The Clouds

What It's About

First performed in 423 BC, The Clouds is Aristophanes' comic assault on the new intellectual fashions sweeping Athens. Strepsiades, an old farmer drowning in debts run up by his horse-mad son, decides the solution is to enrol at Socrates' "Thinkery," a school where clever men teach students to win any argument, however dishonest. What follows is a string of absurd lessons, physical comedy, and escalating farce, as Strepsiades and then his son are drawn into a world of hair-splitting logic that turns morality on its head.

Key Concepts

The play is best known as a satire of Socrates, who is depicted (unfairly, by most accounts) as a Sophist — a paid teacher of rhetorical trickery rather than the moral philosopher of Plato's dialogues. Aristophanes uses the character to mock the broader Sophist movement's fondness for making "the worse argument appear the better," and to voice a conservative unease about how new education was eroding traditional respect for the gods, for parents, and for honest dealing. The play was later staged, in a somewhat different form, at the Dionysia of 423 BC, where it placed a disappointing third — a result Aristophanes complained about bitterly, revising the text afterward (the version that survives) for what he hoped would be a stronger reception, though it seems never to have been performed again in his lifetime.

About the Author

Aristophanes (c. 446 – c. 386 BC) was an Athenian comic playwright, the most celebrated writer of Old Comedy and the only one whose plays survive complete. He used the comic stage to lampoon the leading politicians, thinkers, and cultural trends of his day, often with pointed personal satire, and his work remains the primary surviving record of the Old Comedy tradition.

About This Edition

This is a 1912 translation by The Athenian Society.