ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the first published study of Alessandro Piccolomini’s Italian translation of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, which was printed under the title La economica in 1540. In my study of the translation, I focus solely on the central section of the dialogue, where Xenophon’s principal interlocutor, a landowner named Ischomachus, tells Socrates how he taught his bride to be a good wife. I approach my analysis of Piccolomini’s work with a number of questions. First, how literal is the translation? How well, and with what aim in mind, does Piccolomini convey the irony that is so characteristic of all Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues? What did Piccolomini choose to excise from Xenophon’s sometimes sexually explicit text? What has he added to the original and why? Finally, what does Piccolomini’s radical revision of Xenophon’s dialogue on marriage suggest about his intellectual milieu in Siena and his readers, among whom were a number of prominent women scholars and writers?
