A significant body of work on how Xenophon's Oeconomicus is a response to Aristophanes' Clouds has been written in recent decades , starting with Leo Strauss's enigmatic book on dialogue. And although much attention has been paid to the pronounced relationship between these two works, as well as its relationship to the treatises on the arts of Xenophon and his Hiero, the fertile Oeconomicus has many other fruits to bring us for a better understanding of the coherence of the work. dialogue with the thought of Xenophon. Xenophon presents much of his thinking in a way that requires readers to keep Plato's thinking constantly in mind, but also to strive diligently to discern Xenophon's voice. We can easily recognize the relationship between Xenophon's Apology of Socrates to the jury and Plato's Apology of Socrates and Xenophon's Symposium with Plato's Symposium, and recently it has been proposed that Xenophon's Education of Cyrus or a direct response to Plato's Republic exploring the serious difficulties that Xenophon had with the best regime1. We can therefore conclude that, in some sense, Xenophon's works are derivative. Declaring that a work is derivative is often synonymous with a mark of inferiority, of simple replication. However, audiences must seriously consider that a derivative cannot simply re-appropriate but attempt to respond to a master whom the imitator considers worthy of study. The imitator, if he takes the master seriously and is not content to be submissive to him, needs to master the limits of the original in order to be able to create his own work. We must therefore seriously consider reading Xenophon as a commentator on Plato, willing to shed light on the shadows. One study of Xenophon that has not been brought to light is this...... middle of paper.... ..takes place standing up because it is an unmentioned detail but also because it is a conversation very short. Ischomachus, however, is already seated in the colonnade when he and the young Socrates begin their discussion, suggesting the possibility of greater leisure for their long conversation (Oec. 7.1). Meanwhile, no framework is given for Socrates' public discussion with Critoboulus, but this does not seem important to Xenophon. The importance of the setting is that Xenophon and others are present and they can each engage for an extended period of time without interruption. This again requires us to take the location very seriously, and as the stoa was built on a specific date in memory of a crucial event and is a unique location for the corpus of Plato and Xenophon, we must consider the possibility that there is some meaning in the corpus of Plato and Xenophon. dramatic date of each dialogue.