In the Library
The Clouds
Aristophanes, 423 BCE
- Form
- Form Play
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by William James Hickie
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 15k words
£1.99
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About the book
An old Athenian farmer named Strepsiades cannot pay the debts his horse-mad son has run up, and enrolls the boy in the Thinkery of one Socrates, where students learn to make the worse argument defeat the better. Aristophanes staged this comedy in 423 BCE at the City Dionysia, finishing only third, and revised it bitterly afterward. The chorus of Clouds drifts in as the new gods of the sophists, bright and shifting and useless for swearing oaths upon, replacing the old Zeus the farmer still believes in. Socrates himself appears in a basket suspended above the stage, contemplating the sun, and the play ends with the Thinkery in flames. Plato thought the comedy helped kill his teacher, and the joke has not finished its work.