Personal virtue in Byzantine society had a great deal to do with the proper performance of one's normative gender role. Men ought to act like good men, and women like good women. This chapter deals with ideals of proper, morally upstanding behaviour for women and men in an effort to illustrate how Medieval Roman people thought they ought to be.

The masculine and feminine virtues in turn derived from the larger project of enabling order and keeping chaos at bay. The fundamental ideology undergirding Byzantine culture held that order was good, chaos bad, and men ought to be in authority. Men upheld the order of society and good women were called to support them in their efforts. Bad women worked to undermine the social structure by tempting men to lose control of themselves. Actions that worked to maintain the proper order of society, in which men were active and in control, and women were passive and obedient, were considered good and anything that threatened to disrupt that order was bad. The natural tendency of women to be ruled by their emotions and desires implied that they always wanted to indulge sexual impulses, and hence that they posed a dire threat to men's self-control. Although men were naturally predisposed to be able to govern their appetites, their self-mastery was seen as sufficiently tenuous that women needed to help them out by behaving in a demure and modest fashion. The greater degree of masculine strength that a man possessed, the greater his ability to remain unmoved in the face of either profound emotional distress or sexual temptation.

Two virtues of self-control were profoundly important in Medieval Roman culture: σωϕροσύνη, sophrosene, and φρόνησις, phronesis. Sophrosene meant discretion and moderation, and hence chastity. Phronesis meant understanding and wisdom, but chiefly the wisdom not to do something, prudence. It was the wisdom to maintain self-restraint. Βoth virtues had to do with keeping oneself under control and moderating one's response to stimuli. The discreet and wise person was supposed to keep it together and not be swayed by animal impulses. These virtues of self-control relate strongly to gender because of the belief that men had a natural capability to master pathos.