How Xenophon’s Oeconomicus is a Response to Aristophanes’ Clouds

A significant body of work regarding how Xenophon’s Oeconomicus is a response to Aristophanes’ Clouds has been written in the last few decades, beginning with Leo Strauss’s enigmatic book on the dialogue. And while great consideration has gone into the pronounced relationship between these two works, as well as its relation to Xenophon’s treatises on the arts and his Hiero, the fertile Oeconomicus has many more fruits to yield for us regarding a greater understanding of the coherence of the dialogue to Xenophon’s thought.

Xenophon presents much of his thought in a manner that requires readers to constantly keep in mind Plato’s thought but also diligently strive to discern Xenophon’s voice. We can easily recognize the relation of Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates to the Jury to Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Xenophon’s Symposium to Plato’s Symposium, and recently it has been proposed that Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus is a direct response to Plato’s Republic exploring grave difficulties Xenophon has with the best regime.1 We may thus gather that, in some sense, Xenophon’s works are derivative. To declare a work to be a derivative is often synonymous with a mark of inferiority, merely replication. However, an audience must seriously consider that a derivative may not merely re-appropriating but attempting to reply to a master who the imitator considers worth studying. The imitator, if they take the master seriously and not be merely subservient to them, requires a mastery of the confines of the original so they can create their own work. So we must consider with great seriousness reading Xenophon as a commentator on Plato, one willing to bring to light the shadows.

A study of Xenophon’s which has not been brought to light is that...

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...takes place while standing since it is an unmentioned detail but also because it is such a short conversation. Ischomachus, however, is already seated in the colonnade when he and the young Socrates initiate their discussion, suggesting the possibility of greater leisure for their lengthy conversation (Oec. 7.1).

Meanwhile, no setting is given for Socrates’ public discussion with Critoboulus, but it doesn’t seem important to Xenophon. The importance of setting is that Xenophon and others are present and they can each engage for an extended period uninterrupted. This again forces us to take the location quite seriously, and also as the stoa was constructed at a specific date in memorial of a crucial event and is a unique location to Plato’s and Xenophon’s corpus we must consider the possibility that there is some significance in the dramatic date of each dialogue.