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

Symbols & Motifs

Natural Imagery

Aristophanes’s Clouds is replete with natural imagery. The Chorus of Clouds—the play’s namesake—is the most obvious example. In their first choral song, or parodos, the Clouds describe themselves as “shining bright with radiant dew” as they survey the natural world around them, including mountains, earth, and rivers (276). In some ways, the Clouds resemble the nymphs and nature goddesses of Greek mythology, divine beings tied to the natural world.

The Clouds are only one part of a larger trend. Socrates’s other gods—gods that include “boundless Air” and “Ether bright”—are also drawn from nature. Socrates himself is presented first and foremost as a student of natural philosophy and meteorology, “walking upon air and attacking the mystery of the sun” (225). Zeus, the supreme god of the Greek pantheon, is reduced to natural phenomena such as the celestial vortex, which becomes, for the ignorant Strepsiades, a new god named “Vortex.”

Such imagery belies the power of the true gods to rule over nature. Socrates’s misguided attempts to understand nature without the gods proves fruitless and even disastrous in the world of the play).

Right and Wrong

The ideas of right and wrong are present from the play’s beginning to end but find their most concrete expression in the two personified Arguments, Right and Wrong. Aristophanes uses agon, or debate, to clearly spell out the difference between right and wrong: For Aristophanes, right means following traditional values such as piety and justice, while wrong involves the subversion of those values.

The traditional gods endorse right and see to it that justice is done. Someone who does not believe in the gods does not believe that they are punished for doing wrong; they believe they can do whatever they want, however immoral.

In the world of Aristophanes’s Clouds, a moral atheist is a contradiction. The sophists of the Thinkery are dangerous: Their amorality threatens to tear apart society. Right ultimately wins out (though Right himself loses his agon to Wrong) when Strepsiades is punished by the Clouds and subsequently punishes Socrates and the Thinkery; the gods do, indeed, endorse right and punish wrong.

Ritual and Initiation

The language and practices of religious ritual and initiation pervade the play. The Thinkery morphs into a cultic institution. Though the school rejects the traditional gods, it invents new gods of its own. The school’s initiation rituals closely resemble those of more traditional religion, including the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were rites held for the cults of Persephone and Demeter, two Greek goddesses, as well as those of other mystical philosophical schools, including the school of Pythagoras, which, like the Thinkery, was burned down.

To join the Thinkery, Strepsiades must undergo initiation rites, including donning a wreath of vegetation as he is sprinkled with flour, shedding his cloak and speaking with the Clouds. Socrates becomes a holy man or mystagogue, guiding Strepsiades through the ceremony and invoking his special gods.

The agon between Right and Wrong embodies the central mystery of the cultic Thinkery. In a perversion, this agon argues that the gods and justice do not exist. The sophists’ atheism is a religion in itself—though one whose gods are insubstantial and powerless, worshiped by men who have no morals or values.