Thus far we have stressed what has been called the Socratic “turn” or “revolution”—Socrates’s break with the scientist-philosophers before him which took the form of a new and more serious interest in moral and political concerns. That decisive break was occasioned by Socrates’s recognition of a problem pointed to in the Clouds: that he could not in fact give a convincing account of the cause of things in terms of natural necessity, an inability that means the orthodox religious account of those things might well have been correct. To salvage the possibility of philosophy, then, Socrates embarked on what he called his “second sailing.” In studying Xenophon’s Socratic writings, we of course must look for evidence of both the difficulty Socrates once encountered and his strategy to overcome it. The single most important writing in this respect is the Oeconomicus (or Skilled Household Manager), Xenophon’s account of the fateful day when Socrates began his intensive examination of moral op