Origins & Early Life

Pamphile or Pamphila of Epidaurus (fl. 1st century AD) was a historian of Egyptian descent who lived in Greece during the reign of the Roman emperor Nero (ruled 54 – 68 AD) and wrote in Greek. She was the first known female Greco-Roman historian and, along with Ban Zhao, one of the first known female historians. She is best known for her lost Historical Commentaries, a collection of miscellaneous historical anecdotes in thirty-three books, which is frequently cited by the Roman writer Aulus Gellius (c.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

125 – after 180 AD) in his Attic Nights and by the Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. She is also described in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda, and by the Byzantine writer Photios (c. 810/820 – 893). According to the Suda, she wrote a large number of epitomes of the works of other historians as well as treatises on disputes and sex. She may be the author of the anonymous surviving Greek treatise Tractatus de mulieribus claris in bello, which gives brief biographical accounts of the lives of famous women.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

According to the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia of the tenth century AD, Pamphile was an Epidaurian...

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