Pythagorean Women ─ Their History and Writings

In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy discusses the groundbreaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While Pythagoras encouraged women to be submissive to men, his reasoning was based on the desire to preserve harmony in the home.

Pythagorean Women provides English translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neopythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Pomeroy's boy—which sets the Pythagorean and Neopythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts—is illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women.

Sarah B. Pomeroy is Distinguished Professor of Classics and History Emerita at Hunter College and the Graduate School at the City University of New York. Her book Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity is widely recognized as the definitive book on the topic.