Emily Baragwanath – Valuing Women in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos – May 21, 2026

Abstract:

Xenophon poses interpretative challenges for modern readers, including in how seriously to take the ideas expressed in Socrates’ report of what the Athenian gentleman Ischomachos told him – the bulk of Oikonomikos (Household Management). A particular area of discomfort is Ischomachos’ keen interest in the material world and physical needs and his ethical code based ostensibly on self-interest. However, Xenophon and his Socrates always have their eye on the existential issues that deserve acknowledgment alongside the state of the soul. The material and spiritual do not stand in binary opposition, as famously they do in Plato, whose Socrates regards philosophy’s task as untying the soul from the body (Phaedo 84a-b). Where that tradition teaches philosophers to “live for death,” Xenophon’s Socrates in Memorabilia gives practical help to those facing the existential threat of starvation.
I shall argue that to valorize subsistence and survival is to value women, who are nurturers par excellence: in Oikonomikos the land is personified as female and eulogized as “mother and nourisher,” while the citizen wife’s physical experiences inform her thought and speech. Beyond illustrating her material agency, the work highlights her moral and intellectual capacity, which is exemplified in her ability to dialegein (“to engage in dialogue”). The exhaustive listing of the material items the wife controls points to her manifold responsibilities and associated forms of material and moral agency. In sustaining a beautiful order within the oikos, which enables it to shelter and feed the household, the couple sustains their part of the order of the kosmos. The wife exercises ritual agency as she contributes to the production of a successful oikos, which is itself a project in service of the divine.

Bio:

Emily Baragwanath is Professor and Chair in the Classics Department at UNC-Chapel Hill and current President of the International Xenophon Society. Her publications, which focus mainly on the literary techniques employed by the Greek historians, include Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford, 2008), the co-edited volume Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus, and a forthcoming monograph entitled Xenophon’s Women: Friendship, Economics, and War (Cambridge).