Arete of Cyrene

Arete of Cyrene (/əˈriːtiː/; Greek: Ἀρήτη; fl. 5th–4th century BC) was a Cyrenaic philosopher, and the daughter of Aristippus of Cyrene. She was remarkable in that while many women studied philosophy in her time, she was one of the few to for whom it was a career.

Arete learned philosophy from her father, Aristippus, who had himself learned philosophy from Socrates. Arete, in turn, taught philosophy to her son - Aristippus the Younger - hence her son was nicknamed "Mother-taught" (Greek: μητροδίδακτος). Arete is sometimes described as the successor of her father as head of the Cyrenaic school, but it may have been her son who formally founded the school.

Among the spurious Socratic epistles (dating perhaps from the 1st century) there is a fictitious letter from Aristippus addressed to Arete. In this letter, Arete is represented as living a fairly prosperous life in Cyrene, a North African city in the Greek Empire that is now in northeastern Libya.

There were five Greek cities in the area, and Cyrene was the oldest and most important of them all. Arete's city was named after the Greek myth. Cyrene was a nymph, the daughter of Hypsesus, who was king of the Lapiths, and Chlidanope, a Naiad. Apparently, Apollo found Cyrene wrestling alone with a lion and fell in love with her; he carried her off to Mt. Pelion in that part of Libya (Thessaly) where in later times he founded a city and named it after her and made her its queen. In actuality, the city of Cyrene was founded in approximately 631 BC by a group of people from the island of Thera, located in the Aegean Sea. Their leader was Battus, and he became the first king, founding the dynasty of the Battiads, whose members ruled until around 440 B.C. Under the Battiad dynasty's rule, the city flourished economically and expanded, establishing the cities of Apollonia (Marsa Susah), Barce (al-Marj) and Euhesperides, or Berenice (Banghazi). Cyrene eventually became one of the vast intellectual centers of the classical world, and included some of the best of all academic pursuits, including a medical school and such scholars as the geographer Eratosthenes, the philosopher Aristippus, founder of the Cyrenaics, and, of course, his daughter Arete.

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