Helbig was among the first to draw attention to this subject. Rohde enlarged his notices with critical insight; the details are to be found scattered in Droysen, Mahaffy, and Strack. An excellent account of the position of women in Ptolemaic Egypt is given by Miss Rachel Evelyn White in her article in the ‘Journal of Hellenic Studies.’[259] Mahaffy supplies a fair idea of the nature and difficulty of the subject in his remarks on Cleopatra:[260] “We shall have more to say of the younger Cleopatra, this queen’s sister, who spent her life in Egypt. When modern people wonder at the daring of the last of the series, who has been embalmed in the prose of Plutarch and the verse of Shakespeare, they seldom know or reflect that she was but the last of a long series of princesses, probably beautiful and accomplished, certainly daring and unscrupulous, living every day of their lives in the passions of love, hate, jealousy, ambition, wielding the dominion over men or dying in the attempt. But, alas! except in the dull and lifeless effigies on coins, we have no portraits of these terrible persons, no anecdotes of their tamer moments, no means of distinguishing one Cleopatra from the rest, amid the catalogue of parricides, incests, exiles, bereavements!” The papyri recently discovered throw much new light on the position of women in Egypt, but some difficult questions will not be settled until further discoveries of papyri are made. Especially perplexing is it to settle what is purely Egyptian and what changes were introduced by Greek and Roman usages. Some points, however, are quite clear. It is certain, for instance, that it was usual for brother and sister to marry, and the arrangement was deemed particularly suitable when inheritance of property was concerned. The marriage of the sister to the brother smoothed the way to satisfactory settlements. It is also on all hands allowed that the rights of women are protected and the wife holds an advantageous position in the marriage contracts which have come down to us. “A predominance,” says Ruggiero, “of the man over the woman, a suggestion of such an idea in its earliest stage, any hint, in fine, of marital authority is entirely wanting.”[261] There were two kinds of marriages, the ἄγραφος γάμος and the ἔγγραφος γάμος, the marriage without a full written contract and the marriage with a full written contract. The first seems like a Scotch marriage, where the parties agree to marry and to live with each other, but do not make complete stipulations as to property and children. With regard to this form the information is deficient and the opinions of scholars are divided in regard to some details of it.