Xenophon
The training of a wife — Oeconomicus 7-10
Οἰκονομικός · Written in the 360s or 350s BCE, set in an Athens Xenophon had long left.
Ischomachus explains how he took delivery of a wife who was not yet fifteen, had been raised to see and hear and ask as little as possible, and taught her to run his household — the storerooms, the inventory, the slaves, the accounts. The fullest account anyone in classical Greece wrote of what a woman's work actually was, told entirely by her husband.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
E. C. Marchant's Loeb (Harvard, 1923), by the editor of the Oxford Xenophon. The same confident, unfussy English as his Ways and Means, and the same habit of quiet modernisation — he reaches for 'housekeeper', 'stores', 'accounts', vocabulary that makes the household legible to an English reader by making it resemble a Victorian one. The most consequential choice is invisible: Greek has words for the enslaved that Marchant renders as 'servants' and 'housekeeper', and a reader who does not know that will not learn from the English that these are slaves. That is worth saying in a note wherever the household staff appear.