Marriage Law and Family Organization in Ancient Athens: A Study on the Interrelation of Public and Private Law in the Greek City

Abstract

In an article published in 1927, Herbert Meyer showed that the Germanic legal system possessed from an early epoch, perhaps from its very beginning, in the form offriedelehea type of marital union which was characterized by the legal equality of husband and wife, in contrast with themuntehein which the wife was legally subject to her husband. This important discovery implied that the distinction made in Roman law between marriage withmanusand “free marriage” no longer stood alone. In fact the coexistence, in many known legal systems, of several types of marital relation—differing from one another in their effect upon the relationship between the wife, her husband and his family—may now be considered as established. The theory was first proposed by Meyer himself, who called attention to similar phenomena in a number of legal systems, Indo-European as well as non-Indo-European, in addition to the Roman and the Germanic; and it was later extended by Koschaker in his broad investigation into the “Eheformen bei den Indogermanen.”