Daisy Goodwin, a 61-year-old married novelist and TV producer, has alleged that ten years ago she was molested by Daniel Korski, and said she felt ‘entirely justified’ in describing the alleged incident a decade later. She claimed that other women had come forward with ‘very interesting stories’ on the topic. What would the Athenians have made of this?

An Athenian woman was a precious asset, supplying children for battle but, being too weak to fight, denied political decision-making.

She was integrated into society within the family unit, with female friends and vital religious functions, and certainly holding views of her own (as Homer’s epics make clear). In the eyes of the law, however, she remained a minor, under the control of her male kurios (‘lord, master’): for example, her father, husband, brother or paternal grandfather, to whom she returned if, say, her husband died.

If a father died leaving only unmarried female children, they were assigned in marriage to the nearest male kinsmen in a fixed order of preference. And even a married daughter could be so assigned.

Since only married Athenian parents could bear citizen children, any threat to a child’s legitimacy was important. Athenian law made seduction far more serious than rape, because the seducer had broken the bond of loyalty between wife and husband, as well as raising questions about the civic status of any resultant child.

The husband, catching him in the act, could maltreat him, kill him or otherwise demand compensation. Female consent was irrelevant. It was the husband’s property that was being debased, and his decision how to deal with it: his wife had no ‘agency’.

Ms Goodwin does have agency, but what has she done with it? The question raises the problem of blaming the victim of a (to her) embarrassing and humiliating incident for not revealing everything at once in the interests of other women, as an Athenian male would certainly have done on behalf of his own ‘damaged property’. Easy for him, no doubt. But such intensely personal and essentially private matters are never black and white.