Aristophanes: Clouds
Questions
• What is Aristophanes’ conception of Socrates?
• What is the plot of Clouds?
• Who are the main characters?
– Strepsiades (father, “twist and turn, to cheat”)
– Pheidippedes (son, “thrifty horseman”)
– Socrates
– Clouds
How is Socrates like a natural
philosopher (pre-Socratics)?
• Reason can unravel
nature.
• Entomology
• Ass-tronomy
• Geometrical maps
• Atheist? Zeus thunders?
No, clouds.
• He denies Zeus and
believes in the Vortex.
How is Socrates like the Sophists?
• Sophists: paid teachers of rhetoric; the first
professors?
• Relativists: Protagoras said “Man is the measure
of all things”
• They were thought to undermine traditional
morals by making the weaker argument the
stronger.
• Socrates shows a concern with etymology and
grammar, e.g., “fowless,” “trough-ena.”
• There is also the implication that Socrates
practiced asceticism (practice of rigorous
self-denial to reach a higher spiritual
realm).
What is the significance of the
Clouds?
• “Our daimons,” “goddesses,” who provide us
with “our intelligence, our dialectic, our reason,
our fantasy and all our argumentative talents”
(pp. 86-87).
• Ours gods are “Chaos, the Clouds, and the
tongue” (p. 91).
• Boundless and Formless, but they can resemble
many shapes.
• They’re all hot air.
Would the real Socrates please
stand up?
• Socrates didn’t do science.
• He didn’t take pay, so he
wasn’t a sophist.
• But Aristophanes’ character is
poor, argumentative, impious,
and corrupting. Close enough?
• Both a caricature and the real
guy.
Right (Just Speech)
• Back in my day . . .
• Traditional Education: music and
gymnastics
• Moderation
• Hate the marketplace and avoid the baths
• Boys were tough, fit, and . ..
• Didn’t flash us with their lovely young
manflesh.
Wrong (Unjust Speech)
• You old fogy!
• Hercules and the baths & Nestor and the
marketplace (both respectable men)
• Excess is best! Nothing good comes from
moderation.
• Zeus & adultery
• A-holes, all of them!
Strepsiades and the Creditors
• Earlier “intellectual abstractional” solutions
included a Thessalian witch, a glass lens,
and a hanging.
• The old and the new argument
• No repayment or interest either
The return of Pheidippides
• Justifies father-beating: for your own
good, second childhood, the subjectivity of
law & custom, chickens.
• Chickens eat their dung, too, but never
mind.
• Burning down the house…
Aristophanes’ case against Socrates
• Socrates in the play is close enough to the real
guy to count.
• Comedy is not just fun, although everyone in a
comedy must be funny, Just Speech included.
• Socrates refutes traditional morality, but doesn’t
replace it with anything solid.
• How are we to conceive of Socrates? Whose
Socrates do you favor, Plato’s or Aristophanes’?
What is the significance of these two
conceptions?