Pamphile of Epidaurus

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.

According to the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia of the tenth century AD, Pamphile was an Epidaurian,[1] whereas Photios describes her as an Egyptian by birth or descent.

[3] Photios summarizes the preface to Pamphile's Historical Notes, which states that, during the thirteen years she had lived with her husband, from whom she was never absent for a single hour, she was constantly at work upon her book, and that she diligently wrote down whatever she heard from her husband and from the many other learned people who frequented their house, as well as whatever she herself read in books.

[3] The estimation in which it was held in antiquity is shown by the extensive references to it in the works of the Roman historian Aulus Gellius and the Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtius, who appear to have availed themselves of it to a considerable extent.

The work was not arranged according to subjects or according to any settled plan, but it was more like a commonplace book, in which each piece of information was set down as it fell under the notice of the writer, who stated that she believed this variety would give greater pleasure to the reader.

Classical scholar Deborah Levine Gera has made a case that Pamphile of Epidaurus may be the author of the anonymous surviving treatise Tractatus de mulieribus claris in bello (Treatise on Women Famous in War), written in Greek, which gives accounts of the lives of fourteen famous women.

[15] Additionally, Pamphile is known to have written a three-volume epitome of the Persica by the fifth-century BC historian Ctesias, which also happens to be the source for two of the fourteen lives in the Tractatus de mulieribus.