In considering marriage prestations and inheritance in China, India, the Near East and ancient Greece we have seen little evidence of that extreme patriliny which is said to involve the complete assimilation of a wife to the agnatic group of her husband either by purchase or by some other form of transfer. In this chapter I look critically at another society, that of Rome, which, at least in its early stages, has often been taken as an extreme example of the incorporation of females combined with strong patriarchal authority (patria potestas) exercised over a joint ‘family’ of living agnates and their dependants. Knowledge of the early period is necessarily fragmentary and uncertain, and has been subject to many changes of interpretation over the past hundred years, the general trend of which I want to sketch out in the way that has been done for ancient Greece, Israel and Arab societies. In seeking to qualify, as others have done, ideas about the position of women regarding property, I raise the question of how far reconstructions of the earlier state of affairs reflect the emergence of written ‘laws’ as distinct from already existing oral norms.