The Clouds

Overview

The Clouds is an Athenian comedy from 423 BCE, about ninety pages in translation, and it is filthy, fast and formally strict. Old Comedy has a fixed skeleton: a ridiculous idea, a hero who acts on it, a chorus, a formal debate called an agon, a passage where the chorus turns and addresses the audience in the poet’s own voice, and a run of scenes in which the idea plays out. Aristophanes fills that skeleton with a satire on the new higher education, and he puts Socrates at the head of it.

Two things to know before you start. First, the Socrates on stage is not the Socrates of Plato. He runs a school, charges fees, studies the heavens and the insides of insects, teaches rhetoric, and denies the gods, all of which the Platonic Socrates explicitly does not do. Aristophanes has taken the most recognisable intellectual in Athens and hung every fashionable doctrine on him. Whether that is slander or caricature with a point is the argument the play exists to start.

Second, the text we have is damaged in an unusual way. The Clouds placed third out of three at the City Dionysia in 423, which stung, and Aristophanes revised it some years later. Our manuscript is the revision, and it was probably never staged. The chorus’s address to the audience complains about the first version’s defeat, and the second agon has a seam in it where the revision shows.

What happens

Strepsiades cannot sleep. He is a farmer who married a woman from a grand family, and their son Pheidippides has run up enormous debts on racehorses. Lying awake doing arithmetic, he hits on a plan: next door is the Thinkery, where clever men teach an argument that can make the weaker case defeat the stronger. Learn that, and he can talk his creditors out of court.

He knocks. A student describes the school’s researches, which include measuring how many of its own feet a flea can jump and determining which end of a gnat produces its hum. Socrates appears overhead in a suspended basket, explaining that he must mingle his mind with the air to think about the heavens. He initiates Strepsiades, and the chorus of Clouds arrives, the school’s new divinities.

The lessons fail. Strepsiades is old, slow and interested only in the money, and Socrates throws him out. So Strepsiades hands over his son.

The centre of the play is the debate Pheidippides watches before enrolling. The Stronger Argument, who stands for the old education of gymnastics, poetry, modesty and cold baths, faces the Weaker Argument, who stands for the new one. The Stronger argument’s case is nostalgic and his examples keep sliding toward the erotic. The Weaker wins by pointing out that everyone in the audience, and most of the gods, behaves exactly as he recommends.

Pheidippides is trained, and it works immediately. Strepsiades sees off two creditors with logic-chopping about the calendar and interest. Then he throws a celebration dinner, asks his son to sing some Simonides, and is told that the old poets are rubbish. The argument escalates and Pheidippides beats him. Worse, when Strepsiades protests, his son proves that a father who beats a child for the child’s good may be beaten in turn by a son for the same reason, and then offers to prove the same about his mother.

Strepsiades turns on the Clouds and asks why they let him do it. They tell him they always lead a man who loves wicked things into ruin, so that he will learn to fear the gods. He takes a torch, climbs onto the roof of the Thinkery and burns it, chasing the students out while Socrates asks what he thinks he is doing.

How to read it

Read it out loud, or read a translation made for performance. Half the jokes are physical, the rhythm is doing a lot of work, and on the page a literal version can read as merely peculiar.

Read Plato’s Apology immediately before or after. The play’s charge sheet, natural philosophy, atheism, making the weaker argument the stronger, and corrupting the young, is almost word for word the reputation Socrates says he has to answer in court. Line the two up and decide for yourself whether Plato is defending his teacher against a libel or admitting that the libel had something in it.

Do not look for consistency in the stage Socrates. He is a natural scientist in one scene, a sophist in the next, a mystagogue in a third. That incoherence is the joke: Aristophanes is satirising a type, and the type is assembled from everyone.

Watch the Clouds themselves. They are goddesses who take any shape, they flatter whoever is talking, and they turn out at the end to have been testing him. They are the play’s own image of what a fashionable argument is.

The common misreading is that the ending is a call for violence against intellectuals. It is a comic conflagration in a genre where the hero always gets his way, and the Weaker Argument has already won the debate in front of the audience. What the play leaves you with is not a verdict but a father who wanted exactly this and is appalled to have got it.

Questions it raises

• Is the play attacking Socrates in particular, or using him as the most famous available face for something broader?
• The Weaker Argument wins his debate honestly, by pointing at the audience. Does the play have an answer to him, or only a fire?
• Strepsiades wants the education in order to cheat. Does the Thinkery corrupt him, or supply what he brought with him?
• The Clouds say they ruin those who love wicked things in order to teach them piety. Is that a moral to the play, or one more shapeless thing telling a man what he wants to hear?
• If you had seen this in 423 and sat on the jury in 399, what would you think you knew about the defendant?
• Comedy in Athens was licensed to say anything about anyone. Does that make the portrait harmless, or does a laugh do the work an accusation cannot?