Miscellanies 4.19.121

The author of the Danaid says similar things about the daughters of Danaus, thus: “And then the daughters of Danaus quickly armed themselves before the fair-flowing river, lord Nile,” and so on. The other poets sing of Atalanta's swiftness in the hunt, Anticlea's affection, Alcestis's love for her husband, and the courage of Macaria and the Hyacinthides. What then? Did not Theano the Pythagorean reach such a height of philosophy that to one who looked at her curiously and said, “A lovely arm,” she answered, “But not public”? To the same modesty belongs that saying too: asked on what day after intercourse with a man a woman may go down to the Thesmophorion, she said, “From her own husband, at once; from another's, never.” Indeed Themisto of Lampsacus, daughter of Zoilus and wife of Leonteus of Lampsacus, philosophized in the Epicurean way, as Myia the daughter of Theano in the Pythagorean way, and Arignote, who wrote about Dionysus; and the daughters of Diodorus called Cronus all became dialecticians, as Philo the dialectician says in his Menexenus, who gives their names as follows: Menexene, Argeia, Theognis, Artemisia, Pantaclea. I remember too a Cynic woman, called Hipparchia of Maroneia, the wife of Crates, with whom he celebrated the dog-wedding in the Painted Porch.