Plutarch's Virtues of Women remains one of the most enduringly popular works in the Moralia, especially among those scholars who study the history of women and gender in antiquity. This new Italian edition with commentary and translation is a valuable addition to the ever-increasing body of work on Plutarch's women. T. provides a thorough account of the textual history of the Virtues of Women and has collated an impressive bibliography of scholarship on women in Plutarch. The footnotes, commentary and critical apparatus also offer extensive cross-references to relevant passages elsewhere in the Moralia and the Lives in addition to other primary and secondary sources. The introductory material covers a wide range of topics, some more thoroughly than others. The strongest chapters are those that deal with manuscript transmission (Chapters 2 and 3) and the relationship between Virtues of Women and Polyaenus’ Strategemata (Chapter 5), which provide a detailed analysis of the textual tradition.

The introduction sets the scene with an overview of the dramatic context and aims of the text. Plutarch states his goal clearly; he hopes to demonstrate that the virtue of men and women is not so different (Mulier. virt. 243b–d). This aim is not borne out by the anecdotes that follow, which instead focus primarily on the ways in which women can be virtuous within their social context(s) without threatening its organisation. T. notes that Plutarch does not follow through on his proposed methodology, which is similar to the comparative approach taken in the Parallel Lives. There is a short discussion of the mythico-religious aspects of the text, with T. commenting that Plutarch's religious sensibilities are evident in a significant number of anecdotes. He comments on the tradition of cataloguing women and their virtues that goes as far back as the Homeric epics, as well as the philosophical tradition within which Virtues of Women is situated. The overview of later literature in the same tradition and the influence of the text on the literary catalogue tradition is thorough and provides a fascinating view of the fortunes of the text over two millennia. Like the rest of the work, the introduction contains a great deal of untranslated Greek and Latin, which makes the reading somewhat cumbersome and time-consuming, and much of the most interesting material is relegated to towering footnotes.

A brief note at the end of the introduction, accompanied by an equally brief footnote, claims that Virtues of Women has served as support for feminist ideas; it is not clear how T. has reached this conclusion, and he comments no further on the value of the work for the feminist tradition, nor does he provide adequate references to support this statement. It might have been better to omit this sentence, especially considering that T. seems rather disinterested in feminist scholarship on Plutarch, and his own view tends towards the centrist. Particularly notable is the omission of the excellent essays by L. Foxhall and J.A. McNamara in S. Pomeroy's edition of Advice to the Bride and Groom and Consolation to His Wife (1999), while the (also excellent) contribution of P.A. Stadter in the same book is cited several times. This is indicative of the general tendency to ascribe uncritically to Plutarch a positive, even proto-feminist, view of women, even in the face of immensely complicating evidence to the contrary.

In fact, T. sees little marginalisation of women in Plutarch's work, taking the presence of a large number of virtuous women as evidence for lack of prejudice. In the Virtues of Women, he argues, women sometimes play the role of ‘absolute protagonist’ (‘[un ruolo di] protagonista assoluto’, p. lxv), the effect of which is sometimes obscured by the shortness of the episode or the need to supply detail. In T.'s view the protagonists of the anecdotes often act independently, in conflict with male prescriptions and in response to male weakness or absence, and are often rewarded with divine honours, monuments or festivals. This leads to some tenuous conclusions. For example, T. fails to take into account the resolution of the story of Valeria and Cloelia (250a–f), who were sent back to Porsena's camp after their daring escape, nor does he adequately comment on the role of shame in the anecdote about the young women of Miletus (249b–d) – whose further suicides are prevented by a wise man's suggestion that they should be carried naked through the agora (surely relevant) –, focusing instead on the literary and medical accounts of mass suicide and theories of the soul that might be at play here. These omissions appear especially jarring given the tradition of moral-educational literature that T. acknowledges throughout. The comparative nature of the story of Aretaphila (255e–257e), who is tortured by Kalbia, is an excellent example of the moral-educational aims of the text. Furthermore, Aretaphila overthrows two successive tyrants and yet declines a seat in the government in favour of spending the rest of her life at the loom. The resolution of this anecdote (and Plutarch's approval) ought to be compared with the resolution of the final anecdote in the treatise, in which the (unnamed) wife of Pythes takes over control of the government at her husband's request, while he languishes in his mausoleum grieving their sons. Taken together, these anecdotes reveal the conditions for women's political participation.

Several anecdotes emphasise the importance of permission, in which a husband or father allows women to take on extraordinary roles. This is most evident in the anecdote about the wife of Pythes and implied in the anecdotes about the Phocian women (244b–e), the women of Amphissa (249e–f), Megisto (252b–253f), Pieria (253f–254b), Stratonice (258d) and Eryxo (261b). The complexity of these episodes is never fully realised in T.'s notes. Instead, T. often focuses on Plutarch's sources and the historical basis for the anecdotes. Furthermore, works in this genre did not hold the same standard for men and women, even when they considered them equal in philosophical ability, but rather promoted the gendered distinction between domestic and civic activity.

As a result, the commentary provides excellent sources for further study while offering a simplified view of the issue at hand. Ultimately, the book could have benefited from a more nuanced understanding of gendered ethics in imperial Rome and provincial Greece, but is otherwise well worth perusing for anyone interested in Plutarch's women.