Talk:Arete of Cyrene

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 03:46, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Arete and Boccaccio
This is a bit of a puzzle. I tried to find the authority for the statement in an earlier version of this page that Arete wrote 40 books, and taught philosophy in Attica, etc. I finally tracked it down to H. J. Mozans, (1913), Woman in Science, pages 197-9, who says that this statement comes from the famous 14th century writer Giovanni Boccaccio, apparently in his book On Famous Women. The puzzle is that I can find no independent verification of this. Modern encyclopedias and textbooks which repeat these lines all seem to refer to Mozans' book as the authority. I don't think that Mozans (the pen-name of John Augustine Zahm) was making this up, indeed he even gives us the Latin text he's translating, but modern versions of On Famous Women, and books about it don't seem to make any reference to Arete at all. Singinglemon (talk) 17:20, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 08:12, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Hmm. In the version I'm reading today, this is definitely not a stub article, even if considered only on its length. It discusses the subject adequately -- that is, there are no significant omissions -- & is provided with footnotes. Yes, we lack details such as dates of birth & death, physical appearance, & any number of events in her life we know must have happened; but that is not unusual when writing about individuals of this period. Taking that into consideration, I'm regrading this as a "Start" article. My suggestions for improving this article further would be to add details that add context to Arete's life: how she compared to other women philosophers, other women of the time, other inhabitants of Cyrene, discuss more fully how her teachings influenced later writers. -- llywrch (talk) 16:58, 11 January 2018 (UTC)