ABSTRACT
From the perspective of historians most familiar with classical Athens, HellenisticEgypt is apt to seem a haven of opportunity and privilege for women.1 Even the briefest glance through the documents collected in the Loeb Select Papyri reveals women as active property owners, buying, selling and leasing all manner of property, or making or taking on loans, albeit normally with the presence of a male guardian, kyrios. In Lefkowitz and Fant’s sourcebook on women throughout antiquity, the texts from Egypt provide a very different view of the lives of women from that in the earlier Greek sources.2
