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Book: Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome

Chapter: Cleopatra

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.20027

Blurb:

(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 bythat 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

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