CHAPTER XI

ADVICE TO WOMEN

To the women Pythagoras spoke as follows, about sacrifices. To begin with, inasmuch as it was no more than natural that they would wish that some other person who intended to pray for them should be worthy, nay, excellent, because the Gods attend to those particularly, so also it is advisable that they themselves should most highly esteem equity and modesty, so that the divinities may be the more inclined to grant their requests.

Further, they should offer to the divinities such things as they themselves have with their own hands produced, such as cakes, honey-combs, [to-ers?] and perfumes, and should bring them to the altars without the assistance of servants.

They should not worship divinities with blood and dead bodies, nor offer so many things at one time that it might seem they meant never to sacrifice again.

Concerning their association with men, they, should remember that their female nature had by their parents been granted the license to love their husbands more excessively than even the authors of their existence. Consequently they should take care neither to oppose their husbands, nor consider that they have subjected their husbands should these latter yield to them in any detail.

It was in the same assembly that Pythagoras is said to have made the celebrated suggestion that, after a woman has had connexion with her husband, it is holy for her to perform sacred rites on the same day, which would be inadmissible, had the connection been with any man other than her husband.

He also advised the women that their conversation should always be cheerful, and to endeavor that others may speak good things of them. He further admonished them to care for their good reputation, and to try not to justify the fable-writer who accused three women of using a single eye in common, so great is their mutual willingness to accommodate each other with the loan of garments and ornaments, without a witness, when some one of them has special need thereof, returning them without arguments or litigation.

Further Pythagoras observed that (Mercury) who is called the wisest of all, who arranged the human voice, and in short, was the inventor of names, whether he was a God (in Jupiter, the supermundane gods, the liberated gods, or the planet Mercury), or a divinity (the Mercurial order of demons), or a certain divine man (the Egyptian Theuth, or in special animals such as the ibis, ape, or dogs), perceiving that the female sex was most given to devotion, gave to each of their ages the name of one divinity. So an unmarried woman was called Core, or Proserpine, a bride Nympha, a matron, Mother; and a grandmother, in the Doric dialect, Maia. Consequently, the oracles at Dodona and Delphi are brought to light by a woman.

By this praise of female piety Pythagoras is said to have effected so great a change in popular female attire, that the women no longer dared to dress up in costly raiment, consecrating thousands of their garments in the temple of Juno.

This discourse had effect also on marital fidelity, to an extent such that in the Crotonan region connubial faithfulness became proverbial; (thus imitating) Ulysses who, rather than abandon Penelope, considered immortality well lost. Pythagoras encouraged the Crotonian women to emulate Ulysses, by exhibiting their probity to their husbands. In short, through these (social) discourses Pythagoras acquired great fame both in Crotona, and in the rest of Italy.