The Clouds

Fiction | Play | Adult | BCE

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-626

Lines 627-1130

Lines 1131-1511

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Old Versus New Values

At the heart of Aristophanes’s Clouds is the conflict between old and new values. Aristophanes uses his play to reflect upon and ridicule the growing tendency among intellectuals and sophists to challenge and subvert traditional Athenian and Greek values. The fictionalized figure of Socrates typifies ideas that were perpetuated by many fifth-century BCE intellectuals, who championed wrong arguments and so-called scientific discoveries. The foolish Strepsiades falls prey to these new ways before realizing that he was misled.

The contrast between new and old values rests on the idea that Athenians had begun to go astray in the second half of the fifth century BCE. Though Athens had had a glorious past, a new crop of intellectuals were questioning the old values of military discipline, piety, and self-restraint and replacing them with new values, such as an interest in the arts, scientific inquiry, florid oratory, and, in some cases, novel and subversive ideas about the gods.

When the play begins, Strepsiades wishes to take advantage of “New Education” to evade his debts: Since the sophists teach oratory and logic, Strepsiades hopes he can learn to argue his case so effectively that he can cheat his creditors. His goal highlights the danger posed by the new values, which do away with morality and even the gods. Socrates will convince Strepsiades that the traditional gods do not exist to punish wrongdoers. Wrong, the personified Argument championed by the Thinkery, will make the case that “there isn’t any such thing as Justice” (902).

In contrast to the new values represented by Socrates, the Thinkery, and Wrong, the old values of Athens are voiced in the play by Right, the second of the two personified Arguments housed in the Thinkery. It is Right who, in the words of the Chorus Leader, “fostered by your education / The glorious ancient virtues of our nation” (958-59). Right advocates for traditional values such as piety, honesty, and physical discipline. He lauds the positive benefits of this way of life, warning against the attitude adopted by those who follow the “new” values hailed by Wrong.

Though Right admits defeat, the Chorus praises him and the old ways he argues for, and looks back at the time he described as “a real Golden Age” (1029). At the play’s end, Strepsiades regrets his decision to follow the new values instead of the old when his son Pheidippides turns against him—though it’s unclear whether he actually learned anything from his experience.

The Importance of Education

Aristophanes’s Clouds explores the importance of receiving a good education. The Thinkery (or phrontisterion in Greek) represents the perversion of good education. Under the leadership of the unscrupulous, fictionalized Socrates, it teaches its students to subvert traditional values. At the Thinkery, “people […] try to prove that the sky is like a baking-pot all around us, and we’re charcoal inside it” (96-97), and here, for a fee, one can learn “how to win a case whether you’re in the right or not” (98-99). Perhaps worst of all, the type of education propagated by the Thinkery attacks the gods, and with them the very idea of justice and morality.

Good education is defined in contrast to the type of education offered by the Thinkery. The personified Right Argument acts as the chief spokesperson for the traditional “good” education—even though he ultimately “defects” to the side of Wrong and the “New Education.” In the education described by Right, one learns how to believe in the gods, obey the laws, and cultivate physical and mental health through strict discipline. If one does these things, says Right, “you’ll be healthy, you’ll be strong, and you’ll be sleek” (1011).

Those who prefer to follow the kind of education advocated by Wrong and the Thinkery—the kind associated with the “sophists” of the fifth century BCE—become impious, immoral, and even unhealthy and sickly. The students of the Thinkery are pale and feeble; Pheidippides likewise develops this “gorgeous complexion” when he completes his course of study at the Thinkery.

In contrast to Socrates and the Thinkery, the Clouds have provided an education of their own, one that is more in line with the traditional education described by Right. When Pheidippides, “corrupted” by his education at the Thinkery, convinces Strepsiades that he is justified in beating him, the Clouds explain that they deliberately misled him, finding him “to be in love with wickedness” (1459), and wishing to teach him “that it is right to fear the gods” (1461). This is precisely what a good education is supposed to teach: the importance of respecting the traditional gods and values.

While education is important, not everybody makes a good student. A lack of education is shown to be just as problematic as a bad one. The rustic and ignorant Strepsiades is doomed to his unscrupulous and incorrigible behavior by his lack of education and inability to learn. Strepsiades is put forward as the very model of a bad student, “a clueless stupid forgetful bumpkin” (629-30). Unable to understand or even remember Socrates’s lessons, he sends Pheidippides to the Thinkery in his place. At the end, it is unclear whether he has learned his lesson from the Clouds “that it is right to fear the gods” (1461). His destruction of the Thinkery is just as illegal and morally dubious as his earlier desire to cheat his creditors; this might lead some to think that he remains just as “in love with wickedness” at the end of the play as he was at the beginning (1459).

The Relationship Between the Gods and Morality

The Greeks gods are guarantors of justice and the universe’s moral order. This moral order is challenged by sophists such as Aristophanes’s Socrates, with dangerous and even catastrophic consequences. Socrates does not believe in the traditional gods, and therefore does not believe there are any beings that punish those who commit wrong. Socrates even laughs at Strepsiades when he suggests that Zeus strikes down those who commit perjury:

You stupid, antiquated relic! If Zeus strikes down perjurers, why hasn’t he burned up Simon, Cleonymus and Theorus? They’re perjurers if anyone is! Instead of which, he strikes his own temple, and the holy headland of Sunium, not to mention any number of his own sacred oak trees—or would you say they were guilty of perjury? (399-402).

This type of argument—later echoed by Wrong in his agon with Right—is dangerous because it encourages immoral behavior: If human beings are not punished for committing injustice, what is to prevent them from being unjust when it suits them?

The traditional gods “are no longer current” at the Thinkery (248), which instead invokes obscure—and ultimately impotent—deities such as “boundless Air,” “Ether bright,” or “Chaos, the Clouds and the Tongue” (424). Because such gods cannot guarantee the moral order, the world of Socrates becomes amoral, and one where anything goes: The personified Argument Wrong argues that “there isn’t any such thing as Justice” (902).

Such ideas are portrayed as particularly dangerous because they are so appealing. Socrates and Wrong are able to win over Strepsiades and Pheidippides, but also Right himself. Strepsiades, hardly a deep thinker, never seriously considers that his desire to cheat his creditors is problematic, particularly when Socrates tells him that gods do not exist to punish wrongdoers.

The Clouds push back against this teaching, revealing at the end of the play that they misled Strepsiades. The gods, we find, do exist after all to punish wrongdoers. If Strepsiades is “cast […] into misery” then so is Socrates, whose school is destroyed by the very rustic whom he led further into injustice and wickedness.

In the world of the play, the violent destruction of the Thinkery is portrayed as just—regardless of whether the man who carries out the destruction is behaving justly. For Socrates now finds himself punished, just as Strepsiades has been punished. As violent and dark as Socrates’s punishment is, it is precisely the kind of punishment meted out by the gods in traditional myths, such as those presented in tragedies. It may be the kind of punishment that the Clouds—as the masterminds behind the play and the self-professed agents of the traditional gods—had wanted for Socrates all along.