Marriage Rights In Ancient Greece

Marriage rights are always something that I have found very interesting, as most culture differ extremely from what we seen in our modern Western culture. As in todays world women who live in a Westernized society have the same rights in their marriage as their husbands do, especially when it comes to things such as divorce, custody, and the ownership of property. This is completely different to what a marriage looked like in Ancient Greece. One thing that’s especially interesting to me are what rights a woman has in her marriage (what rights she had in terms of property, right to try and get a divorce, right she had when it came to her children, etc.). It is evident that the main purpose when it came to a woman in her marriage in ancient

Since the city of Athens has the most information regarding laws and marriage due to the fact that it “was far larger in population and wealthier than the average Greek city,” so that’s the city I’m going to be focusing most of my research on. In the city of Athens, a women’s citizenship “consisted in the capacity to bear children who would be citizens,” with that being said, it is evident what values men seemed to think women had. When it came to marriage “Athenian women were given in marriage by their male relatives and their own choice had no legal bearing on the contract.” These women had pretty much no say in who they were going to marry, where they were going to go after getting married, and for the most part these women didn’t get a say on what age there were to be

The law is very clear in this case, and openly states that “the law does not allow anyone to have the disposal of the property of an heiress except her sons, who obtain possession of it on reaching the second year after puberty.” Meaning that legally, if a women whose husband has died has a son that property would remain with her family. In this case the woman in question had lost her land, in a way that legally should not have occurred as “one who has refused to take the heiress in marriage and is not her father but her cousin, introduces an heir to her fortune in violation of every law.” This shows how even with laws in place in favor of a women keeping the family property in the family were still bent around in order for men to get what they wanted, even if it was greatly unjust, or ever against the law. As even though this widow had sons who were in line to inherit the property of her husband’s family, because she was a women and her sons, at the time, were minors it was still taken away from