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Oeconomicus (Xenophon)A Socratic dialogue on household management and farming, one of the earliest works on economics and one of the most important sources of information on the relations of men and women in ancient Greece. In the external, framing dialogue, Socrates discusses the importance of moderation and hard work for success in household management with Critoboulus, the son of Crito. When Critoboulus asks about the practices involved in household management, Socrates pleads ignorance on the subject but relates what he heard of it from an Athenian farmer gentleman named Ischomachus. In the discussion related by Socrates, Ischomachus describes the methods he used to educate his wife in housekeeping, their practices in ruling and training slaves, and the techniques involved in farming. Cicero translated the Oeconomicus into Latin, and the work gained popularity in the Renaissance in a number of translations. More recently, the dialogue has been given a great deal of attention from two rather disparate intellectual traditions. Michel Foucault wrote a chapter on "The House of Ischomachus" in the second volume of his history of sexuality, and Leo Strauss wrote an obscure political-philosophical commentary on the dialogue. Foucault took Xenophon's depiction of the relationship between Ischomachus and his wife as the locus classicus for Greek ideology of power, according to which a man's control of his emotions was externally reflected in his control of his wife, his slaves, and his political subordinates. Strauss took the Oeconomicus to be the Socratic dialogue par excellence, a more critical examination of the nature of the gentleman, virtue, and rule. Following Foucault, feminist scholars and social historians have seized on the Oeconomicus as a source for Greek attitudes on the relationship between men and women, but successive interpretations have differed far from each other, some claiming that Xenophon's attitude toward women is mysogynist, some that he was a proto-feminist, some that his utopian attitudes toward women are themselves patriarchal. Another line of interpretation has sought to treat Ischomachus as a figure of lampoon in the dialogue rather than a stand-in for Xenophon. Many have suggested that the Ischomachus of the dialogue is the same Ischomachus whose family became the subject of ridicule in Athenian political oratory. After this Ischomachus died, his widow moved in with her daughter and son-in-law and soon after became pregnant with the man's child. The man, Callias, was frequently ridiculed in Athenian comedies for his sexual excesses, pseudo-intellectualism, and wastrel tendencies. Some have taken Xenophon's use of Ischomachus as a supposed expert in the education of a wife as an instance of anachronistic irony, a device frequently used by Plato in his Socratic dialogues. The import of such irony has also been the subject of much contention: are his wife's actions a sign of a bad education or just the inevitable result of the loss of the controlling influence in her life? How responsible was Ischomachus for pairing his daughter with a man of such poor character? On the other hand, Strauss's interpretation seems to hold great sway with his students and theirs, but little from this tradition has been published on the Oeconomicus.
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