The Clouds

Fiction | Play | Adult | BCE

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-626

Lines 627-1130

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Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Literary Context: Aristophanes’s Clouds and Athenian Old Comedy

The text of Aristophanes’s Clouds that has come down to us does not represent the play as it was originally performed. It is a revision—and an incomplete one at that. When Aristophanes first staged Clouds in 423 BCE, the play was awarded third place in its festival. This upset Aristophanes, who regarded Clouds as his most clever play. He resolved to produce a revised version of the play to set things right—Aristophanes himself tells us all this in the parabasis of the current Clouds. This second, revised version of Clouds is sometimes known as Clouds II to distinguish it from the original version of the play, known as Clouds I.

Clouds II was never performed, and there are signs that Aristophanes never completed the revision. For example, the revision departs at several points from the norms and conventions of Athenian “Old Comedy.” The term “Old Comedy” refers to the type of comedies produced in Athens during the fifth century BCE. Its most important proponents were the playwrights Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes. Of these, we now can read only Aristophanes—the works of Cratinus and Eupolis are known only from scanty fragments. In fact, almost everything we know about the structure of Old Comedy comes from the surviving plays of Aristophanes.

The main divisions of Old Comedy were usually the following:

Prologue: A scene in which the characters introduce the subject and the main elements of the plot.

Parodos: The entrance of the Chorus and the first choral song (as in Tragedy).

Agon: A formal debate, typically divided into nine parts, and sometimes anticipated by a preliminary debate or conflict known as the Proagon.

Parabasis: A convention unique to Old Comedy, in which the Chorus addresses the audience in the voice of the playwright; this is typically divided into seven parts.

Episodes: Several scenes exhibiting the hero’s success or the consequences of the Agon.

Exodus: The conclusion of the play, often involving a scene of revelry and celebration called the Komos in Greek.

Aristophanes’s Clouds II generally adheres to this structure, though there are some important irregularities. For instance, choral songs are missing at some points where we would expect them, as at the end of one of the episodes at line 888. The play also ends very abruptly, without a real conclusion or a concluding choral song marking the exodus. Perhaps most glaring of all, the agon (debate) between Right and Wrong involves five actors; in Old Comedy, only four speaking actors could be on stage at the same time, with most scenes involving no more than three.

Scholars usually conclude, based on internal evidence, that Aristophanes abandoned his revision between 419 and 416 BCE. However, the play still circulated in print, and today it is the only version of Clouds that survives. Clouds I, the original play, has been lost, and only a few fragments of it remain.

Authorial Context: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Ideas

Aristophanes was an Athenian comic poet who lived between roughly 446 and 386 BCE. His works are the main surviving examples of the type of drama known as “Old Comedy.” He wrote some 40 plays, 11 of which have survived and can be read today. Only fragments of works by other Old Comedy authors—including Aristophanes’s main rivals, Cratinus and Eupolis—have survived, and so almost everything known today about Old Comedy is based on the works of Aristophanes.

Aristophanes’s plays are marked by their championing of traditional values or beliefs. Aristophanes, who often addressed his audience through his plays, evidently took great pride in the sophistication of his works, his adoption of themes from tragedy, and his biting social and political criticism. Throughout his career, Aristophanes used his works to attack various contemporary figures, perhaps most notably the populist politician Cleon.

Aristophanes’s Clouds is our main surviving example of the ancient “comedy of ideas,” a type of comedy focusing on philosophers and philosophical ideas that became increasingly popular in Athens by the end of the fifth century BCE. One of Aristophanes’s early plays, the Daitales (“Banqueters) of 427 BCE, explored changes in the period’s educational practices. Teachers known as “sophists,” who offered lessons in philosophy, rhetoric, and mathematics, became increasingly popular in Athens while earning a reputation for challenging and even subverting traditional values and public religion.

Other contemporary poets produced comedies on similar themes. One of the comedies that competed with Aristophanes’s Clouds in 423 BCE—Ameipsias’s Connus—also seems to have satirized Socrates. The play, which won second prize the year it was performed, is known today only from fragments. In 421 BCE, Socrates may have again been featured in a comedy, this time in Eupolis’s Kolakes (“Flatterers”), in which he was likely one of the sophists on whom the rich Callias was wasting his money.

Though the themes explored in Aristophanes’s Clouds are not unique, the play stands out within Aristophanes’s oeuvre. Most of Aristophanes’s comedies from this period revolved around the Peloponnesian War and the desire to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Clouds illustrates both the Athenian “comedy of ideas” and the scope of Aristophanes’s preoccupations at a time of social and cultural upheaval in Athens.

Historical Context: Socrates and Greek Philosophy

Perhaps the chief reason for Clouds’s notoriety is its portrayal of Socrates. Socrates was a historical philosopher and a contemporary of the playwright Aristophanes, who lived from roughly 470 BCE to 399 BCE, when he was executed for impiety and corrupting youth. Though he has become one of the most important philosophers of the Western tradition, Socrates never wrote anything himself. Our main sources for his life and ideas come from the works of his contemporaries, acquaintances, and students, the most important being Aristophanes and the Greek philosophers Plato and Xenophon.

The portrait of Socrates cobbled together from these three men is not always consistent; the Socrates of Aristophanes’s Clouds is a very different person from the philosopher known from the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Plato—whose version of Socrates has probably become the most prevalent—presents his teacher as an almost heroic sage, daring to question everything, even when it led to his execution. Xenophon, who also studied with Socrates, depicts the man as more conventionally pious.

Aristophanes’s portrayal of Socrates has some things in common with the accounts of Plato and Xenophon, but it is usually regarded as a caricature. By all accounts, Socrates was conventionally unattractive (bald, snub-nosed, and pot-bellied). Aristophanes takes advantage of Socrates’s appearance in his play and mentions Socrates’s tendency to walk about barefoot. Aristophanes also presents Socrates as taking payment for his lessons in the fashion of the sophists, which was something that Socrates famously did not do. Aristophanes makes Socrates into a natural philosopher when all the evidence suggests that Socrates emphatically spurned natural philosophy, or the study of the physical universe and nature, in favor of ethical philosophy, or the study of what is right and wrong.

Aristophanes’s caricature of Socrates proved dangerous. In his Apology, Plato presents Aristophanes’s Clouds as helping to turn the Athenian public against Socrates. Aristophanes combines aspects of the historical Socrates with the practices and teachings of the sophists, elite teachers known to challenge conventional values and regarded by much of the Athenian public as dangerous. Aristophanes uses his sophistic Socrates to expose the dangers of intellectualism and the importance of accepting the old ways. To what extent Plato’s portrait of Socrates is any more accurate than Aristophanes’s cannot be known.