The Clouds

"It is. It’s the comic playwright Aristophanes. We have a lot of plays left by him from the middle-to-late fifth century BC. But the one I thought I’d share is The Clouds. It is a comedy and quite vulgar, which I love. The basic idea of the play is that there’s a middle aged man called Strepsiades, who’s up to his eyeballs in debt, seemingly because his son has horse fever. The son loves horses and horses are very expensive to keep. His debtors are crowding around his door and he has no way to pay them. So he’s heard of this bloke called Socrates, who runs the Phrontisterion, or the Thinkery. Yes, or Thinking Shop, perhaps. And Socrates, he’s heard, teaches these two arguments: the good or better argument and the bad or worse argument, otherwise known as the virtuous argument and the dodgy argument. Strepsiades wants to go and learn the dodgy argument. It’s the kind of argument where you can make it and it doesn’t really matter about facts. It doesn’t matter what’s true, but by using it to attack whoever’s on the other side of the argument, you’ll win. So the premise of the play seems evocative of our times in this post-truth world that we’re in. It’s still really relevant and interesting. It feels incredibly modern, not least because it sets up this big gulf between Strepsiades, who’s this self-confessed man from the country, who has been forced by his family to move to the city and didn’t really want to and wants a simple life. It’s a caricature of a rural bloke, as set against this effete, emaciated set of pasty elites who spend all day inside, with books, thinking about stuff and not really doing anything in particular. In any case, when Strepsiades shows up at the Thinkery he finds all the students there and Socrates and Chaerephon, his right hand man, doing all these seemingly fascinating but ultimately ridiculous experiments. So it’s simultaneously an indictment of philosophy and an indictment of spending all day inside, reading books. It doesn’t end well for Socrates. Ultimately The Thinkery burns down with Socrates and Ch inside it. But, at the same time, it’s a celebration of this dramatic literary form. It was performed in a festival context, at the City Dionysia. But, while being very literary—and you might think quite highfalutin as a result of that—there’s jokes about arses. Everyone on stage was wearing a big prosthetic penis, a big phallus. This is typical of not just The Clouds , but all of Athenian Old Comedy, which is technically the genre this fits into. That’s the really good thing about studying classical literature across many of the genres, that you don’t have to be highfalutin to have good knowledge. You can celebrate phenomenal versions of poetic form and learning and art but at the same time tell arse jokes. The classics are not these sanitised works of literature with a capital L. You can view them like that of course—and it’s wonderful to celebrate them in that way—but they shouldn’t be confined to some sort of reading elite. They’re for everyone. And there’s something in them for everyone. I suppose what it comes back to, for me, in terms of The Clouds and Aristophanes, and this particular genre of Greek literature, Greek drama, is that for us now, if we’re looking for a reason not to learn Greek what comes to mind is ‘Well you’re going to spend a significant amount of time locked away in this dark room, learning about this language of dead Mediterranean people, and how relevant is it to us? It seems disconnected. It’s very much not. It’s developed that reputation but it need not have it. And if you find yourself locked away in a room, it’s a wonderful way out. It’s not a pursuit which forces you to stay there. It’s something which gives you inspiration for what’s outside the room."

"Yes. This is a famous play by a great comic writer. It is funny in its own right; but it probably features in the Apology as one of the sources of the ‘old’ accusation against Socrates. In The Clouds Socrates is lampooned: he’s the comic figure who arrives in a basket, and is clearly a grubby old man, a chiseller and a cheat. The play is the story of Strepsiades, who is in debt because his son keeps spending his money on horses, and he hopes that Socrates can educate him so he can win his cases in court and get out of debt. It’s a domestic drama. But the Clouds is also a philosophical play. If you read it in some kind of relation to the things that Plato says in The Republic or the Phaedo , or the Apology , there are all sorts of philosophical moves in The Clouds that are familiar from other more serious passages in Plato. For example, the chorus (there were choruses in classical comedies, just as in tragedies) is a chorus of clouds. One of the lines that is pushed several times in the play by them is ‘We’re the clouds, we can explain anything that needs explaining: we explain thunder, lightning, the crops growing, and so on. Why do you need any other gods?’ And that kind of argument, which is a classic philosophical argument about ontological economy, is one that Plato himself uses in some places (in relation to his so-called theory of forms in the dialogue Parmenides), and Aristotle, subsequently, too – but it’s also, astonishingly, the argument that Aristophanes is making in the play, and not in the mouth of Socrates. “Read The Clouds and the Apology to get a snapshot of Athens at the end of the Fifth Century ” But The Clouds ’ claim for ontological parsimony, as one might say, is a ground for the formal accusation against Socrates, namely that he was encouraging the youth not to believe in the city’s gods. In the Apology Socrates complains that the Athenians’ minds have been contaminated by this very play, and he may have been right; but it is ironical that the damaging argument is not represented by Socrates at all, but by the playwright’s own chorus. The old slander is not too careful in its attribution. It’s extraordinary that we’ve got both works from two thousand five hundred years ago: both The Clouds , and the Apology which alludes to it. In the Apology Socrates suggests that this play has damaged his chances of getting a fair hearing in court, and there is the play – and you can see not only why it would have done so much harm, but also how deeply into the fabric of Greek thinking philosophical ideas had permeated. There’s even a bit at the end where the just argument and the unjust argument have a discussion with each other. It’s familiar to us, the sort of discussion you might get in a Platonic dialogue, in a philosophical text. It’s revealing, then, of the cultural reach of philosophy at the time, that this philosophy is included in a play that was clearly funny, with jokes about measuring the jump of a flea, plenty of scatological material, and some allusions to Persian slippers that I’ve never fully understood (clearly something rude, but I’ve no idea why). If you read The Clouds and the Apology side by side you get a snapshot of Athens at the end of the Fifth Century in the combination of something that was written at the time (Aristophanes’ text), and something that was written later looking backwards (Plato’s Apology). There you can see a great deal about what it would have been like to live in the terrifying ferment of Athens at that time with the Spartans at the gates any moment. Do we need to decide? There was a man who did some kind of talking to people in the street and was killed with hemlock in 399BC, that’s well attested. But the representations of Socrates are all representations: even Xenophon’s version, who is a rather dull, worthy bloke, doing worthy things. So I reject the question, I think. What you might think is that the explicit reference in the Apology to the representation of Socrates in The Clouds makes us see as we read (especially if we read the two texts side by side) that the Socrates of the Apology is a representation too, just as much as the Socrates of The Clouds . That makes us rethink how we treat representations of particular thinkers: whether the representation is supposed to give us a lens on some historical reality, or is doing something quite different. In both the Apology and The Clouds it’s doing something very different. That helps us understand what’s going on in the other books I’ve chosen too. They all represent a historical figure in ways that are not meant to be transparent to the historical figure, whatever that might be, but in ways that make us think about the representation itself, and its role in our understanding of Socrates’ question, ‘how best to live?’"