Many Pythagorean writings were attributed to her in antiquity, including some letters and a few fragments from philosophical treatises, although these are all regarded as spurious by modern scholars.
[2][3] In the catalog of Aristoxenus of Tarentum quoted by Iamblichus, she is the wife of Brontinus, and from Metapontum in Magna Graecia, while Diogenes Laertius reports a tradition from Hermesianax where she came from Crotone, was the daughter of Brontinus, married Pythagoras,[4][5][3] and while some claim that after Pythagoras' passing, she took over his school,[6] the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that was not the case.
[9] These writings are all widely considered by modern scholarship to be pseudepigrapha,[1][10] works that were written long after Theano's death by later Pythagoreans, which attempt to correct doctrinal disputes with later philosophers[11] or apply Pythagorean philosophy to a woman's life.
[11]Walter Burkert notes that this statement, that "number does not even exist" contradicts the Platonic idealism of the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists, and attributes it to the Hellenistic period, before the advent of Neopythagoreanism in the early Roman period.
[11] The various surviving letters deal with domestic concerns: how a woman should bring up children, how she should treat servants, and how she should behave virtuously towards her husband.