The story of Diognete, a late fifth-century Athenian woman, provides a lens for thinking about how to write the history of women in classical Athens. The introduction considers the value of biographical approaches and other tools which treat women as individual subjects rather than members of categories. It explains the author’s decision to assign names to women whose names are lost or suppressed in the evidence, repositioning them as subjects of their own lives. It argues that the texts on inscribed dedications and gravestones commissioned by women were determined by the women themselves, leaving us with myriad female-authored texts. These texts inform the book’s experiential approach, which focuses on women’s own experiences of their lives.