Bonus episodes like this are normally for subscribers, but it’s Women’s History Month! Also, it’s correctional. Episode 16.6 was on Anna Komnene, who I believed to be the first female historian when I planned the series. It turns out that Pamphile is just one of her predecessors.
Find it on your favorite podcast app.
People who hated taking history classes in school can blame the Greeks. The Greeks invented history. It’s true that many other cultures did make lists of genealogies. They made lists of successive kings. They told mythic stories about their past. Sometimes they composed epic poems on a current or recently dead ruler by recounting his deeds with much praise and flattery mixed in. There are a host of other history-adjacent genres, but Herodotus of Halicarnassus is considered the Father of History because he travelled extensively to gather multiple accounts, attempted to weigh their relative reliability when they contradicted each other, and wrote a fully narrative book on the rise of the Persian empire and their wars with the Greeks. He called it The Histories, and he did all this during the 5th century BCE.
Herodotus was swiftly followed by Thucydides who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War. His big innovation was that where Herodotus accepted divine intervention as a reasonable explanation for historical events, Thucydides did not. He always tried to find a more earthly rationale for cause and effect. Historians have been following his lead ever since.
Greece had a spate of other less-famous historians, but with one exception, they were all men. This is not all that surprising. All the ancient civilizations were male-dominated, and Athens was particularly so. Polite women there weren’t even supposed to be mentioned by name. That would be rude. When respectable women appear in the court records at all, they are referred to as so-and-so’s sister or the wife of so-and-so. The legal term for wife was damar, which means “to subdue, or tame.” Respectable women were strictly regulated in where they could go, how far they could walk, etc. They were not intended to be seen on the streets. That was for slave women and prostitutes. Some Greek writers rebuked respectable women for daring to be seen even by members of their own households. Female infanticide was accepted, and maybe even common. One interesting way of determining the status of women is to compare the average age of grooms and brides. The farther apart they are, the more unequal the relationship is likely to be. Athens was particularly bad in this respect. Girls as young as 12 or 13 were often married to men of over 30 (Hamel, Ellis, French). I say Athens, rather than Greece, because not all the Greek city-states were the same. But most of our sources are Athenian, so that’s what we know. And what we know is almost exclusively male.
A Historian and a Woman
To my very great astonishment, there is actually one female Greek historian in the first century CE, which admittedly means we’ve moved into the Roman era (not the Greek era). Her name was Pamphile of Epidaurus. Epidaurus is not in Athens, and maybe that explains her existence. I don’t know much about Epidaurus or its gender relations. Pamphile also has some connection with Egypt, which many scholars have assumed means that her family was Egyptian even though she lived in Greece. At the time she lived, Egypt had been ruled by Greeks for hundreds of years, and more recently both Egypt and Greece were part of the newly formed Roman Empire, so there was plenty of back and forth possible.
The reason Pamphile escaped my initial sweeps for first female historian is that none of her work has survived. Last Thursday I covered Anna Komnene, and you can actually read her history book if you want to. Not so for Pamphile. She is said to have written 33 books, which together formed a collection of historical anecdotes. We know this not because we have the books, but because a handful of other ancient and medieval writers referenced her.
The one who provided the most information Photios I of Constantinople, who wrote hundreds of years later in the 9th century. He still had a copy of Pamphile’s work, which in and of itself is no small accomplishment. I’m guessing that nothing I have written will be available 800 years from now. Anyway, Photius says she was interesting, but not orderly. He also says her style was quite plain, which was only to be expected of a woman. Someone should tell him to try Hemingway.
Photios also summarized Pamphile’s preface. Like Anna Komnene, she had to explain her credentials. How could she, a mere woman, possibly know anything about history? She’s not allowed to travel around like Herodotus did. According to Photios’s summary of her preface, she got her material from her husband and from the many learned people who frequented their house.
Okay, so she has sources. But that’s not enough, if you’re a woman. You also have to prove you are a respectable woman. Otherwise why should anyone believe your word? So Pamphile also says in the thirty years that she lived with her husband, she was never absent from his side for a single hour. I really hope that’s not true, because, wow, does that not sound like a healthy marriage to me, but historically, I can see why she said it. That would prove she was faithful and trustworthy and all that.
Despite all this sketchiness, Photios is overall positive about Pamphile’s work. He says, “This book is useful as a means to erudition. In fact one finds in it much essential information as regards history, sentences, some data on rhetoric and philosophical speculation, on poetic form and randomly on other subjects of the same kind” (Photios, 175).
Pamphile is also said to have written a handful of other things, including essays called “On Disputes” and “On Sex” (Suda). Historians would give an arm or a leg or at least a few toes to know what an ancient woman would write on either of those topics, but of course those essays don’t survive either.
As per usual for an accomplished woman, there’s confusion over whether she or her husband wrote various things (Suda). But to me the fact that her name is remembered at all means she really wrote at least some of it. Otherwise they’d be attributed to her husband and Pamphile’s name would be entirely forgotten.
Women Famous in War
The only other thing I have on Pamphile is not knowledge, it is conjecture. There is a surviving anonymous text called Tractatus de mulieribus claris in bello, which is to say “A Treatise on Women Famous in War.” It has the histories of fourteen women, arranged seemingly randomly. It’s written in a plain style. It’s about women, which many a male historian never even thought of doing. Author Deborah Levine Gera’s hypothesis is that maybe this text about women because it was written by a woman. And maybe that woman’s name is Pamphile of Epidaurus (Gera, 61). It is unprovable, as Gera herself admits, but at least this treatise still exists.
As for what happened to Pamphile herself, we have no idea.
This bonus episode was typical of many because it’s on a woman that I just didn’t have enough source material on to do a full episode. I have lots of others like it on Patreon, which you can purchase individually for $5, but it’s a better deal to sign up as a regular supporter. However you can support, you are much appreciated. This upcoming Thursday would ordinarily be a bye-week for the podcast, but it’s women’s history month, so forget bye-weeks. I’ll be bringing you another first woman. This one comes from the archive of bonus episodes. It’s on the first woman to take flight.
Selected Sources
Ellis, Marialeen (2013) “Dominated, Denied, and Debauched: The Lives and Roles of Women in Classical Athens,” Vulcan Historical Review: Vol. 17, Article 6. Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/vulcan/vol17/iss2013/6
French, Marilyn. From Eve to Dawn : A History of Women. Toronto: Mcarthur, 2002.
Gera, Deborah Levine. Warrior Women: The Anonymous Tractatus de Mulieribus. Germany: E.J. Brill, 1997.
Hamel, Debra. Trying Neaira : The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece. New Haven, Conn. ; London: Yale University Press, 2005.
Photios I of Constantinople. “Bibliotheca.” http://www.tertullian.org. Accessed February 24, 2026. https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/photius_01toc.htm.
“Suda (10th Century Byzantine Encyclopedia).” Accessed February 24, 2026. https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/sol/sol-html/.