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Fearing Spouses in Aristotle's Ta Oikonomika

One of the surviving chapters of the Oikonomika attributed to Aristotle contains one unusual piece of advice: that spouses should fear each other. What could be going on? The work which the Loeb Classical Library classifies as Book 3 of the Oikonomika attributed to Aristotle is a curious piece. It has come down to us only via medieval translations into Latin. (I will be quoting the Loeb text and translation except where noted.) It is not certain that it is by Aristotle, and it is not certain whether it is even a part of the work attributed to Aristotle in ancient times. For want of a better name, let me refer to its author, whoever that was, as ‘Aristotle’, and let me refer to this piece as Book 3 of Ta Oikonomika – but with the caveats that it may not have been by the Stagirite, and its ancient source may not have even been one typically attributed to Aristotle, although it was so attributed at some stage. For what it is worth I am inclined to think that it was part of a work attributed to Aristotle by the ancients, and it was written by one of the Peripatetics, or at least an ancient Greek philosopher of Aristotle’s time or later. If it was not part of Aristotle’s Oikonomika, it may be part or all of an otherwise lost ancient work attributed to Aristotle on marriage (Rose, 1971: 180–2, 644–7). If G. C. Armstrong, the Loeb translator, is right, the writer of our text seems to have knowledge of Xenophon’s Oikonomicos, which would put the earliest date of composition sometime in the generation before Aristotle. I will be taking it to shed light on one ancient Greek ideal of marriage, and so if it did transpire that this book was an ancient Roman or medieval forgery, that would undercut some of the conclusions of this paper; but there is no evidence that it is not a Peripatetic work, at least. A text on ‘Economics’ was a genre well known in the ancient world, and it typically concerned itself with the proper management of a household: a very rich, often rural household at that. The chapter with