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6 - Finding (Things at) Home: Xenophon's Oeconomicus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Alex C. Purves
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

Nothing about the “spatiality” of space can be theorized without using objects as its indices.

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion

It ought to be obvious that the objects that occupy our daily lives are in fact the objects of a passion.

Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting”

ὡς δὲ καλὸν φαίνεται, ἐπειδὰν ὑποδήματα ἐφεξῆς κέηται

How beautiful it looks, when shoes are arranged in rows …

Xenophon, Oeconomicus 8.19

How could it be worthwhile to spend the last chapter of this book focusing on a Socratic dialogue that espouses the beautiful appearance of shoes arranged in rows within the ordinary setting of a house? For one thing, by looking at the small intermediary gap that occurs between objects, we gain access to a slightly different way of thinking about space. And since we opened this book by thinking about magnitude (megethos) and scale in terms of the maximum amount of space that can be seen in one view, it is appropriate in closing to rethink the notion of space from a more miniaturist vantage point. If the long, pedestrian text of Xenophon's Anabasis was characterized by an overwhelming sense of space that never opened up into a real view of home, then the perfectly ordered text of the Oeconomicus focuses on the delights of having arrived there. The divergence in perspectives between Xenophon's two works is obvious.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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