A treatise attributed to Phintys, a female member of the Pythagorean community in southern Italy. A woman's greatest virtue is chastity. Because of this quality she is able to honour and to cherish her own particular husband. I agree that men should be generals and city officials and politicians, and women should keep house and stay inside and receive and take care of their husbands. Courage and intelligence are more appropriately male qualities because of the strength of men's bodies and the power of their minds.
Chastity is more appropriately female.
Accordingly a woman must learn about chastity and realise what she must do quantitatively and qualitatively to be able to obtain this womanly virtue. Of these the most important quality for chastity is to be pure in respect to her marriage bed, and for her not to have affairs with men from other households. If she breaks the law in this way she wrongs the gods of her family and provides her family and home not with its own offspring but with bastards. She wrongs the true gods, the gods to whom she swore to join with her own ancestors and her relatives in the sharing of life and the begetting of children according to law. She should be dressed in white, natural, plain.