The historical Theano belongs to early Pythagorean legend (6th c. BCE Croton/Metapontum), but the letters and teachings transmitted under her name are pseudepigrapha. The core didactic letters date to the late Hellenistic and early Imperial periods—commonly the 1st–2nd centuries CE (Städele and related work)—not the Archaic age of the legendary namesake.
The surviving Greek addresses practical Pythagorean household ethics: how a woman should rear children, manage servants, and behave when a husband is unfaithful. Lexical features such as the developed sense of affection in the letter on infants are themselves a dating signal that the texts are Imperial, not sixth-century.
She is therefore best classed by the date of the transmitted corpus: Roman, 1st–2nd century CE. The legendary early Pythagorean woman remains the literary persona; the surviving Greek is later Pythagorean epistolography in her name.
Available Works
Also published as PDF.