Ten papers, which originated from a session at the meetings of the American Philological Association held in 1997, draw on a wide range of archaeological, literary and historical sources to reinterpret the significance, or otherwise, of relationships between women in ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt. Subjects include: imaging the woman's world from the Bronze Age frescoes of Akrotiri; Sappho; evidence from Attic vase painting; Classical Attic tombstones; Ovid; Lucian; 5th-century AD Egypt. Contributors are drawn from the fields of archaeology, the classics and queer studies and reflect current trends in gender studies.