Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-05-21T04:48:56.624Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The economies of pedagogy: Xenophon's wifely didactics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Yun Lee Too
Yun Lee Too
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Xenophon's Oeconomicus is a work which has recently prompted a number of widely divergent responses. A predominant reading offers that the work is a testimony to Greek misogyny in the classical period: the husband Ischomachus takes a young, inexperienced wife, who is accordingly and following custom tamed and instructed to manage the space within the οἶχος. Another interpretation regards Xenophon and Ischomachus as better-than-average Greek men with respect to women's standing in society, or even as proto-feminist. In this treatment of the dialogue, the fact that the husband allows the wife her own space – the home (as distinct from the farm outdoors) – and teaches her her own activities – housework and the management of the household slaves – demonstrates a considerable degree of respect for the wife and for woman's worth, while Socrates' exclamation that the wife has a ‘masculine intellect (ἀνδϱιχὴν διάνοιαν)’ (10.1) is to be taken as proof of the Xenophontic wife's authority. There are further variations which qualify these interpretations: either the husband is regarded as echoing Socratic sympathy towards women while continuing to insist that the wife be a domestic; or the husband, despite being a misogynist, is seen as granting the wife some degree of autonomy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 47 , 2001 , pp. 65 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergren, A., ‘Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought’, Arethusa 16 (1983), 69–96.Google Scholar
Blundell, S., Women in Ancient Greece (London, 1995).Google Scholar
Cantarella, E., Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, tr. Fant, M. B. (Baltimore and London, 1987) [= L'ambiguo malanno (Rome, 1981)].Google Scholar
Cartledge, P., ‘Xenophon's Women: A Touch of the Other’, Tria Lustra. Liverpool Classical Papers 3 (1993) 5–14.Google Scholar
Chantraine, P., Xénophon's Economique (Paris, 1949).Google Scholar
Christ, M., ‘Liturgy Avoidance and Antidosis in Classical Athens’, TAPA 120 (1990), 147–69.Google Scholar
Cohen, D., ‘Seclusion, Separation, and the Status of Women in Classical Athens,’ GR 36 (1989), 3–15.Google Scholar
Foucault, M., Histoire de la sexualité 3. Le souci de soi (Paris, 1984).Google Scholar
Foxhall, L., ‘Household, Gender and Property in Classical Athens’, CQ 39 (1989), 22–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gabrielsen, V.. ‘The Antidosis Procedure in Classical Athens’, CM 38 (1987), 7–38.Google Scholar
Gini, A., ‘The Manly Intellect of His Wife: Xenophon Oec. Ch. 7’, CW 96 (1992/1993), 483–6.Google Scholar
Goldhill, S., Foucault's Virginity (Cambridge, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gray, V., ‘Dialogue in Xenophon's Hellenica’, CQ 31 (1981), 321–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvey, F. D., ‘The Wicked Wife of Ischomachos’, ECM/CV 3 (1984), 68–70.Google Scholar
Higgins, W. E., Xenophon the Athenian. The Problem of the Individual and the Society of the Polis (Albany, NY, 1977).Google Scholar
Irigaray, L., This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Porter, C. (Ithaca, 1985) = Ce Sexe qui n' en estpas un (Paris, 1977).Google Scholar
Kofman, S., ‘Beyond Aporia?’, in Benjamin, A. (ed.), Post-Structuralist Classics (New York and London, 1988) 7–44.Google Scholar
Le Doeuff, M., Hipparchia's Choice. An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., tr. Selous, T. (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1991) = L'Etude et le rouet (Paris, 1989).Google Scholar
Loraux, N., The Children of Athena. Athenian Ideas About Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, tr. Levine, C. (Princeton, 1993) [= Les Enfants d' Athena: Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes (Paris, 1984)].Google Scholar
Miller, A., For Your Own Good. The Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing, tr. H. and Hannum, H. (London, 1987).Google Scholar
Murnaghan, S., ‘How a Woman Can Be More Like a Man: The Dialogue Between Ischomachus and His Wife in Xenophon's Oeconomicus’, Helios 15 (1988), 9–22.Google Scholar
Nehamas, A., The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pomeroy, S. B., ‘Slavery in the Greek Domestic Economy in the Light of Xenophon's ≪Oeconomicus≫’ Index 17 (1989), 11–18.Google Scholar
Pomeroy, S. B.Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1994).Google Scholar
Redfield, J., ‘Homo Domesticus’, in Vernant, J.-P. (ed.), Tlie Greeks, tr. Lambert, C. and Fagan, T. L. (Chicago and London, 1991) 154–83.Google Scholar
Scaife, R., ‘Ritual and Persuasion in the House of Ischomachus’, CJ 90 (1995), 225–32.Google Scholar
Ste. Croix, G. de, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972).Google Scholar
Stevens, J., ‘Friendship and Profit in Xenophon's Oeconomicus’, in der Waerdt, P. Van (ed.), The Socratic Movement (Ithaca, 1994) 209–37.Google Scholar
Strauss, L., On Tyranny (Ithaca, 1963).Google Scholar
Strauss, LXenophon's Socratic Discourse: An Interpretation of the Oeconomicus (Ithaca, 1970).Google Scholar
Too, Y. L. and Livingstone, N. (eds), Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Cambridge, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vernant, J.-P., Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London, 1983) = Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris, 1965).Google Scholar
The Greeks (Chicago, 1995) [= Uomo greco (1991)].Google Scholar
Vilatte, S., ‘La Femme, l' esclave, le cheval et le chien: les emblèmes du KALOS KAGATHOS Ischomaque’, Dialogues d'histoire ancienne 12 (1986), 271–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zeitlin, F., Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago and London, 1996).Google Scholar