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 627-1130Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 627-1130 Summary

Socrates comes back to the stage, exasperated. Invoking a pantheon of newfangled gods, he complains that he has never encountered “such a clueless stupid forgetful bumpkin” as Strepsiades (629-30). Hoping that a new approach may fare better, Socrates invites Strepsiades outside to lie in a bed. He tries unsuccessfully to teach him about weights and with the Chorus measures and grammar.

Socrates orders Strepsiades to lie in his bed beneath a blanket and instructs him in how to practice intellectual incubation, in which ideas arise spontaneously. Strepsiades complains that bedbugs are devouring him. With Socrates’s encouragement, Strepsiades thinks of some outlandish strategies to deal with his debts and litigation. His ideas are so ridiculous that Socrates loses patience and throws him out, declaring that he will not teach him anymore.

Strepsiades, distraught, asks the Clouds for advice. They suggest that he find somebody younger to take his place at the Thinkery and study with Socrates. Strepsiades determines to ask Pheidippides again to enroll at the Thinkery, saying that he will throw him out of his house if he does not obey.

Strepsiades leaves as the Clouds wish him luck and finds Pheidippides at home. After giving him a garbled version of some of the lessons he learned from Socrates, such as how Vortex has overthrown Zeus as supreme god and the grammatical word for a female fowl. Though Pheidippides is skeptical, he at last gives in to Strepsiades’s threats and accompanies him to the Thinkery. They meet Socrates, and Strepsiades asks him to make sure that Pheidippides learns from Wrong how to beat any argument, no matter how justified, in court.

The personified arguments, Right and Wrong, arrive on stage. Right declares that he will present “the case for justice” (902), while Wrong retorts that justice does not exist. The two exchange insults until the Chorus Leader intervenes as referee of the agon, or debate scene: Both Right and Wrong will present their case in turn, with Right explaining old-fashioned, traditional values and Wrong explaining the “New Education.”

Right speaks first. He explains how boys used to be educated in the past, how they were taught to be obedient, respectful, and pious. He urges Pheidippides to be modest and to honor his father, and Wrong calls him old-fashioned. He concludes by praising the benefits of following him and warning against the dangers of following Wrong.

After the Chorus praises Right’s words, Wrong makes his case. He engages Right in a kind of elenchus or cross-examination in which he uses spurious arguments, praising hot baths, spending time in the market, and other habits associated with the younger proponents of his “New Education.” Wrong gets Right to concede defeat when he points to the audience and shows that those who occupy the highest positions in Athens—and most of the people out there in the audience—come from a depraved class.

Right throws off his cloak and defects to Wrong’s side. Strepsiades entrusts Pheidippides to Wrong’s tutelage, who promises to turn him into a “top-class sophist” (1111). Strepsiades joyfully returns home as the Chorus warns him that he may come to regret his decision.

The Chorus speaks. They urge the audience to award them the first prize, promising that if they do, they will bless them with seasonal rains. If they are denied what they deserve and “if any mortal treats the Clouds of heaven with despite” (1121), they will send forth destructive weather, ruining crops, property, and celebrations.

Lines 627-1130 Analysis

Aristophanes’ Clouds, despite its somewhat unfinished state, exemplifies the narrative and metrical structure of Old Comedy. The play begins with a prologue scene in iambic trimeter. This is a poetic line consisting of three iambs, which are metrical feet that have one brief, unstressed syllable preceding one long, stressed syllable. The prologue introduces the main characters and conflicts of the play, and is followed by the parodos, or entry song of the Chorus. The parodos is in dactylic meter—a dactyl includes a long syllable followed by two short syllables. Next comes a scene that passes between anapest meter, where every third syllable is stressed, and iambic meter.

Following the parabasis, the play continues to adhere to the conventions of Old Comedy, though with some deviations that confirm that Aristophanes never completed his revision. The parabasis is followed by an episode in iambic trimeter. This is typical of a comedy of the period, except that the choral song at the end of the scene never materializes.

The agon between Right and Wrong, in anapestic and iambic meters, is a standard fixture of Old Comedy, but again there is a deviation. Staging conventions in the fifth century limited the number of actors with speaking parts to four. This is the reason that Socrates—rather artificially—excuses himself before the agon, which requires four speaking actors on stage: Right, Wrong, Strepsiades, and Pheidippides. The lack of a choral song means that the actor playing Socrates wouldn’t have had time to change costumes to assume the role of either Right or Wrong—an issue that would have needed to be resolved if Aristophanes had ever produced his revised Clouds.

The second parabasis that follows the agon is in iambic and trochaic meters, where a short syllable follows a long syllable. This parabasis is somewhat shorter than what is typical of Old Comedy.

The scenes that unfold between the first and second parabasis is crucial to the plot’s advancement. Socrates’s attempts to instruct Strepsiades are met with repeated failure: Strepsiades is not intelligent enough to understand Socrates’s lessons, simple and absurd as they are. He is also not smart enough to understand the trouble he is getting himself into by pursuing the “Wrong” argument—trouble that is increasingly foreshadowed in the scenes following the parabasis. After the debate between Right and Wrong, the Clouds warn Strepsiades that he may “regret” his goals. Through Strepsiades, the play explores The Importance of Education. Strepsiades’s poor choices arise from not having an education and being unable to learn.

The climactic agon, or debate, between Right and Wrong illustrates the foolishness of Strepsiades’s goals and how Socrates stands for the wrong values. Aristophanes personifies Right and Wrong, giving them human qualities.

Right represents the “right” argument, which upholds piety. Wrong represents New Education and the “wrong” or “weaker” argument.

Wrong wins the debate. This illustrates how, in Aristophanes’s day, sophists and philosophers went about making the wrong argument seem right. According to Plato’s Apology, this was exactly what the real Socrates was accused of during his trial in 399 BCE.

In the agon of Clouds, Right argues for old-fashioned, traditional values, taking as his models “the men who fought at Marathon” and their generation (987). The Battle of Marathon—fought in 490 BCE—was seen as the premiere example of Athenian military strength, virtue, and courage. Right speaks of justice and morality, ideas necessary for a society to function, while Wrong dismisses these values and endorses the pursuit of pleasure.

Wrong’s victory highlights why Wrong is dangerous: Wrong beats Right by pointing at the audience and forcing Right to admit that those who follow Wrong in forsaking justice and morality to pursue pleasure are far more numerous than the followers of Right. This shows how Wrong, as followed by the fictional Socrates and his ilk, has become an epidemic in contemporary Athens.

Aristophanes will not leave Wrong’s victory at that: Even as Pheidippides enters the Thinkery to begin his studies with Wrong, The Clouds—who have hailed Right as a “noble and glorious sage” (1026)—warn Strepsiades that he will regret his actions. The Clouds’ allegiance to Right rather than Wrong suggests just how much the Clouds diverge from Socrates and his school—a divergence that will prove key as the play approaches its denouement