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Joshua Lellis Joshua Lellis October 12, 1999 Aristophanes’ The Clouds – An Atypical Example of Old Comedy The Clouds is not your typical Aristophanean Old Comedy play. There is no great ending feast, no clear hero, and no sense that all is right in the world at the end of the show. Aristophanes has many interesting agendas, many causes for which his play lobbies, even though the play itself, on the surface, appears to be a simple scam comedy. This is not the case. It is one of the beauties of his multifaceted play that there is more to everything than just the face value. He has written a play chastising villainous people, such as Strepsiades and Socrates, but also magnifying the stupidity of the other characters in the play, such as Pheidippides. He mocks all of the characters in his play. No one is immune, but, as is the case in Greek comedy, his satire is aimed toward a goal of awakening/enlightening the Athenian people. He is writing during the Peloponnesian war and he feels as though he must make the point in his play about the futility of war and the degradation of Greek culture because of war. In looking at the text of the play itself, much is said about ancient Greek culture and Aristophanes’ contemporaries, such as Socrates, Euripides, and Aeschylus. It also includes the some of the earliest allegorical characters in the theater, Right Logic and Wrong Logic. It is also the only example of old comedy which ends without a feast. It ends on a down note, without any real conclusion. In order to understand the greater meaning of The Clouds, it is necessary to first examine the plot and the structure of the play itself. The play opens with Strepsiades unable to sleep and cursing his son, Pheidippides, who is able to sleep quite peacefully. Strepsiades owes money to many creditors because of his son’s obsession with horses. Pheidippides is constantly thinking about horses, even in his sleep. These are the first two satirical characters Aristophanes introduces, the lower class father who wants to get out of his debts any way he can and the upper class son who is indifferent to the world. There is a definite disapproval in Aristophanes’ reckoning of Pheidippides’ character, because of his disrespectful attitude and his laziness. In order to avoid paying his debts, Strepsiades seeks out Socrates to teach him Right and Wrong Logic, the latter of which is supposed to allow an individual to win an argument no matter how immoral or horrifying the cause is. This is the happy idea of the play: the ability to avoid paying debts through a type of unjust argument. Socrates is unable to teach anything to Strepsiades, however, because Strepsiades is too old to remember anything. Socrates does manage to install a Greek pseudo-atheism, a belief in the Clouds rather than Zeus, into Strepsiades, but little else is retained from the old man’s lessons. Strepsiades convinces his son to go in his place and his son learns Right Logic and Wrong Logic. There is a feast and then Strepsiades refuses to pay his debts to two creditors. However, things take a turn for a worse when Pheidippides beats his father and is able to justify it by saying that his father beat him when he was little so that he could learn, so in turn Pheidippides should beat his father in his old age in order to teach his father a lesson. Strepsiades plan backfires and he finishes the play by burning down Socrates’ Think-shop, a sort of just revenge brought on by the gods, as he does it in the name of Zeus. On the surface, the play demolishes Socrates and all ancient philosophers as baboons who are stealing people’s money and telling them how to lie. Socrates is presented as a loon who measures how far a flea jumps by covering its feet in wax and then using the flea’s feet as a unit of measurement. He is seen as a nut with his head in the clouds, quite literally. He is obsessed with clouds in the play and has lost all the old Greek gods and customs. He is representative of the Greek man that Aristophanes is addressing his play to: intelligent, refined, but lost. He is an example Socrates the character is not the same person as Socrates the man. There are only three ancient sources on Socrates’ life: Plato’s dialogues (and then, only the early ones are closer to Socrates’ beliefs), Xenophon’s history, and Aristophanes’ The Clouds. On the surface it appears as though Xenophon and Plato were friends of Socrates and Aristophanes was not (Strauss, 3). Performing only a cursory read of The Clouds, one gets the sense as though Aristophanes believed that Socrates was an idiot and was corrupting the youth of Athens, which is, of course, ultimately what Socrates was put on trial and executed for. Strauss states that Aristophanes and Socrates may have been friends, though, because they are two of the three people awake at the end of a Platonic dialogue called the Banquet (5). It may be likely that Socrates is presented as the ultimate sophist because he is the most recognizable teacher in ancient Athens. It may have been some twisted form of praise. The other option presented by Strauss is that Socrates is presented in his youthful form, when he was still a natural philosopher and is concerned with geometry, astronomy, and biology rather than politics and right and wrong. The youthful Socrates is not misleading the populace as much as unsuccessfully searching for the right way of life. He questions the existence of the gods and of various ways of looking at nature. From this standpoint, Socrates comes out of The Clouds as a good person. The main question, then, in dealing with The Clouds is why the play does not end with a feast, like all of the other Aristophanean comedies. The Clouds shows the flux of Greek culture, the quotidian existence of the Greek people, and in doing so, shows the failure of the Greeks and their impending doom. The war is only mentioned in passing in the play, as though it were unimportant, but its existence is central to the understanding of the play. The play takes place in a time when virtue and goodness is being weighed against the ability to lie for money. It is a predecessor to later theater, especially the Neoclassical Ideal to please and to teach. Aristophanes warns of the easy route. The laziness of the Greeks leads to their downfall. Rather than working diligently, Strepsiades’ son lays about all day as a member of the upper Athenian class. Aristophanes foresees the problems between class division. The setup of the Greek theater itself is revealed in his writing. The place where the play is being performed must have two levels, one bottom floor and a higher floor, because Strepsiades sees Socrates on the roof of the Think-shop. The skene must also have at least two doors, one signifying the home of Strepsiades and the other signifying the Think-shop’s door. All of the characters are masked, including the chorus who are wearing something to signify their existence as clouds. According to the short introduction, during the first production the mask of Socrates the character was so similar to Socrates the person that “Socrates stood up in his seat to show the likeness” (Aristophanes, 101). The other revealing section is the pleading by the chorus to get first prize. The play in its original production at the City Dionysia in 423 B.C. won third place, or rather, last place (Sommerstein, 2). It is said that Aristophanes “regarded Clouds as his best play” (2). He is said to have been revising the edition which now exists as the standard, possibly in an attempt to perform it again. In a choral ode in between the episodes, Aristophanes writes “this [is] the best of my plays” (Aristophanes, 116). He then compares it to Electra and shows the works “purity”. The Clouds, therefore, is Aristophanes ideal of Old Comedy. It teaches the audience, makes the audience laugh, and most importantly, forces the audience to deal with issues at hand. He says there are “no appendage/of leathere, red-tipped and gross, to arouse adolescent/laughter” (117), i.e. no bawdy phallic attachments, “no jeering of baldheads or obscene dancing;/No pantaloon punctuating his lines by poking his neighbour/to cover bad jokes” (117). It is possible that Aristophanes continually revised his play as a labor of love, in an attempt to fashion the perfect comedy. Aristophanes’ The Clouds is not a typical example of Old Comedy. It is quite possibly the best example, in that it defies convention and makes a valuable point about what good theater/comedy is and about Greek society, but also because it still conforms to the Old Comedy standard. It proceeds from the prologue with a happy idea to the komos, though the feast is a one-line exit from the Chorus, completing its role in the play and exiting the stage. It is an incredible play by an ancient genius. Works Cited Aristophanes. The Clouds. Trans. Hadas, Moses. The Complete Plays of Aristophanes. New York: Bantam, 1988. Sommerstein, Alan. “Introductory Note to The Clouds”. Aristophanes: The Clouds. Warminster: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1991. Strauss, Leo. Socrates and Aristophanes. New York: Basic Books, 1966..
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