Readers drawn to Leo Strauss have good reason to pay close attention to two books that by themselves might seem to have little to recommend them, as distant as they seem from the customary issues of intellectual life today (they are commentaries on Xenophon), and as superficial as they at first seem (they appear more like mere paraphrase than anything else Strauss wrote). But Strauss said in a letter to Gershom Scholem a year before he died that “my two books on Xenophon's Socrates… are not the last thing I have written, but I believe they are the best” (Strauss 2001, 764-765). Within his best two books, in his Preface to the second, Xenophon's Socrates, Strauss singled out the first, Xenophon's Socratic Discourse, as the more important: he wrote and published his interpretation of the Oeconomicus first, he said, “because that work is, it seems to me, the most revealing and at the same time the most misunderstood of Xenophon's Socratic writings.”

Xenophon narrates his Oeconomicus after uttering a single sentence of his own, its first: “I once heard him discourse on the management of the household as well, in about these words.” After that he relates only the words of Socrates or Kritoboulos except for “Socrates said,” “Kritoboulos said,” and the like. Xenophon's sole sentence implies his presence in the audience for the conversation he narrates.