The more I read, the more I am mystified by the covert - and sometimes, overt - hostility of Greek men to their women. It's rather like hearing Thomas Jefferson speak movingly of human freedom, when you realize he doesn't apply it to his slaves.

My reading suggests to me that no country, such as Saudi Arabia, which manifestly surpresses its women, would get a single query out of a Greek man in the Classical age. Perhaps before, when women's work was more obviously critical to economic survival, it wasn't so bad - although it's impossible to read almost any great writer from Hellas, including Homer, without feeling that women are given very short shrift indeed, to the point of being treated as a grudging but inevitable adjunct of male life solely for their fortunes and their child-bearing features.

Then you look at Rome, and by comparison, Roman women simply bulge with status and comparative freedoms.

I particularly like the writer who made it clear that educating your wife was not only a waste of good money, but the more she knew, the less she'd be likely to behave. Again, sounding rather like some of the Southern apologists who made it illegal to educate slaves.

So my question is - why Hellas? Why were women so damned unimportant in the scheme of things?