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Aristophanes found the teachings of the sophists absurd, and his play Clouds caricatures them with a sharp, funny dive into chaos. It’s a little puzzling, because he has Socrates as the head sophist, and Socrates was most certainly not a sophist, nor a fan of them. The translator of the Bantam Classic edition, Moses Hadas, explains that Aristophanes may have done this because he found Socrates’s mannerisms and behavior amusing enough to throw into a play that pokes fun at philosophy. It could be that Aristophanes was also mocking philosophy more generally, with its “impractical” studies.
Strepsiades the pragmatic farmer has found himself with various debts, and wishes for his useless son to go learn sophistry in order to get him out of having to pay them. His son refuses to go, so Strepsiades goes instead. Here he finds Socrates and other teachers doing all sorts of things that didn’t appear useful to a man with practical interests: measuring the jumping distances of fleas, learning about the farts of gnats, and using made up logic to win arguments.
Socrates explains some things to Strepsiades about weather that appear blasphemous but that carry a surprising level of scientific sophistication given the age. This is taken as mere philosophers challenging traditions and conventions. The clouds, or the chorus, keep the play pumping forward and splitting open the drama in poetic charm.
Right logic and wrong logic debate their merits through a rapid-fire exchange of verse, Strepsiades’s son is eventually brought in, and the twisting, arbitrary logic of sophistry is used to justify the son beating his own father, as events get out of control. Aristophanes managed to caricature both learning and those skeptical of learning, while sprinkling his play with amusing references to bodily functions, sodomy, sex jokes, language peculiarities, cultural oddities and misunderstandings, whimsical reflections on the employment of sophist logic, and criticisms of social norms like debt and interest and public attitudes toward philosophy.
It’s an amusing play that, like others of Aristophanes’s works, points to a lot of similarity between the modern and ancient world. I’d really like to see this one performed. I can picture a comedy that gets more and more out of hand, held together only by its poetic chorus and well composed sense of the absurd.
Strepsiades the pragmatic farmer has found himself with various debts, and wishes for his useless son to go learn sophistry in order to get him out of having to pay them. His son refuses to go, so Strepsiades goes instead. Here he finds Socrates and other teachers doing all sorts of things that didn’t appear useful to a man with practical interests: measuring the jumping distances of fleas, learning about the farts of gnats, and using made up logic to win arguments.
Socrates explains some things to Strepsiades about weather that appear blasphemous but that carry a surprising level of scientific sophistication given the age. This is taken as mere philosophers challenging traditions and conventions. The clouds, or the chorus, keep the play pumping forward and splitting open the drama in poetic charm.
Right logic and wrong logic debate their merits through a rapid-fire exchange of verse, Strepsiades’s son is eventually brought in, and the twisting, arbitrary logic of sophistry is used to justify the son beating his own father, as events get out of control. Aristophanes managed to caricature both learning and those skeptical of learning, while sprinkling his play with amusing references to bodily functions, sodomy, sex jokes, language peculiarities, cultural oddities and misunderstandings, whimsical reflections on the employment of sophist logic, and criticisms of social norms like debt and interest and public attitudes toward philosophy.
It’s an amusing play that, like others of Aristophanes’s works, points to a lot of similarity between the modern and ancient world. I’d really like to see this one performed. I can picture a comedy that gets more and more out of hand, held together only by its poetic chorus and well composed sense of the absurd.
