Plutarch's essay-treatise arguing that courage and virtue are identical in men and women, proven through paired stories of collective and individual heroic women.
Mulierum Virtutes ("The Virtues of Women") is one of the moral essays gathered in Plutarch's Moralia, addressed to a woman named Clea. Plutarch opens by rejecting Thucydides' view that the best woman is the one least talked about, and instead argues, following Gorgias, that a woman's reputation should be widely known. His central claim is that courage, wisdom, and justice are the same virtue in women as in men, differing only in application, and he sets out to prove it not by argument but by evidence: paired lives and deeds, women set beside men, so the reader can judge the likeness for themselves.
The essay falls into two parts. The first collects deeds performed by groups of women acting together: the Trojan refugee women who burned the ships rather than keep wandering; the women of Chios who fought off Philip's army; the Persian women who shamed their fleeing husbands back into battle; the Amphissian women who protected the sleeping Thyiads of Delphi; and the wives of the Spartan conspirators who swapped clothes with their husbands to help them escape prison. The second part turns to individual women, mostly tyrant-killers and political actors: Cloelia, who swam the Tiber to escape Etruscan hostages; Timocleia of Thebes, who lured a Macedonian officer to his death down a dry well after he raped her; Camma, who poisoned herself and her husband's murderer together at a shrine of Artemis; Aretaphila of Cyrene, who spent years scheming, enduring torture, and finally delivering the tyrant Leander to his enemies; Eryxo, who lured the tyrant Laarchus to his death to restore a rightful king; and Xenocrite of Cumae, whose defiant remark about the tyrant Aristodemus helped spark his overthrow.
The essay matters as one of antiquity's few sustained arguments for the moral equality of the sexes, made not through abstract philosophy but through an anthology of specific, often violent, political history spanning Persia, Gaul, Greece, Rome, and North Africa. Plutarch treats these women as historical agents whose actions changed the fate of cities, and many of the stories he preserves survive nowhere else in Greek or Roman literature.
“Where are you fleeing to, basest of all men? You cannot sink down here and hide, back to the place you came from.”
— Mulierum Virtutes · read this chapter →
“Yes — but finer still that only one man who has known me should be left alive.”
— Mulierum Virtutes · read this chapter →
“Aristodemus alone of the Cumaeans is a man.”
— Mulierum Virtutes · read this chapter →
“I wish I had died before this night rather than live, so that I might at least have kept my body untouched by outrage, when everything else was being destroyed”
— Mulierum Virtutes · read this chapter →
“it is of these very things that you have provided us an abundance, and of nothing else”
— Mulierum Virtutes · read this chapter →
It is an essay arguing that courage and virtue are the same in women as in men, proven through dozens of historical anecdotes rather than philosophical argument. It splits into stories of women acting collectively to save their cities and stories of individual women who killed or outwitted tyrants.
Aretaphila was a woman who spent years working to overthrow the tyrants Nicocrates and Leander in Cyrene, first attempting poison, then enduring torture, and finally arranging for Leander to be handed over to a Libyan chieftain. After the city was freed she declined political power and withdrew to a private life at the loom.
Camma was a Galatian priestess of Artemis whose husband Sinatus was murdered by Sinorix, a rival who then pursued her. She pretended to accept his courtship, then killed them both by sharing a cup of poisoned honeyed milk at the altar, declaring she had lived only to see that day of justice.
After Alexander's sack of Thebes, a Macedonian officer raped Timocleia and demanded she reveal hidden treasure. She led him to a disused well she claimed held her valuables, and when he climbed down, she and her maidservants buried him under stones. Alexander later admired her courage and set her free.
No — his explicit thesis, stated at the essay's opening, is the opposite: that virtue is the same quality in both sexes, and he sets out to demonstrate this by placing women's deeds directly alongside men's rather than by abstract argument.
Plutarch describes a mysterious epidemic of suicide among unmarried young women in Miletus that resisted every appeal from parents and friends, and was stopped only when a decree ordered that any woman who hanged herself would be carried naked through the marketplace for burial, using the fear of posthumous shame to end the deaths.
Moralia: Ad Principem Ineruditum · Moralia: Adversus Colotem · Moralia: Amatoriae Narrationes · Moralia: Amatorius · Moralia: An Recte Dictum Sit Latenter Esse Vivendum · Moralia: An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit · Moralia: An Virtus Doceri Possit · Moralia: An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · Moralia: Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti