This suggests a curious inquiry in respect to his _Memoirs of Socrates_. This work has generally been regarded as giving us a more correct notion of the real, living Socrates than the manifestly idealizing works of Plato. But was not Xenophon, who could not fail to see the future power of Socrates' influence, as anxious as Plato to claim the prophet as the champion of his own views, and does not this fact determine the whole character of his work? Is it not a romance, in the same sense that the _Cyropædia_ is, with only this difference, that the facts of Socrates' life, being fairly well known to those for whom Xenophon was writing, could not be treated with the same freedom and disregard as those of Cyrus' life? Before we part with Xenophon, we must call attention to another treatise of his, in which he deals with a subject that was then pressing for consideration--the education of women. While, as we have seen, the Æolian states and even Dorian Sparta provided, in some degree, for women's education, Athens apparently, conceiving that woman had no duties outside of the family, left her education entirely to the care of that institution. The conservative Xenophon does not depart from this view; but, seeing the moral evils that were springing from the neglect of women and their inability to be, in any sense, companions to their cultured, or over-cultured, husbands, he lays down in his _Œconomics_ a scheme for the education of the young wife _by her husband_. As this affords us an admirable insight into the lives of Athenian girls and women, better, indeed, than can be found elsewhere, we cannot do better than transcribe the first part of it. It takes the form of a conversation between Socrates and a young husband, named Ischomachus (Strong Fighter), and is reported by the former. Socrates tells how, seeing Ischomachus sitting at leisure in a certain portico, he entered into conversation with him, paid him an acceptable compliment, and inquired how he came to be nearly always busy out of doors, seeing that he evidently spent little time in the house. Ischomachus replies:--