Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome - An Anthology - Ian Plant
Cleopatra
Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome - An Anthology - Ian Plant
Ian Plant [+]
Macquarie University
Dr Ian Plant is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Ancient History, Division of Humanities. He studied Classics (including Ancient Greek and Latin) and Ancient History at the University of Canterbury, where he completed his doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr Katherine Adshead and Professor Kevin Lee. He taught at the University of Western Australia before taking up the post at Macquarie.
His fields of research are Greek history and historiography, especially the study of Thucydides. He also works on women writers from Ancient Greece and Rome, and more recently on Egyptian religion in Greek and Latin writers. He teaches Ancient Greek, Latin, Mythology, Greek Heroes, Women Writers, Thucydides and Herodotus.
Among his current research projects are:
Thucydides and the writing of history
Greek and Roman writers on Egyptian Religion-a project he is working on in collaboration with A/Professor Boyo Ockinga.
Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Description
(fl. after AD 64) Six fragments of Greek prose by Cleopatra survive in the corpus of medical writings that have come down to us from antiquity. Four are said to be from a work called Cosmetics and are cited by Galen. Cleopatra was not an uncommon Greek name. As ancient testimony consistently cites a Cleopatra as the author of Cosmetics, we should accept that the author identified herself by that name. The link with queen Cleopatra may have been a late invention. Galen implies that she was a physician (12.393, 446). She should be thus identified as Cleopatra the physician to distinguish her from the queen