Aesara of Lucania

Aesara of Lucania (Greek: Αἰσάρα Aisara; 4th or 3rd century BC) was a Pythagorean philosopher, who wrote a work On Human Nature, of which a fragment is preserved by Stobaeus.

Nothing is known about the life of Aesara, she is known only from a one-page fragment of her philosophical work entitled On Human Nature preserved by Stobaeus.Lucania, where she came from, was an ancient district of southern Italy and part of Magna Graecia where many Pythagorean communities existed. It has been conjectured that her name is a variation on the name Aresa, who, according to one minor tradition, was a daughter of Pythagoras and Theano. A male writer from Lucania called Aresas is also mentioned by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras.

On Human Nature is written in the Doric prose characteristic of the 3rd century BC or earlier, although that doesn't exclude the possibility that it was written later in an archaic style. It has been argued that the fragment is a Neopythagorean forgery dating from the Roman era, although this at least implies that there was an earlier Pythagorean called Aesara of Lucania worth imitating. It has also been suggested that the fragment is pseudonymous, and comes from a textbook produced by one of the dissenting successor schools to Archytas of Tarentum in Italy in the 4th or 3rd century BC. In the absence of any strong evidence supporting either hypothesis, there is no reason to suppose that the fragment was not written by a woman philosopher called Aesara in the 4th or 3rd centuries BC.

Aesara argues that it is by studying our own human nature (and specifically the human soul) that we can understand the philosophical basis for natural law and morality:

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