‘You know nothing about law.’ So my fellow undergraduates and I were told by an Oxford don, advising us on preparation for the dreaded General Paper in Ancient History in our final examinations. He was quite right. There has been less excuse for ignorance since the publication of the highly readable Law and Life of Rome (Crook 1967a). That admirable work set out to encompass a much wider subject than the present book, no less than the entire range of Roman law, expounding its principles and setting them in their social context. Women were mentioned where appropriate, although there was not space to examine in depth the relevant aspects of the law.

Hitherto, there has been no detailed study of Roman law relating to women. Women’s studies made a relatively belated appearance among the concerns of ancient historians and classicists, and references to law, if made at all, tended to be confined mainly to marriage, tutela (guardianship) and divorce, not straying much further afield. The changes that occurred in those areas of the law have tended to be presented in terms of increasing independence for women, rather than of the possible purposes of the (male) makers of the law. What these purposes were is one of the themes that will be found threaded through this book.

An early tendency in Roman women’s studies (to use a convenient phrase) was to rely mainly on literary evidence, restricted in period mostly to the last century of the Republic and the first of the Principate, and in subject matter to the upper classes and what Crook (1967a:104) has called ‘the antics of Roman “night-club” society’. This produced some rather over-dramatic accounts of Roman society and an exaggerated estimate of the self-assertiveness and independence of Roman women. Some late blooms of that crop are still appearing. A statement of the legal facts seemed desirable.