In her anxiety to draw broad cultural conclusions, there are times when Sissa neglects to acknowledge that some of the examples she produces are more transgressive than typical in their representations of women. Medea's murder of her children, for example, is presented as an inherent part of the classical conception of the dispossessed woman. As it happens, Euripides is thought to have invented Medea's infanticide, although Sissa never mentions this in her analysis.

His play has come to dominate the surviving idea of Medea, but the earlier myths associated with her name are widely divergent and the mythical Medea most familiar to fifth-century Athenians would have been the heartbroken mother whose children were murdered not by her but by a Corinthian mob. When Euripides' play premiered, the Athenian audience was actually in the middle of a war with Corinth, which made his absolution of Corinthian guilt a politically explosive move.

Sissa also suffers from the modern habit of transliterating Greek into English characters when quoting the originals - a trope of questionable logic, since ?pith?me?ˆn pásche?n (the wish to be passive), will be as incomprehensible to non-Greek readers as the original Greek. Yet such gripes are minor concerns compared to the praise owed for Sissa's fresh approach to a subject with important ramifications for the West's understanding of its sexual history. A reminder has long been overdue that the ancients were as obsessed by women's bodies as everyone else.