Ancient Greek

Aristophanes

446–386 BC

“Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.”

Clouds, [828]

Aristophanes was the leading comic dramatist of classical Athens. His puts on stage a quarrel that philosophy and education never settle: whether cleverness in argument, once taught as a tool for hire, can leave the household and the city intact. Strepsiades sends his son to the Thinkery to cheat creditors and gets back a pupil who can justify beating his father. The play asks whether an art of speech cut free from the older training in custom and the gods is education at all. Plato's is, among other things, a long reply to that joke.

In the Conversation

3 of the Great Ideas

Epistemology

Rhetoric

The art of speaking may be taught as the power to make the worse argument appear the better, and when it is so taught, the ancient rhetoric of a city bound by its customs is displaced by a new rhetoric which defeats it not by better reasons but by the sheer novelty and cleverness of the arguments it can muster on any side.

Philosophy & Practical

Education

The new education, which promises to make a young man clever at argument, delivers a cleverness that is turned first against the creditor and then against the father, so that what was sought as a weapon for the household becomes the instrument of its destruction, and the comic poet can ask whether an education so constituted is an education at all.

Philosophy

Philosophy, as it appears to the ordinary citizen who has not been trained to it, is a suspicious occupation in which grown men investigate the motions of fleas and the phases of the moon, and teach the young how to make the worse argument appear the better, and it is the comic poet's office to put this appearance on the stage before the philosophers themselves have explained what they are doing.