Oikonomos
The oikos (household) was the base unit for the organization of social, political, and economic life in the Ancient Greek world.
[11]: 31 Most of the processing and storage facilities needed to run a farm, such as grain stores and oil presses, were found on the land owned by the oikos.
[11]: 61–62 Chance weather events, warfare, sick animals, pests, and even ageing members of the oikos could seriously threaten its existence.
[11]: 61–62 Households which practised a trade in addition to or instead of farming, often had their workshops located within the house in a room facing the street.
He would be expected to provide funds for religious festivals, attend important events such as births and marriages, as well as fulfill his civic duties as a member of the polis.
In return the oikonomos would be expected to provide material aid to these same neighbours in their own time of need.
[12] Here, the role of the oikonomos largely concerned management of his household with the aim of accumulating and preserving wealth, rather than a relation to any modern sense of "economics".
[13] In this portrayal, though Socrates figures his own property to be worth a hundredfold less than Crito's, he has enough to satisfy himself and friends who would help him if he did not; the latter has social obligations of sacrifice, patronage, entertaining guests, and financing potential wars.
[13] Meanwhile, Ischomachus, a "fair and good"[13] upper-class farmer, focuses his instructions on household managing on the importance of ensuring his wife's submissiveness and of close supervision of the house, as well as on a thorough understanding of agricultural techniques.
Aristotle, however, argued that the role of "master of the house" is a position of nature rather than of particular skill in household management.
To the extent that there is a natural part of household management which concerns acquisition, it is limited to the provision of basic necessities.
[15] The obligation of Aristotle's oikonomos is to use and order wealth (the most essential of which are the necessities for survival which nature provides, which are presupposed) rather than to acquire it.
[16] Aristotle specifically objects to the sophist Alcidamas's use of oikonomos in the context of a rhetorician as "dispenser of pleasure to his audience".
In Poetics, he writes that the tragedian Euripides is faulty in his "oikonomia",[17] translated as "management" as well as (more directly) "economy",[17] of the subject of tragedy.
[20]: 280 The oikonomos was probably a low-ranking figure, as accounts place them in charge of trivial local decisions and subordinate to the strategos, who functioned as governor of the satrapy.
