The Clouds

Fiction | Play | Adult | BCE

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-626

Lines 627-1130

Lines 1131-1511

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Lines 1-626Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-313 Summary

The play, set in Athens, opens with two men sleeping in their beds. One is sleeping soundly, but the other tosses and turns until he sits up and speaks. In an introductory monologue, he identifies himself as Strepsiades. He explains that he can’t sleep because he is tormented by thoughts of the debts racked up by his son Pheidippides, the man sleeping in the bed next to his. Pheidippides’s passion for horses and horse racing, encouraged by his mother, threatens to bankrupt Strepsiades.

Strepsiades orders a slave to bring him his account books and reviews them disconsolately, grumbling animatedly about his wife and Pheidippides. He lights upon an idea to escape his debts and wakes up Pheidippides, asking him to do him a favor. Pheidippides promises to do so, and Strepsiades reveals what he wants: for Pheidippides to enroll in the Thinkery, a school where one can learn “to win a case whether you’re in the right or not” (98-99). This way, Pheidippides can learn how Strepsiades can avoid paying his debts.

Pheidippides is disgusted by the idea. No self-respecting young Athenian would become involved with the Thinkery and the heads of the school, Socrates and Chaerephon. Despite Strepsiades’s threats to cut him off, Pheidippides is not persuaded. He storms off.

Refusing to be deterred, Strepsiades decides to enroll in the Thinkery himself, even though he is “old and slow and forgetful” (129). He proceeds to the Thinkery and knocks on the door, receiving a not particularly warm welcome from a Student. Strepsiades explains that he wishes to enroll. The Student tells him about some of Socrates’s discoveries: a unit of measurement to determine the distance jumped by a flea, the source of a gnat’s buzzing, and a map of the known world (among other things).

Strepsiades finds Socrates, who is standing on a board or basket suspended high above. As Strepsiades questions him, Socrates explains that he is observing meteorological phenomena. Strepsiades asks to be enrolled at the Thinkery. He tells Socrates that he wants to become an orator so that he can avoid paying his debts. Socrates begins the initiation ceremony and introduces Strepsiades to the Clouds, the deities of the Thinkery, after dismissing the traditional gods.

The Clouds arrive and sing their entry song, the parodos. They can be heard singing in the distance before they enter, speaking of their journey from the ocean to the sky and the earth. Their words are accompanied by a peal of thunder that impresses Strepsiades. Approaching nearer, the Clouds praise Athens as the “loveliest land on earth” (300), describing its connection with gods such as Athena and Dionysus.

Lines 314-626 Summary

Strepsiades is inspired by the Clouds, who now appear in full view at the top of the auditorium. They have the faces of young women and wear cloudlike costumes—though what exactly these costumes would have looked like is unknown. The ensuing scene can be interpreted as a proagon, a conventional scene in Old Comedy that involves a preliminary contest or debate, and a setup for a more formal agon, or debate scene, later in the play.

In this proagon, Strepsiades questions Socrates on the gods and the order of the world, and Socrates responds with pseudo-philosophical or pseudo-meteorological explanations. Socrates explains the nature of the Clouds’ patronage. He explains the Clouds’ feminine appearance by referring to the tendency of clouds in the sky to take on various shapes.

The Chorus greets Socrates with a brief song as their “high priest of fine twaddle” (359). Socrates explains to Strepsiades that the Clouds are the only true gods, “proving” that it is they, not Zeus, who cause rain and thunder. Socrates claims that the celestial vortex causes the movements of the clouds and celestial bodies. This leads Strepsiades to conclude that a being called Vortex has overthrown Zeus as the supreme sky god.

The Clouds address Strepsiades and ask him what he wishes to learn. Strepsiades responds by telling them he wishes to become the best orator around so that he can cheat his creditors. The Chorus promises Strepsiades that he will achieve greatness in the future. After asking Strepsiades some questions to determine his aptitude—and finding the results unimpressive—Socrates leads his new student into the Thinkery.

The Clouds wish Strepsiades success in his endeavors. They remove their costumes and address the audience in the parabasis. The Chorus leader, speaking as Aristophanes, expresses disappointment in the Athenians, saying that he thought they would be intelligent enough to appreciate Clouds when it was staged. Instead, the play was defeated, and now Aristophanes is working on a revision to present to the Athenians.

The Clouds get back into character and continue singing, calling upon gods such as Zeus and Poseidon. They criticize the populist politician Cleon—one of Aristophanes’s favorite targets—and urge the Athenians to turn against him. They claim to have spoken with the moon, who is upset with the Athenians for their recent meddling with the calendar.

Lines 1-626 Analysis

Like most of Aristophanes’s surviving plays, Clouds is set in a contemporary fifth-century BCE Athens. Its main character, Strepsiades, is fictional, but some of the play’s supporting characters, particularly Socrates, are based on historical figures. The combination of contemporary setting with mostly fictional characters and plot characterize Old Comedy. In contrast, Attic Tragedy is usually set in the distant past and features heroes and gods enacting traditional myths.

The prologue of Clouds introduces us to Strepsiades, who like most of Aristophanes’s protagonists, represents the Athenian everyman. Strepsiades belongs to the landed middle class. He is not aristocratic and does not possess great wealth, but owns farmland and has at least one slave. Strepsiades’s relatively humble social standing does not prevent his son Pheidippides from developing extensive tastes. Pheidippides has a passion for horses, a pastime usually associated with the wealthy elites or the “Knights,” who in Greek were known as Hippes or “Horsemen” because they were able to afford horses. Horses were extremely expensive in antiquity. Yet Strepsiades is not so rich that he can easily afford Pheidippides’ upper-class tastes, and the play opens with him on the verge of bankruptcy.

Strepsiades, in seeking a way to cheat his creditors, is presented as unscrupulous. The Athenian legal system was a favorite target of Aristophanes, such as in his work Wasps. The Athenian legal system was notoriously fickle, and it wasn’t uncommon for a skilled speaker to convince the jury to support a dubious case. There were many skilled orators in Athens who accepted payment for writing legal speeches that plaintiffs or defendants used in the courtroom. Some of these orators were the so-called “sophists,” educated teachers who travelled through Greece giving costly lessons to elite young men, and who had by Aristophanes’s day acquired a reputation for challenging traditional values.

It is in this context that Aristophanes introduces his fictionalized version of Socrates. Through him, the play explores the theme of Old Versus New Values. Aristophanes’s Socrates, a highly-caricatured version of the historical Socrates, is a sophist, unlike the historical Socrates, who was known not to accept payment from his pupils. This fictionalized Socrates subverts the traditional pantheon and represents a dangerous attack on old-fashioned values. For instance, Socrates rejects the idea that Zeus punishes wrongdoers, which suggests that any behavior, however perverse, can be justified.

At the same time, Socrates’s school, the Thinkery, is represented in surprisingly-traditional terms. For example, its initiation ceremonies and incantations are highly ritualistic and reminiscent of traditional mystery cults, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The parodos of Clouds, where the Chorus first comes on stage, is unusual because the Chorus would have started singing before entering the stage. Some scholars have reflected that this may have made it difficult for the Athenian audience to hear the Chorus, contributing to the play’s defeat when it was first staged in competition. The elevated language of the Chorus is closer in some ways to the elevated diction of tragedy than to the less formal diction of comedy.

In contrast, the parabasis allows the Clouds to shed their disguise and address the audience in the playwright’s voice—a convention unique to Old Comedy. Here we learn that the play represents a revision of an earlier play that was defeated in competition when it was staged in 423 BCE.

The Clouds are obscure and challenging figures. On the one hand, Socrates presents them as an alternative to the traditional gods, whom he dismisses. Yet the Clouds appear to be suspiciously close to the traditional Greek gods. Like the traditional gods, the Clouds are anthropomorphic, meaning that they have human qualities. Strepsiades even questions Socrates about why the Clouds look so much like young women. The Clouds invoke traditional gods such as Zeus, Apollo, and Dionysus—in marked contrast to Socrates, whose deities include natural phenomena such as “boundless Air” and “Ether bright.”

As we will see more and more throughout the play, the allegiance of the Clouds lies much more with traditional gods and old-fashioned values than with the newfangled notions of the Thinkery. At the end of the play, the Clouds decisively turn their backs on Socrates. The tension between Socrates and the Clouds illustrates The Relationship Between the Gods and Morality. By challenging the gods, one will be punished catastrophically.