When we think of ancient medicine, we might think first of the Greek tradition beginning with Hippocrates and probably then of Galen in Roman times. Hippocrates stands at the beginning of the western medical tradition and we have a collection of texts attributed to him known as the Hippocratic Corpus.1 The Hippocratic Oath, a statement of professionalism, was still regularly taken by newly qualified doctors until fairly recently, albeit in a modified form. Galen achieved fame in Roman times as an extraordinarily learned and intellectual doctor, a collector and editor of medical texts, a public performer of medicine and sometimes gruesome experiments, and doctor to the rich and famous.2 His influence was felt deep into medieval times. Yet these are only two men in a very long tradition, and the world of health and medicine was a world in which women too played a vital, if not always so visible, role.

Ancient Egypt has fascinated the modern west since Napoleon’s campaigns took soldiers and scholars to the land of the Nile in 1798; the French and British came to blows there and many French discoveries were delivered into British possession – perhaps most notably the bilingual Rosetta Stone, which was key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. This rather small black stone tablet can still be seen in the British Museum. The story of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter in the early twentieth century remains a television and publishing favourite, and there have been various tours of authentic objects, including to London’s Saatchi Gallery in 2019–2020; pyramids and mummies are more than ever objects of fascination and fantasy – and everyone knows the name Cleopatra.1 But the line of pharaohs stretched back far longer than Cleopatra and King Tut – it is sobering to recall that we are closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the first pharaohs – and there have been many other intriguing and much more ancient discoveries in Egypt.

In ad 203, a young mother was killed by animals in the amphitheatre of Carthage in North Africa on the orders of the local Roman authorities.1 She died alongside other members of her small religious group, men and women, apparently confident in the knowledge that she was about to enter heaven. This woman was called Vibia Perpetua and she was a Christian; she left us part of her story in a text called The Passions of Perpetua and Felicity (Figure 27). The text gives us a fascinating insight into the mind of a young Roman woman caught up in the power of her beliefs. It also reveals much about the workings of Roman society, especially those times in which people came up against the system. Here we will explore who Perpetua was and how she ended up dying in this terrible way.

It is a warm dark night in the great city of Rome. You are squeezed with your friends into the terraces of one of the most impressive buildings of the Roman empire, the Colosseum, lit by the flickering light of hundreds of torches, part of a crowd of thousands of city-dwellers eager and ready to be entertained. Everyone knows the emperor Domitian (ruled ad 81–96) always puts on a good show, but there is to be nothing ordinary about tonight’s bloody spectacle, for the emperor has laid on not only a performance of gladiators but this time female gladiators.1 As the women troop out, sword-arms clad in armour, shields at the ready, and bare-chested, a thrill runs through the massed ranks of the shouting crowd. Tonight would be a night to remember.

Olympias, born around 373 bc, was the daughter of Neoptolemus the king of Molossia, a rural, inland, and not-so-important place in Epirus in north-western Greece. The region lacked the old established city-state culture of other parts of Greece, but the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, by tradition the oldest oracle in Greece, did give it some cachet and ensured ongoing contact with the rest of the Hellenic world.1 The royal house, the Aeacids, claimed descent from the Greek hero Aeacus and from his more famous grandson Achilles – a family connection that Olympias’ son Alexander (the Great) certainly took seriously.2 Despite her origins on the periphery of the Greek world, Olympias occupied a central place in the history of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean – and farther afield – in the second half of the fourth century bc because of her marriage to Philip II of Macedonia and her son Alexander the Great.

In the first few hours of a new digging season in Athens, 14 June 1967, archaeologists started to excavate the area to the north of the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares, which lies to the northwest of the Acropolis.1 Just 15 cm down, Evelyn Lord Smithson wrote shortly afterwards in an article in the journal Hesperia, the earth began to reveal a new burial – the upper rims of several pots appearing through the dirt. As the archaeologists explored further, they uncovered the whole burial pit with a large belly-handled amphora some 71 cm in height with various other smaller items of pottery in it. The type of amphora indicated that the burial was that of a woman, designated AA 302, who had been cremated around 850 bc. She has become known to archaeologists as the ‘Rich Athenian Lady’.

Some of the best-known images from Bronze Age Greece are of Minoan women and goddesses portrayed on palace frescoes and on gold rings that often show religious scenes. The enigmatic Isopata gold ring, for example, shows a number of female figures in flounced skirts, with bare breasts, who appear to be dancing outside amongst the flowers – their arms gesticulating and bodies swaying.1 Other evidence certainly suggests the importance of dance for Minoan women – terracotta models from Palaikastro, for example, show women dancing in circles accompanied by a lyre player.2 These images conjure up a vivid picture of life on Crete, beliefs, and practices.

Neaira was supposedly a prostitute who sold her body for sex; she was also, in our single source for her life, a courtesan, a concubine, or ‘that sort of woman’.1 These labels are pejorative ones, carrying the moral and social judgements of the male-authored ancient Greek sources – no prostitute from classical Greece has left us her own testimony. But we could also choose other terms for Neaira that would fit her at various points in her life: she was a child, a girl, a woman, a sex slave, a victim, a partner, a lover, an opportunist, a mother, and above all, perhaps, a survivor.2 Whilst all those labels we can apply may fit, she herself, her character and emotions, her aspirations and motivations remain elusive; some are given to us by a man, Apollodorus, who is using her story for his own ends – hardly a disinterested source. Even though we lack her own words and her physical remains, her story, shadowy as it is, is still worth exploring as a life as valuable as any other and therefore worthy of remembrance and sympathy.

The name Cleopatra has an immense resonance in western culture, conjuring up images of romance, intrigue, actress Elizabeth Taylor, and the clash between ancient Egypt and the rising power of Rome.1 She is indelibly linked with some of Rome’s most powerful men: Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian, who would become Rome’s first emperor. We might think of a young, exotic, and beautiful queen being rolled out of a carpet in Caesar’s presence, or clutching an asp to her breast to take her own life. That Cleopatra is rightly famous, occupying the Egyptian throne at what in hindsight was a pivotal point in Mediterranean history – if she and Antony had defeated Octavian then things might have turned out very differently indeed. A Hellenistic-style monarchy would have continued to rule in the east and, if Antony had consolidated himself in Rome as well, the two states may have been combined: Antony and Cleopatra’s empire. The ‘what ifs’ are intriguing. Less famous but no less interesting in terms of her position and the life she lived is that of Cleopatra’s daughter with Antony, Cleopatra Selene (Figure 24).2

The Hittite state started small, as one of a number of competing kingdoms in Anatolia.1 Under a series of rulers from the early king Hattusili I, around 1650 bc, it grew to become a regional superpower, expanding from its north-central Anatolian heartland, with political and economic interests drawing its attention southeast to the Mediterranean coast, Syria, and the older kingdoms in the area, and also westward to the Aegean.2 Its capital at Hattusa, the fortified residence of the Hittite kings, modern Boğazköy, became a splendid city of temples, testament to the rulers’ commitment to the gods and the rituals necessary to win their favour and avoid incurring their displeasure.3

Theodora is a woman about whom we are supposed to believe the worst. She has the misfortune to have become one of the main subjects, alongside her husband, the emperor Justinian, of one of the most famous, accessible, and lurid texts from antiquity: The Secret History, by Procopius. The Secret History is a book that has defied classification; it is not exactly a history and not exactly a biography – in Byzantine times, the writer of the Suda labelled it both a comedy and an invective. Peter Sarris, in his introduction to one translation, rightly calls it ‘vitriolic’ – with ‘carefully calibrated pieces of character assassination aimed at the Emperor and his wife’.1 ‘Our’ Theodora is fundamentally entangled with Procopius’ own vision of his times revealed in The Secret History and to approach her we must approach him too.2

In the third year of pharaoh Ramesses V, c. 1145 bc, an Egyptian woman called Naunakhte, who lived in the workers’ village of Deir el-Medina (Figure 12), went to her local court to explain her final will.1 It was her express wish to disinherit some of her eight surviving children, sons and daughters, because they had failed in their duty to care for her in her old age. In her words: