Bilistiche
Bilistiche or Belistiche was a Hellenistic courtesan of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and winner of the 264 BC Olympic Games in tethrippon and synoris.
Name
It is generally accepted that the name Bilistiche is a Macedonian dialectal form of a Greek name. The first element presumably relates to φιλ-, ‘love’;. The most probable full etymological account of her name accordingly construes it as the superlative stem φιλιστ- followed by the productive suffix -ίχα, found in a number of other female names, particularly in Boeotia.Origin
According to Pausanias, Bilistiche was a woman from the coast of Macedonia; according to Athenaeus, she was an Argive ; according to Plutarch, a foreign slave bought from the marketplace. If one were to accept Plutarch's information, one might suppose that, as a slave of such origin she was given Macedonian citizenship for her services, although this is considered unlikely.Olivier Masson dismissed Plutarch's information as fiction concluding that Plutarch had drawn her from the existing entourage of the Macedonian nobility, as does Daniel Ogden, who notes that Plutarch's information probably originated from Sotades' work On Bilistiche whose contents are unknown, but may have been a polemic against her.