Expanded and updated for this English-language translation, offers the first history of women in ancient Greece and Rome to be written from a legal perspective. Moving outward from an examination of the legal evidence—the laws governing marriage and divorce, sexual behavior, and inheritance—Cantarella demonstrates how literary, anecdotal, and juridical sources can and cannot be used to discover what Greek and Roman men thought about women. She offers a provocative feminist interpretation of the sociological information that can be derived from law codes, lawyers' speeches, records and discussions of custom, and legislation to determine the status of women in society. At the same time she draws upon the evidence of myth, ritual, and literature to question whether women were actually subjugated to the extent that the alws imply.