One day Socrates came upon a prominent Athenian named Ischomachos sitting in the Stoa of Zeus in the Agora (1:1), waiting for some men who were late for a meeting. Socrates remarked on Ischomachos’s uncharacteristic idleness, at odds with his reputation and stature in the community. Ischomachos replied, “Well, Socrates, it’s true I don’t spend my time at home—as far as the management of the household is concerned my wife is certainly perfectly capable of looking after that.” When Socrates expressed interest in this arrangement, Ischomachos gave an extensive account of the training and domestic responsibilities of his wife. He recalled telling her when they married (he as an adult, she at fourteen), that a certain division of activities was fundamental to human affairs: “Since both our interests inside the household and those outside demand their own specific activities and attention, I suppose the gods fashioned human nature accordingly: the woman’s for the activities and business within the household, and the man’s for the activities and business outside.” This fictional account, from Xenophon’s Oikonomikos or Household Management, has done much to shape modern notions of how the classical Athenian household operated and of Athenian gender roles and gender politics. If Xenophon’s self-satisfied aristocrat were to be taken at his word, the subject of women in the Agora would at best be an interesting paradox. Backed by a chorus of other spokesmen of the Athenian patriarchy, he tells us quite emphatically that there were no women (that is, no respectable women) in the Athenian Agora, that there shouldbe no women in that most public of all public spaces. This was the arena of Athenian politics and business, of a civic order so dominated by male citizens of military age that the very voices of the city’s other residents are drowned out by theirs. Public space, they insisted, was the property of male citizens: private space, the household, the place for women.