Amazon.com description: Product Description: Building on a survey of the Roman Republic's rigid patriarchal institutions, this study examines the profound changes in the social, economic and jural conditions of Roman women that necessarily resulted from centuries of near-continuous warfare, while penetrating as well the more subtle influence that warfare exerted on the emotional and legal ties between parent and child. Moving between the rich and the poor, the city and the country, it combines the interests of a new generation of scholars with one of the central issues in Roman history: the domestic consequences of Rome's expansion from the city-state to empire in the last two centuries of the Republic.