Marriage Rights In Ancient Greece

Marriage rights are always something that I have found very interesting, as most cultures differ extremely from what we see in our modern Western culture. In today’s world, women who live in a Westernized society have the same rights in their marriage as their husbands do, especially when it comes to situations 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 is what rights a woman has in her marriage (what rights she had in terms of property, divorce, custody of her children, etc.). It is evident that the main purpose when it came to a woman in her marriage in ancient Greece was to produce as many male offspring

I decided to focus my research on Athens, since it was one of the largest cities in ancient Greece. There was also a significant amount of information surrounding marriage laws. Athens was also one of the cities that women had the least rights (compared to cities like Sparta for example). Women had very little power when it came to their day to day lives. They could not own any property (unless they became a widow, but that will be discussed later), they could also not handle any sort of financial matters other than the day to day purchasing of food and supplies for her family. This meant that a woman was under a male caretaker for her whole life, going from her father’s family to her husband’s family once she was married. This paper will illustrate how little power a woman had in her marriage, and showcase the few instances where a woman actually had some rights that were in

There is a good example of this relationship “in a forensic speech delivered towards 360,” when two neighbors (“Teisias and Kallikles”) regarding a wall that had “diverted water onto the land of Kallikles and caused damage [to his property].” In order to try and prove that the water hadn’t caused any significant damage Teisias remarked “Before the other party engaged in malicious litigation, my mother was in amicable terms with their mother. The women used to visit one another … because our fathers were on amicable terms as long as they were alive.” This demonstrates how much it was expected for women’s relationships to based on who their husbands were friendly with, as this was a fact that was strong enough to be used in