CloudsAristophanes

Aristophanes produced Clouds at the City Dionysia in 423 BC. The surviving text is a later revision. The target is the new education associated with the sophists, and the figure who carries it is Socrates.

Strepsiades, an elderly farmer buried in debts run up by his horse-mad son Pheidippides, enrolls at the Thinkery to learn how to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger and so cheat his creditors. Socrates appears suspended in a basket, studying the heavens. The Clouds form the chorus as patron goddesses of empty talk. Strepsiades proves a hopeless pupil. He forces his son into the school instead. Right Argument and Wrong Argument debate; Wrong Argument wins. Pheidippides emerges pale, clever, and ready to argue that a son may beat his father. Strepsiades, ruined by the very skill he sought, leads a torch attack that burns the Thinkery down.

Plato's Apology has Socrates name this play among the sources of the prejudice that later helped condemn him. Clouds is the tradition's sharpest comic statement on education and rhetoric: what happens when the art of winning arguments is cut free from the question of what is true or just.