The first book called "economics" is a conversation about a farm

What the book is

The earliest surviving book with "economics" in its title is by Xenophon, an Athenian soldier and writer, and was probably written after 362 BC.¹ Its title, Oikonomikos, means "the household manager". It is not a treatise. It is a conversation, in which Socrates asks a rich young man what running a household means, and then reports a long talk he once had with a gentleman farmer called Ischomachus.²

Xenophon did not invent the word. Plato used it before him.³ What Xenophon did was write the first whole book about it, and the book's subject is a house and a farm.

Wealth is what you can use

The conversation opens with a definition that most modern textbooks would not risk. Wealth, Socrates argues, is only what benefits its owner. A flute is wealth to a man who can play it. To a man who cannot, it is not wealth at all, unless he sells it.⁴ Money that you use badly is not wealth either. By this test a household's wealth is not what it holds but what it can do with what it holds.

Count the goods and write the list

The most practical passage is about stores. Ischomachus describes how he and his wife went through the house and put everything in its place. Then they counted the household goods, wrote the list down, and handed the list to a housekeeper chosen for her memory and self-control.⁵ The list was the control. Anyone could check the house against it.

That is an inventory, kept in writing, with a named person accountable for it. It is the oldest surviving description of household accounting, and it is two and a half thousand years old.

The master's eye

Xenophon has a phrase for what makes a farm thrive. It is "the master's eye".⁶ A bailiff can be taught the work, but what keeps him careful is that the owner looks. Ischomachus explains how he trains a bailiff to be loyal and careful, and then admits that the last thing, honesty, is the hardest. He teaches it with the laws of the city, which punish the dishonest, and with the practice of the Persian king, who rewards the honest.⁷ A bailiff who steals, he says, makes farming pointless.

The point is not that servants are thieves. It is that whoever handles your money will handle it better if they know you can see.

What happened to the book

Cicero translated it into Latin as a young man; he says so himself, and the translation is lost.⁸ A Roman writer on farming cited that Latin version.⁹ Fifteen centuries later a Florentine architect writing his own book on the family owned a Latin translation and drew on it.¹⁰ The book on running a house was read, copied and translated for two thousand years, by people who thought it was the foundation of the subject. It was.