Why did Aristophanes write the Clouds?
Disclaimer: not a single word of this story has been written with AI.
Since over 2 years I have spent almost all my free time on philosophy, and now
I want to challenge myself to produce real essays. I have to learn everything,
from in-depth reading, to analysis, and mostly writing.
I believe especially in this era where AI threatens to make all of us dumber,
it is very important to go back to thinking. Critically. Independently.
Provocatively. Not chase dumb clicks, rather have the courage to do and say
unpopular things.
Who better to start from than Socrates, and one of his intellectual enemies
like Aristophanes for that matter too. Aristophanes wrote the Clouds in 423 BCE. There he presents a picture of an Athenian society undergoing a cultural revolution, with social tensions between those who mourn a glorious past built by people educated according to traditional values and those in favor of the new cultural wave of philosophers and sophists with a dangerous and uncertain future looming ahead if young people follow them.
The Plot of the Play
Strepsiades — father of Pheidippides — is full of debts he can’t repay, due to his son’s and wife’s lavish lifestyle. Instead of thinking how to pay the debts back, he has heard that an academy of new intellectuals led by Socrates — the Thinkery — can teach how to win any argument. Anticipating he will soon have to defend himself from creditors in court, he forces his son to enroll in it and learn the skill of rhetoric. There Pheidippides is presented with two arguments: Right, standing for traditional values and seeking justice, and Wrong, representing new ideas from philosophy and seeking victory. Wrong wins the debate and becomes Pheidippides’s teacher. Not only does he learn how to get his father out of debts, he also beats him over a quibble and uses his newly acquired rhetoric skills to justify it.
All along we discover that the Clouds — the new gods taught in the Thinkery — who have been directing the debate between Right and Wrong, have been plotting deceitfully against Strepsiades, meaning to teach him a lesson of the consequences of his dishonest and cunning plan to avoid paying debts.
The play ends with Strepsiades regretting his decision, pleading traditional gods to forgive him, trying to “uncorrupt” his son, and seeking revenge on the Thinkery by burning it down.
The Broader Discussion around Culture and Education
In 423 BCE old values from a traditional Homeric education were collapsing under two forces: war, and philosophy.
After 8 years of fighting against Sparta, as Thucydides explains in his History of the Peloponnesian War (Corcyra 3.82–83), tensions from civil war were producing an inversion in the meaning of traditional values — reckless daring was called courage, prudent hesitation became cowardice, and moderation turned into unmanliness — and people needed a new ethical and moral vocabulary to mediate social relationships.
Philosophers too were exposing flaws of traditional values, exposing poets like Homer and Hesiod for creating gods and heroes that were corrupt, thieves, adulterers, and liars, certainly not examples for young citizens to follow.
Xenophanes — F6 (DK 2IBII; KRS 166)
“Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods
Everything that men find shameful and reprehensible –
Stealing, adultery, and deceiving one another.”
A new cultural wave was gaining traction fueled by new ideas and methods from philosophers and sophists, but Aristophanes in the Clouds is trying to warn against the danger they represent for the future of Athens.
The Superior Argument vs the Inferior Argument Speeches
Aristophanes wants the audience to compare traditional and new values directly, and uses the traditional comedy format to stage an open debate (agon) between traditions and new ideas.
In the debate Right (also translated as The Superior Argument) presents the traditional values: youth must learn restraint, moderation, and discipline. They must not become effeminate. They must train their body and take good care of it so they become healthy, strong, and sleek. These were the values of the Athenian warriors when they defeated the Persians at Marathon in 490 BCE
“That’s the sort of discipline that I used to rear the men who fought at Marathon”
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And the Clouds close underlying that these were the values that created “the real” Golden Age
“How we envy the happiness of those whom you taught –
They lived in a real Golden Age!”
If these values guaranteed Athens security and wealth, it is easy to see how anything new is a risk. Can new values give Athens more security and more wealth?
Next Wrong (also translated as the Inferior Argument) responds by rejecting traditional values; instead he wants young men to enjoy life, have sex, food, drink, and fun. He is aware that this will lead them into vices, for example adultery, therefore they need to learn to get out of trouble with words when it happens, hence the art of rhetoric and debate is key.
What did Aristophanes actually fear?
The reply of Wrong is rather superficial — maybe intentionally for the sake of Comedy — but we can try to broaden the perspective and understand what were the real risks that Aristophanes saw.
New ideas were being generated by philosophers and sophists. Philosophers, mostly presocratics at the time of writing of The Clouds, can be considered proto-scientists. They started to be curious about nature and natural phenomena, and sought to understand how they worked without recurring to traditional gods. From explaining what the universe was made of, and how it worked, to more practical things like meteorological phenomena that directly influenced the life of people. They described natural phenomena as some kind of impersonal gods. In the play Socrates tells Strepsiades that The Clouds are the new gods, no longer Zeus.
These had two consequences on everyday life of real people: first it can create insecurity and anxiety. A farmer who needed rain for their harvest knew how to relate to Zeus: he would make sacrifices of food, because an anthropomorphized god needs to eat and drink like him, but what can the farmer sacrifice to Clouds?
Second, if Zeus is no longer in charge of rain, does it mean people will start sacrificing less to him? Many people in Athens still believed their life depended on the gods, and feared that they would be punished if they, or their community, sacrificed less to them, maybe through famine, drought, or a defeat in war.
Aristophanes is also concerned that this new body of knowledge is useless; what good does it bring to learn that the fundamental matter of the universe is water, air, or apeiron? Useless but appealing, because it makes people sound smart and refined, and in fact many prefer to spend time at the market discussing about them instead of going to the gym to train their body. If the trend continues, who will fight for Athens, when it needs it like it did in Marathon?
The sophists also represented a risk, because they were teaching people the art of rhetoric, the ability to win an argument even when they should’ve lost because they were wrong. If people can get away with whatever they do, because they can talk their way out of it, they will stop obeying the law, and what would happen to Athens? Pheidippides is a perfect example of this: before going to the Thinkery he doubts his father has gone mad, for even thinking that he could learn anything valuable there, but he would never dare act on this belief. After the academy he beats his father in a quarrel over a new poet Euripides and he can justify his behavior saying that he is trying to improve him, just like his father did when he was young for the same reasons. If it was right then, why isn’t it right now for the son to do it for the benefit of his old father?
What values for Athens, and who should educate its citizens?
In the play Aristophanes depicts a picture of some decadence of Athenian society. He hints at the fact that people should go back to traditional education but he doesn’t introduce a class of citizens who represent these values.
There is almost a sense that the Athenian society is in a critical transitional moment, without a strong lead, that is powerful enough to enact change, and good; we can almost imagine Aristophanes asking ”what should we stand for, and who should educate new generations and form the new citizens?”, but not providing an answer in his play.
What were other intellectuals thinking?
What were the consequences of Aristophanes’s play and how did Athenian society evolve after 423? The discussion will continue and pick up even more steam over the next few decades, with many trying to claim the role of the new educators. Among these philosophers and historians were particularly active: Plato will suggest making philosophers the new educators in his Republic to teach truth, Aristotle will assign this responsibility to craft citizens characters to institutions in his Politics. Even Thucydides, we can infer from his work, seems to be interested in founding a new political science to learn about real human nature with a goal at creating better societies.
This new education will reject old Homeric values, but also sophists. They will try instead to introduce a new system of values derived from a systematic pursuit of the truth, but they will have to come to terms with the consequences of this massive shift. Socrates among all will be brought to court in 399 BCE on claims of impiety and corruption of the youth, and fears that the jury called to adjudicate his case will be biased by prejudices created by Aristophanes’ play and therefore more inclined to condemn him. Whether this actually played any role in his actual sentence to death we can’t know for sure though. stemming directly out of the public opinion created by Aristophanes with his play The Clouds, and will ultimately have to pay for his life for this.
