Lauren Caldwell

The chapter treats the three chief medical sects that began in the first through third centuries ce of the Roman period, the Asclepiadeans, the Methodists, and the Pneumatists, based primarily on the hostile witness of Galen (we have few or no other sources). Physicians’ participation in debates suggests how sectarian membership may have advanced the careers of the physicians who offered their services in an unregulated and rather chaotic market and hoped to attract the patronage of aristocrats. Individual teachers, not formal institutions, served as guardians of the doctrines of the sects. The rise and spread of intellectual ideas and debate in the Roman Empire depended on teacher-student relationships and personal connections. Although social bonds did not necessarily stand in the way of debate and study, Galen suggested that the system’s reliance on individuals could impede the advancement of ideas by prioritizing personal loyalties over intellectual rigor.

More than 20 years ago M. L. West’s East face of Helicon performed a service for the discipline of Classical Studies by illuminating Near Eastern influences on Greek poetry and mythology. In a detailed study, he argued persuasively that classicists would benefit from moving outside the narrowly drawn boundaries of Classics to consider the Sumero-Akkadian, Hittite and Ugaritic traditions from which Greek literature might have descended.1 In a discussion of Archaic Greek echoes of Babylonian epic in descriptions of female characters, he wrote of Homer: A common way of praising a woman’s beauty is to say that she resembles or is equal to a goddess. The comparison may be to immortals in general: gune eikuia theisin ‘the lady like unto goddesses’, and so forth. A very similar phrase occurs in a Babylonian poem. The righteous sufferer sees in her dream ‘a maiden, fair her features, a queen, equal to the gods’. Alternatively a woman may be compared to a particular goddess. For example, Homer can speak of ‘Hermione, who had the form of golden Aphrodite’. By classical standards this may seem dangerously presumptuous. But it would have raised no eyebrows at Ugarit. Fifteen years before West’s discussion of female characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, Averil Cameron and A. Kuhrt had published a collection of essays on Near Eastern and Classical Greek sources for the material lives and economic conditions of women. Their volume, though slim, was wide in its geographical and chronological scope, from Assyria of the 9th c. B.C. to Celtic lands of the 8th c. A.D.2 Although Cameron and Kuhrt’s collection did not explicitly set out to find a historical connection between Near Eastern and Greek sets of evidence, their volume, like West’s, underscored the need for Near Eastern sources to be given more sustained study by Classicists. In the decades following, historians of women in antiquity continued to invite conversations among Assyriologists, Egyptologists and classicists.3 By 2012, when S. James and S. Dillon compiled the sizeable Companion to women in the ancient world, the “ancient world” had expanded to include Mesopotamia and Pharaonic Egypt, each of which received its own essay.4 Nevertheless, that Companion still devoted much more space to Greece and Rome than to other areas of the ancient world.