Greek Drama · Part 13 · Comedy · B1–B2
Aristophanes: The Clouds
Part 13 of Greek Drama: we turn to comedy and its greatest writer, Aristophanes. An old farmer drowning in his son’s horse-racing debts sends himself, and then his son, to the “Thinkery” of a strange philosopher called Socrates, who hangs in a basket in the air to think about the sun, and teaches people how to win any argument, right or wrong. Question forms, tag questions and indirect questions, sarcasm and irony, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Now we laugh. Aristophanes was the greatest comic poet of Athens, and nobody was safe from him: politicians, generals, poets, philosophers. Tonight his target is a real man who lived in Athens at the same time: Socrates, the philosopher.
Socrates? The wisest of the Greeks? Made into a joke?
A very big joke, Philo, hanging in a basket in the sky, measuring how far a flea can jump. Plato, Socrates’ student, later wrote that this play helped to turn the Athenians against him, years before his trial. Tonight we learn to ask questions, real ones and sarcastic ones, like Socrates, and like the people who mocked him.
Aristophanes (about 446–386 BCE) is the only writer of Athenian Old Comedy whose plays survive complete: eleven of about forty. Old Comedy was wild, political and full of fantasy, songs, insults and very rude jokes. Real people were mocked by name, sometimes while sitting in the audience.
In The Clouds, an old farmer, Strepsiades, is ruined by the debts of his son Pheidippides, who loves horse racing. He decides to enrol in the Thinkery, a school run by Socrates, where, he has heard, you can learn the “Weaker Argument”, which can make a bad case win. Socrates first appears hanging in a basket, explaining that he must be up in the air to think about the heavens. He worships the Clouds, who form the chorus. Strepsiades is…
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