

Photios’s review of Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries in his Bibliotheke

More information about Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries comes from the medieval Greek bishop Photios I of Constantinople (lived c. 810 – 893 CE), who was an extraordinarily avid reader and had access to an enormous collection of ancient writings, which included many works that have since been lost. This collection seems to have included the first eight biblia of Pamphile of Epidauros’s Historical Commentaries.

Photios wrote at least 279 reviews of various books he had read, in which he summarizes the book in question and offers learned critique on its literary style. These reviews are included in a collection known as the Bibliotheke or Myriobiblos. Photios’s book review 175 is a review of the eight biblia of Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries that he had access to. This review provides vital information about Pamphile’s work and her literary style.

An excerpt from Photios’s review of her work reads as follows, as translated by I. M. Plant in his work Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology (on page 129):

“Pamphile lived with her husband, as she herself noted carefully in the preface to her Commentaries. She says that she began this historical work after living with him from childhood for thirteen years, and that she wrote what she learnt from her husband, not leaving his side for a day or even an hour, staying with him without break for thirteen years. She also wrote what she happened to hear from any of his visitors (for many people came to learn from him, as he had a very good name for his teaching) and in addition what she collected from books.”

“She combined as much of this material into her Commentaries as she thought worthy of note and preservation, not dividing up each piece along the lines of its original design, but writing up each one at random, as she came across it. This was not, as she says, because she found it difficult to divide the material according to genre, but because she considered a mixture, an embroidery, more delightful and more enjoyable than material of only one genre.”

Photios goes on to review Pamphile’s writing style, deeming it “simple” and well suited to the work of a mere woman.

Pamphile most likely married her husband sometime when she was between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. If she had been married to her husband for thirteen years at the time when she began writing her Historical Commentaries, then she was probably somewhere between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-one years old at the time when she began writing it.

Pamphile’s emphasis on her own devotion to her husband is probably a deliberate effort on her own part to put down the anticipated accusation that her historical work is a distraction from her duties as a wife. Her claim that she followed her husband everywhere and never left his side, however, suggests that, unlike most Greek women, she spent much of her time outside the home and therefore had an unusual degree of exposure to public life.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a lead seal of Photios I of Constantinople, dating to the ninth century CE

The influence of Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries

Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries is possibly the earliest known work in the genre of miscellaneous history, which became very popular in the second and third centuries CE. The Greek writer Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE), the Latin writer Aulus Gellius (who, as I’ve already mentioned, cites Pamphile by name), and the Greek writer Athenaios of Naukratis all wrote more-or-less in the same genre.

Dina Guth of the University of Manitoba suggests in this abstract published on the Society for Classical Studies website that the eccentricities of the miscellaneous history genre are a result of Pamphile’s deliberate self-fashioning of her own distinctively feminine authorial voice, which later male writers like Aulus Gellius and Klaudios Ailianos imitated.

Photios writes that Pamphile explains why she chose to arrange her anecdotes in a variegated order the way she did in her introduction by calling her Historical Commentaries “ποικίλη” (poikílē), which is a word normally associated with weaving and embroidery. In the Greek world, weaving and embroidering were very much traditional female activities. By applying this word to her work, Pamphile must have been trying to portray her work as fundamentally feminine in nature.

Later writers, however, seem to have imitated Pamphile’s manner of presentation. Klaudios Ailianos even adopts the exact same word that she evidently used to describe her work; he wrote a work titled Ποικίλη Ἱστορία (Poikílē Historía), which means something like Variegated History.

The Souda’s entry on Pamphile and references to other lost works by her

In addition to the Historical Commentaries, we also know that Pamphile apparently wrote many other works. About a hundred years after Photios, in the tenth century CE, an anonymous Greek writer or group of writers who probably lived in the city of Constantinople compiled an encyclopedia known as the Souda, which provides information about many works of ancient literature that have since been lost.

The Souda entry for Pamphile of Epidauros reads as follows, as translated by Lloyd-Llewellyn-Jones and James Robson in their book Ctesias’ Histories of Persia: Tales of the Orient (page 108), with a few edits of my own:

“Pamphile, from Epidauros, learned daughter of Soteridas, whose works they are also said to be, as Dionysios states in Book 30 of his History of Music. Others write that they are by her husband, Sokratidas. Historical Commentaries in thirty-three books, Epitome of Ktesias in three books, a large number of summaries of histories and other works, On Controversies, On Sexual Pleasures, and many others.”

Although the Souda’s list of the works of Pamphile of Epidauros is evidently incomplete, it is the most complete list of her writings that has survived and it can give us some impression of the kinds of works she wrote.

The Souda’s claim that Pamphile’s works were actually written by her father or her husband can be easily dismissed as a misinterpretation of the statement Photios mentions that Pamphile made in her introduction to the Historical Commentaries that she originally heard many of the anecdotes she retells from her husband, combined with the tendency among classical scholars that I mentioned earlier to assume that works attributed to a woman must have really been written by a man.

ABOVE: First page from a printed edition of the Souda encyclopedia from the fifteenth or sixteenth century CE

Epitome of the works of Ktesias

The Souda records that Pamphile wrote an epitome of the works of Ktesias of Knidos. Ktesias worked as a physician at the court of the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II (ruled 404 – 358 BCE) and was one of the very earliest ancient Greek historians. He wrote his works in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE and was a younger contemporary of Thoukydides.

Ktesias is known for two works: the Persika (a history of the Achaemenid Empire in twenty-three biblia, spanning all the way from its founding until 398 BCE) and the Indika (a history of India). Both of these works have been lost, except for fragments. Most of these fragments have been preserved through quotation or paraphrase by later authors, while one fragment of twenty-nine lines is preserved in Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2330, a papyrus fragment discovered in the rubbish dump of the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt.

Other information about Ktesias’s work is known from book reviews of the Persika and the Indika that are included in Photios’s Bibliotheke and an encyclopedia entry in the Souda. Photios’s book reviews give us the rough outline of Ktesias’s works, but his reviews unfortunately do not cover everything that Ktesias wrote about.

Ktesias is known to have retold many obvious fables and legends in his works. For instance, Ktesias’s Indika contained the earliest known description of a unicorn, which is summarized by Photios in his Bibliotheke 72, and an early account of the Skiapodes (i.e., legendary creatures who supposedly have only one leg and lie on their backs with their legs over their heads to shade themselves from the sun), which is summarized by the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder in his Natural History 7.23.

As a result of these sorts of descriptions, later ancient authors mocked Ktesias as unreliable. For instance, the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) mocks Ktesias in his satirical novel A True Story, which I have written about several times before, including in this article I wrote in January 2020 about ancient Greek and Roman novels.

Nonetheless, Ktesias was a contemporary of the Achaemenid Empire who worked in the Achaemenid court and, as such, had both first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of the Achaemenid government and direct access to records that no other Greek historian of the time had access to that have since been lost.

Pamphile’s epitome of Ktesias presumably summarized Photios’s Persika and perhaps also his Indika in much greater depth than Photios does in his Bibliotheke and would therefore provide us with more information about what Ktesias actually wrote, which, at the very least, would tell us more about ancient Achaemenid history.

On Controversies

The Souda also mentions that Pamphile wrote a work titled On Controversies. This work was presumably a treatise or dialogue of some kind discussing various controversial issues, most likely of moral, philosophical, literary, historical, and rhetorical natures.

Countless treatises and orations on controversial issues written by male writers who lived during the same rough historical period as Pamphile have survived to the present day. Depending on your definition of “controversial,” this genre would most likely include all the essays that are included in the Moralia of Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) and many of the speeches of Ailios Aristeides (lived 117 – 181 CE).

Nonetheless, it would be extraordinarily fascinating if Pamphile’s work On Controversies had survived, since she was a woman and this doubtlessly must have influenced her perspective on at least some of the controversial matters that she presumably discussed.

ABOVE: First page of a 1531 printed edition of a Latin translation of Ploutarchos of Chaironeia’s Moralia, a surviving collection of essays on various moral, philosophical, literary, historical, and rhetorical topics

On Sexual Pleasures

The last work that the Souda mentions Pamphile of Epidauros as having written is a work titled Περὶ Ἀφροδισίων, which means On Sexual Pleasures. This work was almost certainly a sex manual. Unfortunately, no part of the work in question has survived to the present day and the Souda is the only extant source that even mentions its existence.

At first, it might seem strange that a female scholar in the first century CE would write a sex manual and, given that the Souda is the only source that attributes such a work to Pamphile, some may suspect that the work is misattributed. This is certainly a possibility. Nonetheless, it is not implausible that Pamphile did indeed write a sex manual and that the work mentioned by the Souda was indeed correctly attributed to her.

The ancient Greeks seem to have regarded sex as an area of particular feminine expertise and a significant proportion of the female authors whose names are known from antiquity are known to have written sex manuals. Indeed, the most notorious work of erotic literature in the ancient Mediterranean world was a sex manual attributed to a woman named Philainis, who apparently was thought to have lived in around the fourth century BCE. Philainis’s work seems to have borne exactly the same title as the work that the Souda attributes to Pamphile, although they are certainly not the same work.

Three fragments from the introduction of Philainis’s sex manual have actually survived. The papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt discovered bits of papyri bearing these fragments in the rubbish dump of the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt in around the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The papyrologist Edgar Lobel published the editio princeps (i.e., first published edition) of the fragments in 1972, numbering them Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2891, fr. 1–3.

Modern scholars generally believe that “Philainis” is a literary persona, rather than a historical individual, but the true identity of the author of the work attributed to “Philainis” is unknown. Scholars have traditionally described the persona “Philainis” as a prostitute, but this seems to be based on nothing more than the unsupported assumption that any ancient woman who would write a book about sex must have been a prostitute.

If Pamphile did write the work On Sexual Pleasures that the Souda attributes to her, then she was writing in a well-established genre of literature in which other authors had written under female names before her.

ABOVE: Photograph from this page on the website “Oxyrhynchus: A City and Its Texts, Virtual Exhibition” showing the surviving papyrus fragments bearing the beginning of the introduction of Philainis’s sex manual

The surviving Treatise on Women Famous in War

There is only one surviving work that may have been written by Pamphile of Epidauros: a work written in the Greek language titled Treatise on Women Famous in War, which is ironically best known by the Latin title Tractatus de Mulieribus Claris in Bello (even though the work itself is not written in Latin).

This work is a compendium of fourteen short biographies of famous women from ancient history. All of the women whose lives are discussed in the treatise are powerful figures who either ruled themselves, had influence over rulers, or had influence over large numbers of people. Likewise, all the women who are discussed were believed in antiquity to have lived in historical times, not early mythical times.

Even more interestingly, the women come from a diverse range of nationalities. The vast majority of the women are not Greek and none of them are Roman, which is the opposite of what we would normally expect in a work of Greek historiography. The fourteen women who are discussed in the treatise are:

• Queen Semiramis of Assyria
• Zarinaia
• Nitokris I of Egypt
• Queen Nitokris of Babylon
• Argeia
• Queen Dido of Carthage
• Queen Atossa of the Achaemenid Empire
• Queen Rhodogune of Parthia
• Lyde
• Queen Pheretime of Kyrene
• Thargelia
• Queen Tomyris of the Massagetai
• Queen Artemisia I of Karia
• Onomaris

The work has survived to the present day in an anonymous state, without any attribution. Nonetheless, the classical scholar Deborah Levine Gera, who is now the Shalom Horowitz Professor of Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, suggests in her book Warrior Women: The Anonymous Tractatus de Mulieribus, published in 1997 by E. J. Brill, that Pamphile might be the author.

Gera notes that the author of the Treatise on Women Famous in War was clearly a skilled author who had access to a wide array of written historical sources. The author must have lived no earlier than the late second century BCE. Pamphile fits this description perfectly. Since Pamphile was a woman herself, it would make sense that she might have had a particular interest in writing about the lives of famous women of the past.

Gera also notes that the style and composition of the Treatise on Women Famous in War matches what Photios tells us about Pamphile’s style. It is written in relatively simple, straightforward Greek and it consists of a series of independent biographical sketches arranged in a seemingly random order. None of this is enough to prove that Pamphile is the author of the Treatise on Women Famous in War, but it is certainly enough to hint tantalizingly at the possibility.

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the city of Pompeii dating to between c. 10 BCE and c. 45 CE, depicting the Trojan prince Aineias with Queen Dido of Carthage, who is the subject of one of the biographies included in the Treatise on Women Famous in War