Though the setting up of the dowry often coincided temporally with the pledge, it was an entirely separate act. Today there is no doubt about the fact that a marriage was valid even if there was no dowry. The dowry, or pherne, could be connected with the woman's inheritance rights, and consisted of whatever was given her when she married. Should the marriage be dissolved, everything had to be returned, even what the husband had received merely as a legal fiction. It was not a rare phenomenon, either, for assets that the spouse had never received to be declared by him as dowry.

In Attic law, a woman had no legal capacity; and consequently her houshold rights had always to be represented in public by a man. He was known as her kyrios, and might be her father, her husband, her eldest son, or her brother. When there were sons in the family, the daughter exhausted her rights, including those of inheritance, with the dowry, and was then known as epiproikos. But in a case where there was no son, she was known as epikleros and had the right to the whole estate, as sole descendant of an oikos with no males. City law did not however allow the wife to be the possessor of the kleros. She therefore functioned as conveyor of the kleros, and it was via her that it was passed on to her sons. But so that the kleros should not disappear from the family, the law laid it down that the epikleros, along with the kleros, should pass over to the male relative nearest in the lateral branch. Should he refuse her, she came to the immediately next, and so on. This nearest blood relative (anchisteas) could marry her, provided she was unmarried; or could proceed to aphaeresis epiklerou, if she was already married. The only case in which intervention by blood relatives was unacceptable was if the epikleros was married and had had a son, to whom she would transmit the kleros. Protection of the epikleros was subject to special arrangements, such as the graphe kakoseos and the eisangelia, and it called for the intervention of the eponymous archon. An exceptional case was when there were a legitimate daughter and an adopted son in the oikos. The daughter was now called physike epikleros, and her descendants continued to take precedence in the kleros over the adopted son's descendants in the direct line. Thus the only solution for an adopted male to secure his descendants' future was to marry his foster-sister.