The household as microcosm

The household is a microcosm of larger forms of human coexistence: the polis, the army, and the empire. Xenophon regards the management of all as similar exercises undertaken at different scales. His Socrates tells a soldier disappointed at being defeated in the election for a post as a commander by a man whose experience lay in estate management:

The idea that there was a single art of leadership or management which could be exercised at all levels, from household to empire, was a conventional view in fourth-century Greek thought, shared to some extent by Plato (Statesman 258e) but criticized by Aristotle, who countered that the rule of such different domains represented qualitatively different skills (Politics 1.1.1252a7–18).Footnote ⁵ Xenophon, like Plato, identifies this general supervisory skill as the ‘kingly art’ (basilikē technē), but he claims that it applies to the household as much as the kingdom; the rule of a despotic king is effectively conducted over a very large household.

The household, like the cosmos itself, benefits from good order, something that is always of prime concern to Xenophon. Ischomachus tells his wife: ‘there is nothing so useful (euchrēston) or so good (kalon) for human beings as order (taxis)’ (Oec. 8.3).Footnote ⁶ The satisfaction is both aesthetic and practical, inside the home and beyond it, from the holds of trading ships (Oec. 8.11–16) to military formations for battle and display, and the arrangements of choruses of performers. A ‘well-ordered’ (kata kosmon) house can be a ‘chorus of equipment’ (Oec. 8.20).

In writing about the household, Xenophon usually focuses on its legal head, the male citizen, who in other contexts might be the ruler of a city or empire or the leader of an army. All are complex organizations in which tasks should be distributed to specialist staff, but the leader must synthesize and oversee the whole organization, provide direction, and spot opportunities, while occasionally delegating to others – which means his wife and the better trained of his enslaved workers. Home is also the centre of wider social and familial networks. In the second book of the Memorabilia, Xenophon covers the relationships such a man might need to manage: those between parents and children (2.2), competitive brothers (2.3), and the problems of male citizens as heads of household dealing with financial hardship (2.7) and needing to seek employment (2.8).

Xenophon shows some empathy towards the situation of citizen wives, who have equal capacity to contribute to the household (Oec. 7.26–8) and exercise the same forms of oversight. Less often, this extends to those few heads of household who are not male citizens, such as the hetaira Theodote, a non-citizen woman who depends on financial support from ‘friends’ paying for companionship and sexual services to fund her household (Mem. 3.11). And he shows some interest in the activities of the enslaved members of the household.

Xenophon's account of Spartan customs and values related to family life reads as being also a criticism of Athens. His Spartan politeia begins with a discussion of the home in the context of birth and early childhood (LP 1.3–10); but Spartan men's lives would eventually be focused on their messes, outside the household. Sparta offers a different split between the public and private aspects of life from that of Athens (LP 5.5–7, 6.1–5), affecting the roles of men and women.

Socrates at home

The personal lives and domestic arrangements of philosophers who promoted alternative lifestyles or questioned everyday living arrangements would become a topos of the Hellenistic and later biographical tradition, also seen in pseudepigraphic texts such as the letters supposedly from the Cynic philosopher Crates to his wife Hipparchia (DL 6.96–8; Letters of Crates 28–33).Footnote ⁷ Xenophon, in depicting Socrates at home with his family, stands at an early stage in this tradition, although other Socratics clearly treated similar topics, often using the same characters.Footnote ⁸

Most surviving Socratic dialogues present the philosopher engaging with a wide range of interlocutors away from his own home, placing him in Athens’ public spaces and the private homes of its elite. Plato shows Socrates’ wife and children being dismissed from the scene on his final day (Pl. Phd. 116b). However, Xenophon depicts Socrates at home, in a dialogue with his son Lamprocles that plays a key structural role in the Memorabilia.Footnote ⁹ For Thomas Pangle, the reader is ‘plunged down’ in a ‘roller-coaster drop’ from the lofty discussion of Heracles’ choice in the previous chapter, but this changed setting asserts the importance of the family for Xenophon.Footnote ¹⁰ After the Memorabilia's first book, which offers an initial defence of Socrates against the actual twin charges of impiety (Mem. 1.1) and corrupting the youth (Mem. 1.2) levelled against him in 399 bce, Xenophon turns to depicting his teacher as a source of wise advice to family and friends, beginning in his own home, as further evidence against the charges. The relationship between parents and sons was fundamental to Athenian piety; families were also responsible for choosing their sons’ educators.Footnote ¹¹ Respect for parents was an aspect of character scrutinized as part of the dokimasia, preliminary due diligence hearings held for appointees to political office.Footnote ¹²

Xenophon turns the focus from the father–son relationship to that of mother and son. Lamprocles has been complaining to Socrates about his mother's critical attitude to him, but the latter tells him to stop being ungrateful and to listen to her (Mem. 2.2.1–2), placing the question of gratitude to parents within a wider context of civic justice.Footnote ¹³ He describes the contribution that both parents make to their children's lives, highlighting the personal risk borne by the mother:

The relationship between mother and infant is marked by its lack of reciprocity: infants can offer no immediate reward for the labour expended on them, and may not survive into adulthood. Xenophon shows that, unlike other civic relationships, mothers must give care without expecting any return. The sculpted gravestones of Athenian women who died in childbirth are testimony to both the risks of the relationship and its importance.Footnote ¹⁵

Xenophon plays with and subverts more conventional negative views of women in the Symposium. Unlike Plato, he presents the symposium as a space in which women performers are welcome participants, although, unlike the male guests, the female entertainers do not speak. Socrates points to the skills of the girl dancer who has performed juggling tricks for the diners, and observes that she demonstrates the capacity of women to learn:

Socrates responds with an analogy to training horses; his experience with his difficult wife will make him better at educating any other woman. The analogy between dominating women and breaking a horse, seeing the young girl as the untamed colt, was familiar from poetry (for example, Soph. Ant. 477–8), but fits neatly into Xenophon's wider use of human–animal interactions to describe social hierarchies.Footnote ¹⁶

Women's lives at home

Although Xenophon's depictions of women of free citizen status reinforce a particular view of the division of labour between the sexes, he nonetheless accords such women agency in the management of their homes and the stewardship of family resources and property, and credits them with skill and knowledge for doing so. While women are often presented as consumers of resources (Hesiod, Works and Days 702–5; Semonides fr. 7) and disruptive to the order and continuity of families – notably in Athenian tragedy, where Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Medea are only two examples of women who prevent the orderly continuation of the family – Xenophon shows women as co-workers in a joint enterprise, to which each partner contributes different but valuable skills and labour.Footnote ¹⁷ He incorporates women, still treated as opposite to and at times dependent on men in a binary divide, within a positive and orderly microcosm of the larger cosmos.

In his Oeconomicus, Xenophon shows Socrates advising Critobulus, the son of his friend Crito, on household management and marriage through an extended report of a conversation with an idealized Athenian citizen and estate-owner, Ischomachus.Footnote ¹⁸ Socrates regards the relationship between husband and wife as depending on the wife's being trained by the husband in the common goal of preserving household wealth:

The situation Socrates describes reflects Athenian elite marriage practices, which were quite different from modern ‘companionate’ marriage. In a society where men of citizen status were not treated as fully independent adult citizens and did not marry till reaching the age of roughly thirty, the young women they married were chosen by their family and were typically in their mid-teens, but ready to bear children. Xenophon recasts the inequality of age, experience, and education in these marriages as a pedagogic opportunity for the husband: he can teach his wife to act in a manner appropriate to a kalos kagathos like himself.Footnote ¹⁹ Ischomachus’ wife was ‘not yet fifteen’ when they married (Oec. 7.5), and Critobulus admits to Socrates that his wife was young and uneducated when they married (3.13), and that he does not often engage her in conversation, despite her important role in the home (3.12).Footnote ²⁰ Xenophon, however, mentions a woman who did have a companionate relationship, Pericles’ partner Aspasia, whom Socrates offers to introduce to Critobulus: ‘I shall introduce you to Aspasia, who will give proof (epideixei) of all these things more expertly (epistēmonesteron) than I can’ (Oec. 3.14).

Aspasia is an intriguing counter-example to Ischomachus’ wife. As a non-citizen woman brought up in Miletus, in an aristocratic context outside Athens, she had both a different education from Athenian women and a different kind of relationship with Pericles from that experienced in a typical citizen marriage.Footnote ²¹ She featured in dialogues by several Socratics. Xenophon's Socrates here grants her epistemic authority, and the formal ability to demonstrate her knowledge as an epideixis.Footnote ²² He follows this by outlining women's key role in maintaining the household, and the space in which it is exercised:

Xenophon notes the importance of women's work in managing expenditure, but also in domestic production and preservation. Women were responsible for a range of endeavours critical to family life and the maintenance of resources: the preservation and storage of food, the production of textiles and clothing, and the management of domestic labour. Women's work also had an economic value, even if it was realized only in certain circumstances; in poorer households, textiles and other goods might be produced for sale in the market. Socrates advises Aristarchus, who has taken in many female relatives during the civil conflict of 403, to encourage these women to produce cloaks for sale, so that the household's resources are not depleted by the costs of their subsistence (Mem. 2.7).

Aristarchus observes that the civil war has damaged many parts of the economy, which means that he cannot raise funds by selling his household goods (Mem. 2.7.2). Socrates provides examples of Athenian entrepreneurs who are succeeding in business, and the two consider whether it is proper for women of free citizen status to work in craft businesses, as enslaved workers do (2.7.6–7). Socrates’ advice balances this consideration with the assumption that these women, too, would rather take responsibility and action for their upkeep than sit in idleness and worry about their diminishing resources. He concludes with a delicately phrased point that textile skills are ‘the most honourable and decorous for women’ (2.7.10) – perhaps a hint about sex work, a less honourable form of labour for citizen women, and one paralleled with textile work in literary and visual sources.Footnote ²³ Exercising their best skills will both bring the women satisfaction and secure the economic stability of the household.

Women's work with textiles was part of an order that Xenophon regards as natural, in which tasks are organized and in turn gendered by their location within or outside the household, creating a strict binary division. Ischomachus sets out this order to the young wife whom he is ‘training’:

Xenophon here shows how good law mirrors and helps to protect the natural order of the cosmos, as ordained by the gods, collapsing the nomos/physis distinction used by Greek thinkers of this time.Footnote ²⁴ The concern about taking care of and performing one's own work reflects a core principle of Greek political thought, a practical demonstration of citizen autonomy, fundamental to democracy (Hdt. 5.78.1) but also conveying an acceptance of rigid social structures in which character fits a person to a class, as in Plato's principle of specialization (Plato Rep. 2.369b–70c, 4.433a4–6).

Ischomachus draws a parallel between the job of managing a hive and that of managing the house:

He goes on to explain that the queen ensures that worker bees are working, sending them out on missions, and storing and eventually distributing what they bring in, in well-ordered honeycombs. Rearing the next generation of enslaved workers is also her responsibility (7.33–4), as is sending the workforce out on their tasks (7.35). The bee and the hive were a traditional image for an orderly society, present in Homer and other authors, and the ‘bee woman’ is, in the otherwise entirely negative taxonomy of women presented by the iambic poet Semonides, the ideal wife.Footnote ²⁵ Ischomachus imagines that his young wife might enjoy teaching slaves to spin, but be wearied by taking care of them when they are sick (Oec. 7.37, 41). The emphasis on the wife's caring oversight (epimeleia) and her ability to transmit knowledge show that her role is integrated into Xenophon's Socratic value system, even though Ischomachus’ wife perceptively notes that her leadership role will be perceived as laughable compared with that of her husband and his external-facing activities (7.39).Footnote ²⁶

Within the house, however, the wife is a ruler, a ‘queen’ (basilissa). The maintenance of domestic order becomes the wife's prime duty:

Reflection and self-examination are part of this order, in which the well-run household is likened to a city ‘with good laws’, a quality that Athenians attributed to Sparta.Footnote ²⁷ Ischomachus hears his wife's comments on his actions, with slaves and others acting as if the household had political institutions:

The idea of a domestic law court might also suggest comic scenarios such as that of Aristophanes’ Wasps.Footnote ²⁸ The comedic potential has led to suggestions that the whole presentation of Ischomachus and his wife is ironic, pointing to the story of Chrysilla, the widow of the historical Ischomachus, whose far from ideal behaviour is reported by the speechwriter Andocides (On the Mysteries 122–4).Footnote ²⁹ On this reading, the Oeconomicus offers a critique of the idea of the kalos kagathos and delusions of good order. But the inclusion of so many key ethical ideas in these passages makes a wholly ironic reading difficult. Xenophon is committed to these views on good social order elsewhere in his work, and the fact that he regards a woman as capable of implementing them in a specific domain is, as Sheila Murnaghan observed, to treat women's roles as ‘emphatically equal’ and ‘complementary’ to the role of the man in other forms of ordered social arrangement.Footnote ³⁰ Ischomachus grants that his wife, in having this ability, has a ‘great-thinking’ (megalaphrona) mind; after completing his description of her skill in prudent household management, all expressed in language more usually linked to men's roles, he accepts Socrates’ remark on her ‘masculine mentality’ (andrikēn…dianoian, 10.1).

However, Ischomachus undercuts his positive assessment by his next point.Footnote ³¹ Xenophon uses him to idealize marriage as a relationship of total frankness, including honest self-presentation. When his wife wears make-up and built-up shoes, Ischomachus claims that her altered appearance precludes any real connection or frank communication between them (10.2–13). His wife makes no verbal reply to his criticism, but Ischomachus notes:

We might note the philosophical language Xenophon gives the unnamed wife. As he alludes to contemporary philosophical discussions of the difference between appearance and reality, he emphasizes the importance of honesty in relationships, and the distinction between virtue and vice.Footnote ³² Ischomachus’ wife appears to have become fluent in the technical language of Socratic dialogue, and in the Platonic distinction between reality and appearance.

Ischomachus explains that she should display her true nature by distinguishing herself from her slaves through her active working stance at the loom (10.10). While Xenophon has an abiding interest in the self-presentation of individuals performing leadership roles, there is no scope for the positive use of self-adornment in the private life of an Athenian wife.Footnote ³³ The distinction of citizen from slave carries further into the personal lives of the couple. Ischomachus maps the distinction between the self-presentation and activity of the citizen wife and the enslaved woman on to the virtue/vice distinction: ‘Her appearance generates sexual desire, when she, with her cleaner appearance and more appropriate clothing is compared with a slave, and above all when she grants favours willingly, rather than being compelled to give service’ (Oec. 10.12–13). While other sexual partners are available for Athenian husbands – their own domestic slaves, as suggested here, and sex workers of various types – only the citizen wife represents Virtue. In parallel with political typologies of good and bad regimes, her willing submission to her husband's desire makes his domination acceptable.

Xenophon's characters have differing attitudes to domestic resources being expended on the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Socrates criticizes the expenditure which would be involved in maintaining a relationship with hetairai like Theodote, who were maintained by one or more customers who regarded them as ‘friends’ but paid them substantial sums for the privilege of doing so: ‘If someone were to use his money to buy a sexual partner, through which he would become worse in both body and soul, and worse in respect of his estate, how would money actually be beneficial for him?’ (Oec 1.13). The reality, however, was that many Athenian men made use of sex workers; Antisthenes implies that doing so on a casual basis meets his physical need for sex (Symp. 4.38). Xenophon also considers the perspective of the sex workers themselves, although with some subtle criticism. The enslaved entertainers of the Symposium vote Critobulus to be more beautiful than Socrates (Symp. 5.9), emphasizing that they are concerned with the physical and external rather than the internal beauty of the soul.

Socrates’ encounter with the beautiful hetaira Theodote (Mem. 3.11) provides a view of an Athenian household headed not by a male citizen but by a female non-citizen. When Theodote surprises him by addressing him directly as he and his companions discuss her beauty, Socrates questions Theodote to discover the source of her income.Footnote ³⁴ She does not benefit from revenue from farming or property – indeed, as a non-citizen she is not able to own land or real property outright – but is dependent on gifts from friends. Socrates’ probing questions establish that she has no strategy for attracting the customers on whom she depends. In a further animal image, he compares her with a spider which can weave a web but has no strategy to drive prey into its trap (3.11.5–7).

Spartan arrangements contrast with those of Athens. Xenophon begins the Lacedaimonion politeia with an account of citizen women's domestic lives in Sparta and their role in producing the next generation. Compared with women elsewhere, Spartan young women enjoy better food, and are permitted more exercise, so are in a better physical condition, conducive to the production of healthier children, which is their eventual primary function (LP 1.3–10).Footnote ³⁵ Domestic labour such as the production of clothing is the work of the enslaved. Social norms limit the time a man may spend at home and reduce opportunities for marital intercourse, again in the interests of the production of better children, and men are encouraged to marry and father children while at their physical peak. In Xenophon's account eugenic considerations about the size and strength of offspring outweigh concerns about marital fidelity, and Lycurgus’ politeia permitted older men's wives to bear children for younger men other than their husbands.Footnote ³⁶ As Noreen Humble notes, this discussion is introduced and closed with invitations to the reader to consider the question; Xenophon's concern may be as much to offer a counter-example to Athenian norms as to explore Spartan society.Footnote ³⁷ Given the centrality of the household in his thought, he may not have embraced Sparta's physical separation of male and female spheres.

Xenophon pays more attention to the reality of women's lives than Plato does, and appears to grant women more epistemic and moral agency and capability than Aristotle does in Politics Book 1, a work which in many places appears to look back to Xenophon's thought on the household. But his mapping of the characteristics of virtue and vice on to two different modes of performing a female gender identity shows that he is still enmeshed within the patriarchal structures and binaries of Athenian culture.

The lives and work of the enslaved

Xenophon rarely focuses on enslaved individuals themselves, but enslavement as a status is central to his thought.Footnote ³⁸ He differentiates the roles of enslaved workers, and notes the skill with which some might themselves perform supervisory roles within and outside the home (Oec. 12.3–20; Mem. 2.5.2). However, his references to the enslaved are most often embedded in political analogies in which their status becomes a metaphor for the political unfreedom of citizens, his primary concern. As seen in the contrast between free and enslaved women in the Oeconomicus, the enslaved and the free come to represent binary oppositions between bad and good epistemic and moral states. Enslavement further becomes a metaphor for domination by the drive for pleasure. Xenophon describes men who lack control over their physical appetites:

The analogical enslavement to vice of a free person is in Xenophon's account a more significant matter than the lived experience of personal enslavement. A further consequence is that the negative qualities associated with enslavement through analogy are transferred to enslaved persons themselves, who are then viewed as inherently vicious through being subject to base desires (Mem. 1.2.29, 1.3.11). Such views underlie Aristotle's theory of natural slavery (Pol. 1.5–6), in which individuals can be identified as naturally suited to the status of enslavement. Xenophon's thought may well contribute to this model.Footnote ³⁹

Xenophon does, however, recognize the economic value of the enslaved to the household and to its business enterprises, through their skilled and even specialist labour. His recommendations for the management of Athenian public finance in the Poroi effectively turn the city into a large household, exploiting its enslaved workers to boost production of silver (Poroi 4.2–4, 13–26).Footnote ⁴⁰

Within Ischomachus’ house, enslaved workers are overseen by his wife, and kept separated by sex, with the door to the women's quarters kept locked so that the enslaved will not ‘produce children without our assent’ (Oec. 9.5). Outside in the fields, he trains labourers and supervisors in agricultural work, believing it important that a master demonstrate his good qualities and concern (epimeleia) for his workers:

Although owner and enslaved are both part of the household, Xenophon assumes that there will often be conflict between them; this is another way in which the household offers an analogy for class conflict within the polis. Socrates notes that, in some households, the enslaved are kept in chains, yet still keep running away, whereas in others they stay despite a lack of physical restraint (Oec. 3.4). Xenophon connects brutality towards the enslaved with a lack of order in the arrangement of belongings (Oec. 3.2). Here again the household is seen as a microcosm of larger-scale communities, in which those who rule over willing subjects are more successful as rulers (Cyr. 1.1.5–6; Hiero 11.12–15).Footnote ⁴¹

Xenophon's portrait of the hedonist Aristippus makes the connection between being a slave-owner and rejecting the idea of community and necessary concessions to its demands. A slave-owner himself, he regards life as a citizen, subjected to the rule of others, as equivalent to life as an enslaved worker (Mem. 2.1.11). Xenophon subtly portrays the hypocrisy embedded in this equation, while laying out the brutal treatment the enslaved might expect, as Socrates points out the inconsistencies in his argument:

Aristippus’ comments betray the reality of enslavement, as does a further discussion with Antisthenes on the value of skilled enslaved workers.

Xenophon shows that slaves have a measurable market value, easily assessed according to their skills, but that it is difficult to work out the financial value of friends. Both good slaves and friends bring financial benefits and, as the discussion concludes, the former should not be sold and the latter not abandoned (2.5.5).

Homosociality: men's personal relationships outside the home

Book 2 of the Memorabilia shows how citizen men articulate their households’ relationship with other households and with the city through a range of relationships, from formal affiliation through demes (administrative neighbourhoods), cults, and shared military experience, to informal networks of friendship. Friendship between citizens thus has both a personal and a political aspect.Footnote ⁴² Xenophon's account suggests directions which foreshadow Aristotle's typology of citizen friendship (Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics).Footnote ⁴³ Such relationships cement the unity of the citizen body. Xenophon also attempts to integrate a further form of extra-familial male relationship – pederastic relationships between young adults and youths – into his longer investigation of friendship (Mem. 2.6), perhaps as a critical comment on the role such relationships play in Plato's dialogues. For Xenophon, erotic relationships between young men risk the loss of physical and mental self-control.

Friendship begins with family members, who offer the first line of defence for the citizen against the competitive environment of the wider polis. When Chaerecrates is struggling to get on with his brother Chaerephon (Socrates’ good friend, who appears in Aristophanes’ Clouds and Plato's Apology),Footnote ⁴⁴ Socrates advises him on improving this vital relationship, and emphasizes the importance of family bonds:

Brothers, who will defend each other, are less likely to come under attack in their citizen life.

The family is the closest source of support for a citizen, but wider networks are also needed. Friendship (philia) properly extends across a wide range of citizen interactions beyond the household and immediate family. Acquiring friends from outside the family was important in building a network of mutual benefit; Xenophon treats this as a kind of property transaction, resulting in friendship being a social good with an exchange value.Footnote ⁴⁵ Socrates emphasizes this to an unnamed interlocutor (Mem. 2.4): friends help by providing practical support in both public and private matters, filling gaps in provision, and even joining in physical defence. Friends are also sources of personal and emotional support. The quality of friends contributes to their value (2.4.5–7).

In a subsequent conversation with Antisthenes, Socrates develops the monetary valuation of friendship. He concludes that, ‘just as someone will put an unsatisfactory slave on the market for what he will fetch, so it may be tempting to sell an unsatisfactory friend when there is the possibility of gaining more than he is worth’ (2.5.7). Friends fit into networks of exchange, both as providers and recipients of immaterial goods, charis, or favours and prestige, and as possessions themselves in the exchange of actual money and goods. Xenophon's assessment of them as objects of value seems crass, but he is simply extending ideas current in political theorizing about the need for an exchange rate between citizens who contribute different amounts, expressed in the concept of ‘geometric’ equality.Footnote ⁴⁶

Xenophon develops this idea further in Socrates’ long conversation with his favoured interlocutor Critobulus, the son of his own friend Crito (Mem. 2.6), and the interlocutor of the Oeconomicus. Socrates advises his young friend pragmatically, to seek friends who exhibit self-control over their physical appetites, who possess financial prudence, and who do not come with a network of enemies. Yet, despite the evident monetary calculus, a friend who loves money would be a bad choice (Mem. 2.6.3–4).

Possible friends should be sought out and pursued, a process Xenophon describes using management of the enslaved and the aristocratic pastime of hunting as an analogy, as he later does for the courtesan Theodote's pursuit of ‘friends’:

Socrates goes on to liken the personal pursuit of friends to politicians’ pursuit of supporters. So prominent figures like Pericles and Themistocles (2.6.13), who are able to attract support, through either fair means or some kind of enchantment, offer one model for finding friends. Taking the analogy in the other direction, Socrates adds that politicians gain support from flatterers, but that such men are unsuitable as friends. He notes the importance of friends sharing in good personal qualities, restating an analogy between the pursuit of friends and the pursuit of lovers:

Critobulus expresses a wish for help with the pursuit of beautiful young men as an actual form of friendship, collapsing the analogy. Affective and erotic relationships between men and youths were a special class of citizen relationship, one of some anxiety to Athenian society, even as they played an important role in the acculturation of elite youths into adult social practices.Footnote ⁴⁷ Xenophon follows Plato's treatment of these relationships in the context of friendship (Lysis 212b1–2), as Melina Tamiolaki notes.Footnote ⁴⁸

Xenophon expresses concern about the effect of pederastic relationships, but his concern is for the well-being of the older party, centred on the loss of physical and mental self-control demonstrated by falling in love and expressing longing for the younger ‘beloved’. Unusually, he depicts himself in conversation with Socrates, who criticizes those who lose self-control in their enthusiastic pursuit of beautiful youths (Mem. 1.3.8–13). The speech is really aimed at Critobulus, who has kissed the beautiful son of Alcibiades; Xenophon admits that he would have done the same:

Again, the loss of self-control involved in erotic pursuit is likened to enslavement and madness, the loss of reason. However, Xenophon differs from Plato in his rejection of any physical aspect within these relationships.Footnote ⁴⁹ Critias is criticized for rubbing himself against a boy ‘like a pig’ (1.2.30), behaviour more suited to the unfree (aneleutheron) than to the kalos kagathos gentleman (1.2.29), who has learned to control his physical appetites.

Xenophon's treatment of homosocial and homoerotic relationships reacts to Plato's erotic dialogues; Mem 2.6 responds closely to Plato's Lysis.Footnote ⁵⁰ Relationships between men are the focus of Xenophon's Symposium, which replies to Plato's work of the same name, and offers a subtle and witty critique of Plato's presentation of eros and of the role of pederasty in Socratic thought.Footnote ⁵¹ In Xenophon's work, Socrates and his companions are invited to join what might seem a rather awkward party, at which the host, Callias, is pursuing Autolycus, the son of his guest Lycon. The occasion for the event is Autolycus’ victory in an all-in wrestling contest (pankration, Symp. 8.37). Both Callias and Autolycus are still just about young enough to engage in pederastic relationships, although the hazy dramatic setting pays no attention to chronology. Through this set-up, Socrates analogizes his own activities to matchmaking, pimping, and erotic pursuit (Symp. 8.42).

Critobulus’ own beauty opens a discussion and contest between him and Socrates; the symposiasts acknowledge Socrates’ inner beauty, while the enslaved entertainers brought by a Sicilian impresario vote for the handsome young man (Symp. 5.9). The Sicilian in turn becomes annoyed that the guests are entertaining themselves and ignoring the dancers’ performances, and Socrates’ presence is resented by the interloper Philippus, who eventually launches into a critique which mirrors the later accusations against Socrates, in which Lycon was the third prosecutor (6.6–10).

When Socrates intervenes to put the party back on track, he encourages the other guests to sing, while asking the entertainers to dance (7.1).Footnote ⁵² His closing speech (8.12–41) encourages Callias to pursue a chaste friendship with Autolycus rather than a sexual relationship, and he argues that non-sexual relationships between men offer a route to virtue for both parties:

While criticizing Pausanias’ admiration of the Theban Sacred Band, 150 pairs of lovers who fought side by side (8.32), Xenophon appears to acknowledge Pausanias’ relationship with the poet Agathon. In doing so, he sets his work in conversation with Plato's Symposium, from which the female performers were excluded.Footnote ⁵³

However, the dancers’ final scene, representing an erotic encounter between Dionysus and Ariadne, provides a reminder of the allure of heterosexual love within citizen marriage (9.2–5). Autolycus leaves with his father, while the other married guests rush home to their wives (Symp. 9.7). While male friendship is central to existence in the city, the household and the wife within it have an importance for Xenophon not shared by Plato.

The Athenian gentleman on his estate and in the agora

Just as Xenophon has a clear view of the proper role of women in maintaining their households, he outlines the behaviour and activity appropriate to citizen men who are heads of households and responsible for what might be substantial estates. The political and legal duties of a citizen towards the polis might appear as a disruption to this core responsibility, as seen in the routine of Ischomachus, presented as the supreme example of the ‘fine and good’ gentleman, the kalos kagathos (Oec. 7.2–3).Footnote ⁵⁴

Physical self-improvement was a key task for the gentleman. Ischomachus explains how his daily routine contributes to a regime of fitness and the care of self and others:

Ischomachus’ involvement with farming is a supervisory one, although, as he and Socrates observe, supervision requires a knowledge of the tasks being supervised. His key task is to train the managers who take care of farming for him and directly manage his workforce. Socrates is somewhat sceptical that such supervisory skills can be taught, as Ischomachus insists (12.4). This point keys into a significant debate about the teachability of virtue, seen in Plato's dialogues.Footnote ⁵⁵

Although Ischomachus’ manager is enslaved, like those he manages, Xenophon suggests that a citizen who had fallen into poverty might take up the work of an estate manager rather than labouring work (Mem. 2.8.3). Eutherus has lost his own property, and his best option for income is day labouring in the city, as unpropertied free citizens did. But, Socrates suggests, working for the owner of a large estate would not involve physical labour. It would, however, challenge Eutherus’ ideas about what activities are appropriate for a free citizen:

One of the problems introduced by identifying the rule and management of a household with that of the polis is that in Athens the two tasks were undertaken by people of different statuses: office-holders in the city were free citizens, whereas stewards in private households might well be enslaved. The aristocratic idea that subjection to the will of the majority was a form of enslavement, most clearly voiced by Aristippus (see Chapter 4), also impacts the idea that working for another citizen in his private business was not a suitable task for a free citizen.

A further division among Athenian citizens was between those who undertook civic roles and played an active part in the administration of the city, and those who kept a low profile and focused on their private affairs.Footnote ⁵⁶ Ischomachus appears to adopt a quietist attitude, and to avoid public entanglement in politics; some have argued that this implicates Xenophon in an oligarchic perspective.Footnote ⁵⁷ Socrates argues against this notion, encouraging Charmides, something of a real-life Ischomachus, to take a more active role in civic affairs, and re-emphasizing the view that managing household and city are the same function. Socrates tells him he has an obligation to use his skills for the public good, but Charmides insists that his private abilities are not transferable to the public sphere:Footnote ⁵⁸

There is a balance in Ischomachus’ activities between farming on his estate and transacting commercial business in the marketplace or with fellow citizens. One might expect a kalos kagathos to favour farming over trade. David Johnson suggests that Ischomachus’ business activities and views may mark him as a less than perfect exemplar of a conventional gentleman.Footnote ⁵⁹ Xenophon certainly appreciates the Spartan prohibition of citizen participation in trade (LP 7.1–3), and his contemporaries shared such views. Plato largely disdains the financial sphere, forbidding property to his philosopher rulers, while Aristotle's Politics polices a line between good citizen behaviour and interest in profit-seeking and money matters (chrēmatistikē, Pol. 1.10.1258a18–25).Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet Ischomachus points out that grain traders love the produce they trade just as much as farmers do (Oec. 20.27–9).

Matthew Christ, by contrast, suggests that Xenophon is arguing against an aristocratic ideology of non-participation, by showing that the skills of good estate management, exemplified by Ischomachus (and also by Charmides), should benefit the city and earn honours for those who possess them.Footnote ⁶¹ Xenophon, he contends, shows ‘a new vision of elite identity’ in which hard work in managing private business benefits the public standing of the elite, and successful estate management is achieved through cooperation with democratic processes and participation in office-holding. Xenophon attributes a similar view – that the kalos kagathos should provide the necessities for his household – to the Persian king Cambyses (Cyr. 1.6.7). Such activity should be supported by relevant expertise; the later sections of the Oeconomicus provide detailed instruction on farming practice for producing and harvesting crops (Oec. 15.10–19.19). By setting Socrates’ and Ischomachus’ conversation in the agora, where business was undertaken, rather than in a private setting, Xenophon underlines Ischomachus’ commitment to taking charge of his business affairs, and also aligns him with Socrates’ practice of public conversation. Ischomachus’ international perspective may also be unusual. As well as his praise for Persian leaders as farmers (Oec. 4.4), his model of good order is a Phoenician trading ship (Oec. 8.11–16).

While elite Athenian women's responsibilities were largely restricted to their households, other than the performance of religious ritual outside the home, men's lives required social and political interaction in other venues, both through formal institutions and through informal friendship networks. Xenophon has firm views on the proper leisure activities through which kaloi kagathoi could demonstrate their status and maintain their skills and physical fitness, valorizing these efforts as labour (ponos), which he contrasts with the physical work of lower-class citizens and the enslaved, which damages rather than improves.Footnote ⁶² Simply having the time and resources for leisure marked the elite as superior to propertyless wage-labourers; whatever form their non-productive activity took, from symposia in the city to hunting in the countryside, it demonstrated their status and command of expensive resources, and their ability to build relationships through bestowing generosity (charis).Footnote ⁶³

In the countryside, hunting was an important leisure pursuit for the elite, and could play a part in preparing young men for military service: ‘Those who are keen on this pursuit will benefit in many ways. For it furnishes health for their bodies, keener sight and hearing, slower ageing, and above all educates in matters of war’ (Cyn. 12.1–2). The practical benefits of hunting include fitness, better horsemanship (elite men rode to the hunt, but the actual hunting was done on foot with the assistance of slaves), and experience of roughing it – all useful for military life. Further benefits include the development of character virtues, because hunting required cooperation between hunters in the pursuit of prey and driving it into nets, and the sharing of resources including both equipment and trained hounds (as practised in Sparta, according to LP 6.3).

Xenophon has a great deal of detailed comment to make on the breeding and management of hounds, the most important resource needed for hunting hares, a typical activity in Attica (Cyn. 3–4, 6–7).Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet the Cynegeticus ranges far beyond the practicalities of keeping hounds and training support staff for this purpose. It considers the hunting of larger animals: the wild boar of heroic hunting (10.1–23) and, briefly, the large cats and bears found far beyond Greece (11.1–4). Fishing and trapping birds for subsistence or trade (‘night-hunting’, 12.7) was not valorized in the same way; as with other activities, the distinction between elite and non-elite forms serves to further link the non-elite with the enslaved.Footnote ⁶⁵ Xenophon concludes with the claim that hunting contributes to the development of desirable qualities in the kalos kagathos (12.1–9), against those who argue that it is an indulgence.