Phintys

Template:Short description Phintys was a Pythagorean philosopher, probably from the third century BC. She wrote a work on the correct behaviour of women, two extracts of which are preserved by Stobaeus.

According to Stobaeus, Phintys was the daughter of Callicrates, who is otherwise unknown.Template:Sfn Holger Thesleff suggests that this Callicrates might be identified with Callicratidas, a Spartan general who died at the Battle of Arginusae.Template:Sfn If so, this would make Phintys a Spartan, and date her birth to the late fifth century BC, and her floruit to the fourth century. I. M. Plant considers this emendation "fanciful".Template:Sfn Iamblichus mentions Philtys in his list of female Pythagoreans; he says that she was from Croton and that her father was called Theophrius. I. M. Plant believes that Iamblichus' Philtys, though also a Pythagorean and similarly named, is distinct from Stobaeus' Phintys.Template:Sfn

Two fragments attributed to Phintys are preserved in Stobaeus.Template:Sfn However, not all scholars agree that the fragments are authentic: Lefkowitz and Fant argue that the works attributed to female Pythagoreans, including Phintys, were actually rhetorical exercises written by men.Template:Sfn They are written in the Doric dialect, and amount to about 80 lines of prose.Template:Sfn The language used dates to around the fourth century BC, although some features of it appear to be deliberate archaisms; it was likely actually composed in the third century BC,Template:Sfn though a date as late as the second century AD was suggested by Friedrich Wilhelm in 1915.Template:Sfn

The fragments discuss the differences between men and women,Template:Sfn and argue for chastity as the most important virtue for women.Template:Sfn Phintys gives a series of ways that women ought to practice self-control, concluding that the most effective way is to only have sex with her husband in order to produce legitimate children.Template:Sfn Along with her defence of women's chastity, she argues that the practice of philosophy is appropriate for women as well as men.Template:Sfn

External links

• From the treatise of Phintys, the daughter of Callicrates, on the temperance of a woman. Translated by Thomas Taylor, published 1822, at Wikisource
• "Phintys of Sparta" by Kate Lindemann at the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers