The satire in this, one of the best-known of Aristophanes’s comedies, is directed against the new schools of philosophy which had been lately developed in Athens, and which reckoned among their disciples not only the more intellectual of the rising generation, but also a good many idle young men of the richer classes, who were attracted by the novelty of the tenets which were there propounded, the eloquence of the teachers, and the richness of illustration and brilliant repartee which were remarkable features in their method. There were several reasons which would make this new learning unpopular, whatever its real merits might have been. These men controverted popular opinions, and assumed to know more than other people—which was an offence to the dignity of the great Athenian commons. The lecturers themselves were nearly all of them foreigners—Thrasymachus from Chalcedon, Gorgias from Leontini in Sicily, Protagoras from Abdera in Thrace. These, with many others of less note, had brought their talents to Athens as the great intellectual mart, where such ware was understood, and was sure to find its price, both in renown and in the grosser and more literal sense. Besides, they sneered (so it was said) at the national religion; and the national religion, especially to the lower ranks of citizens, meant holidays, and public feasts, and processions, and a good deal of licence and privilege which was very much valued. There were reasons, too, why the poet himself should be very willing to exercise his wit at the expense of the philosophers: to his conservative mind these outlandish teachers, with their wild speculations and doctrine of free thought, and generally aggressive attitude towards the established order of things, were especially objectionable.

The term “Sophist,” though in its original and wider sense it was applied to the professors of philosophy generally, had come to mean, in the popular language of Athens, those who, for pay, undertook to teach a method of rhetoric and argument by which a man might prove anything whatever. It is against these public lecturers, who either taught or were commonly believed to teach this perversion of the great science of dialectics, that Aristophanes brings the whole weight of his biting humour to bear in ‘The Clouds.’ This is no place to inquire how far the accusation brought against them was or was not a fair one, or whether that abuse of their powers which was the disgrace of a few may not have been attributed by unjust clamour to a whole class of public teachers in which they were but the exceptions. It is possible to believe not only, with Mr Grote, that the Sophists “bear the penalty of their name in its modern sense,” but also that in their own day they bore the penalty of superior ability and intelligence in becoming the objects of dislike, and therefore of misrepresentation, and yet to understand how they may have afforded very fair material for the professional satirist. The art of public speaking, which these professors taught, is a powerful engine, which in unscrupulous hands may do as much to mislead as to instruct. That the love of disputation and the consciousness of power will tempt a clever man to maintain a paradox, and discomfit an opponent by what he knows to be a fallacy—that a keen intellect will delight in questioning an established belief—and that the shallow self-sufficiency of younger disciples will push any doctrine to its wildest extremes,—are moral facts for whose confirmation we have no need to go to ancient history. And we are not to suppose that either the poet or his audience intended the fun of the piece to be taken as serious evidence either of the opinions or the practice of any school whatever.

But the question which has, with much more reason, exercised the ingenuity of able critics, is the choice which Aristophanes has made of Socrates as the representative of this sophistical philosophy, and his motive in holding him up to ridicule, as he here does, by name. For Socrates, it is generally allowed, was the opponent of these Sophists, or at least of those objectionable doctrines which they were said to teach. But there were some very important points—and those such as would come most under public observation—in which he, as a philosophical teacher, bore a broad resemblance to them. The whole character of this new intellectual movement in Greece was negative and critical, professing to aim rather at detecting error than establishing certainty. To this the method of Socrates formed no exception. His favourite assertion, that he himself knew nothing for certain, expressed this in the strongest form. And if the reproach brought against the Sophists was that they loved argument too much for argument’s sake, and thought more of confounding an opponent than of demonstrating a truth, we have only to read some of the dialogues in which Socrates bears a part, as we have them recorded by his friends and pupils, to see that he at least supplied abundant ground to an ordinary hearer to say the same of him. He could scarcely have realised to the public of his own day the definition which Schiller gives of the true philosopher—“One who loves truth better than his system.” Xenophon tells us that in argument he did what he liked with his opponents; and Plato has compared him to the mythical giant AntÆus, who insisted that every stranger whom he met should try a fall with him.

It is of the very essence, again, of caricature to take gravity and wisdom for its subject. And caricature on the Athenian stage knew no limits in this. Nothing was sacred for the comic dramatist and his Chorus. The national gods, the great religious mysteries, the mighty Athenian people itself, were all made to put on the comic mask, and figure in the wild procession. Why should the philosophers escape? The higher the ground upon which Socrates stood, the more tempting mark did he present. Lucian understood perfectly the kind of taste to which a writer of comedy must appeal at Athens, when, in his own defence for having made sport of the philosophers, he says: “For such is the temper of the multitude, they delight in listening to banter and abuse, especially when what is solemn and dignified is made the subject of it.”[27]

But besides this, the author who was to write a new burlesque for the Athenians, and had resolved to take as his theme these modern vagaries of speculative philosophy, wanted a central figure for his piece. So in ‘The Acharnians’ he takes Lamachus, a well-known general of the day, to represent the passion for war which he there holds up to ridicule, and dresses him up with gorgon-faced shield and tremendous crest, in parody of military splendour: though we have no reason whatever to suppose that he had any private grudge against the man, or that Lamachus was more responsible for the war than others. Here the representative figure must be a philosopher, and well known. Whether his opinions were very accurately represented or not, probably neither the dramatist nor his audience would very much care. Who so convenient for his purpose as the well-known and remarkable teacher whose grotesque person must have struck every passer-by in the public streets, whose face, with its flat nose, lobster-like eyes, and thick lips, seemed a ready-made comic mask, and whose round and protuberant body made his very friends liken him to the figures of Silenus,—who went about barefooted, unwashed, and in shabby clothes, and would sometimes stand for half an hour in a public thoroughfare as it were wrapt in a dream? There is surely no need to imagine that the comic dramatist had any personal grudge against the philosopher, or any special horror of his particular teaching. Such an artist could hardly have helped caricaturing him, if he had been his personal friend.

The opening scene in this comedy is an interior. It represents a room in the house of Strepsiades, a well-to-do citizen, in which he and his son Pheidippides are discovered occupying two pallet-beds. The household slaves are supposed to be sleeping in an outer room, the door of which is open. So much of the antecedents of the drama as is required to be known in order to its ready comprehension come out at once in the soliloquy of the anxious father.

He has thought of a scheme, however, if he can but get his son to fall in with it, by which they may both be relieved from the pressure of these debts. So he awakes young Pheidippides, and takes him into his counsels. They both walk to the front; the scene shuts, and they are outside the house. The father points to another building at the wing.

Indignant as he is with his son, the father is determined not to lose the chance which this new science offers him of getting rid of his creditors. If his son will not learn, he will take lessons himself, old as he is; and with this resolve he knocks at the door of this “Thinking-School,” the house of Socrates. One of the students comes to answer his summons—in no very good humour, for the loudness and suddenness of Strepsiades’s knock has destroyed in embryo a thought which he was breeding. Still, as the old gentleman seems an earnest disciple, he condescends to expatiate to him on the subject of some of the great master’s subtle speculations; subtle in the extreme, not to say childish, but yet not very unfair caricatures of some which we find attributed to Socrates in the ‘Dialogues’ of Plato. Charmed with what he hears, the new scholar begs to be at once introduced. The back scene opens, and discovers the students engaged in their various investigations, with Socrates himself suspended in a kind of basket, deeply engaged in thought. The extraordinary attitude of one class of learners arrests the attention of the visitor especially:—

But Strepsiades begs to ask a few more questions. These mathematical instruments,—what are they for?

He begs Socrates to come down and help him in his difficulties. He is very anxious to learn this new Argument—that “which pays no bills.” Socrates offers to introduce him to the Clouds, the new goddesses of philosophers—“great divinities to idle men;” and Strepsiades—first begging to be allowed to wrap his cloak round his head for fear of rain, having left home in his hurry without a hat—sits down to await their arrival.

(Socrates chants.)

It is not very easy to comprehend the mode in which the succeeding scene was managed, but the appliances of the Athenian stage were no doubt quite equal to presenting it very effectively. The vast amphitheatre in which these performances took place, open to the sky, and from which actors and audience commanded a view of the hills round Athens, and of the “illimitable air” and “cloudless heaven” which Socrates apostrophises in his invocation to the goddesses, would add greatly to the effect of the beautiful choric songs which follow. But, on the other hand, it presents difficulties to any arrangement for the actual descent of the Clouds upon the stage. Probably their first chorus is sung behind the scenes, and they are invisible,—present to the imagination only of the audience, until they enter the orchestra in palpable human shape. Theories and guesses on these points are, after all, but waste of ingenuity. The beauty of the lines which herald their entrance (which can receive but scant justice in a translation) is one of the many instances in which the poet rises above the satirist.

(Chorus of Clouds, in the distance, accompanied by the low rolling of thunder.[32])

Socrates falls to the ground in adoration of his beloved deities; and Strepsiades follows his example, in great terror at the thunder, with all the buffoonish exaggeration which would delight an Athenian audience.

(Chorus of Clouds, nearer.)

And now, while Socrates directs the attention of his pupil towards Mount Parnes, from whose heights he sees (and the imagination of the audience is not slow to follow him) the ethereal goddesses descending towards the earth, the Chorus in bodily form enter the orchestra, to the sound of slow music—four-and-twenty nymphs in light cloud-like drapery. They promise, at the request of their great worshipper Socrates, to instruct his pupil in the mysterious science which is to free him from the importunity of his creditors. For these, says the philosopher, are your only true deities—Chaos, and the Clouds, and the Tongue. As to Jupiter, whom Strepsiades just ventures to mention, he is quite an exploded idea in these modern times; the great ruler of the universe is Vortex.[33] The machinery of the world goes on by a perpetual whirl. Socrates will, with the help of the Clouds, instruct him in all these new tenets. There is one point, however, upon which he wishes first to be satisfied—has he a good memory?

He appears to the philosopher not so very unpromising a pupil, and the pair retire into the “Thinking-shop,” to begin their studies, while the Chorus make their usual address to the audience in the poet’s name, touching chiefly upon topics of the day which have lost their interest for us moderns.

But the next act of the comedy brings in Socrates, swearing by all his new divinities that he never met with so utterly hopeless a pupil, in the whole course of his experience, as this very late learner, who has no one qualification for a sophist except his want of honesty. He puts him through a quibbling catechism on the stage about measures, and rhythms, and grammar, all which he declares are necessary preliminaries to the grand science which Strepsiades desires to learn, although the latter very naÏvely remonstrates against this superfluous education: he wants to learn neither music nor grammar, but simply how to defeat his creditors. At last his instructor gets out of patience, and kicks him off the philosophical premises as a hopeless dunce. By the advice of the Clouds the rejected candidate goes in search of his son, to attempt once more to persuade him to enter the schools, and learn the art which has proved too difficult for his father’s duller faculties.

One step, indeed, the old gentleman has made in his education; he swears no more by Jupiter, and rebukes his son, when he does so, for entertaining such very old-world superstitions; somewhat to the astonishment of that elegant young gentleman, whose opinions (if he has any on such subjects) are not so far advanced in the way of scepticism. The latter is, however, at last persuaded to become his father’s substitute as the pupil of Socrates, though not without a warning on the young man’s part that he may one day come to rue it. On this head the father has no misgivings, but introduces him to the philosopher triumphantly as a scholar who is sure to do him credit—he was always a remarkable child:—

And Socrates, after a sneer at the young gentleman’s fashionable lisp, admits him as a pupil, and undertakes to instruct him in this “new way of paying old debts.”

The choral ode which must have divided this scene from the next is lost. The dialogue which follows, somewhat abruptly as we now have the play, is but another version of the well-known “Choice of Hercules” between Virtue and Vice, by the sophist Prodicus—known probably to the audience of the day as well as to ourselves. The Two Arguments, the Just and the Unjust, now appear upon the stage in character; one in the grave dress of an elder citizen, the other as a young philosopher of the day.[35] It is very probable that they wore masks which would be recognised by the audience as caricatures of real persons; it has been suggested, of Æschylus and Euripides, or of Thrasymachus the sophist, and of Aristophanes himself. What is certain is, that they represent the old and new style of training and education: and they set forth the claims of their respective systems in a long discussion, in which each abuses the other with the utmost licence of Athenian comedy. Yet there are passages of great simplicity and beauty here and there, in the speeches of the worthier claimant. The Unjust Argument, confident in the popularity of his system and his powers of argument, permits his rival to set his claims before the audience first. He proceeds to speak of the days when justice, temperance, and modesty were in fashion; when the Athenian youth were a hardy and a healthy race, not languid and effeminate as now; and he calls upon young Pheidippides to choose for himself the principles and the training which “had made the men of Marathon:”—

But the arguments of the evil counsellor are many and plausible. What good, he argues, have men ever gained by justice, continence, and moderation? For one poor instance which his opponent can adduce of virtue being rewarded upon earth, the fluent sophist quotes a dozen against him of those who have made their gain by the opposite qualities. Honesty is not the best policy among mortals; and most assuredly the moral virtues receive no countenance from the example of the gods. Sophistical as the argument is, and utterly unfair as we know it to be if intended to represent the real teaching of Socrates, the satirist seems to have been fully justified in his representation so far as some of the popular lecturers of the day were concerned. The arguments which Plato, in his ‘Republic,’ has put into the mouth of the sophist Thrasymachus—that justice is really only the good of others, while injustice is more profitable to a man’s self—that those who abuse injustice do so “from the fear of suffering it, not from the fear of doing it”—that justice is merely “an obedience yielded by the weak to the orders of the strong,”—do but express in grave philosophical language the same principles which Aristophanes here exaggerates in the person of his devil’s advocate.[36] This latter winds up the controversy by plying his antagonist with a few categorical questions, quite in the style of Socrates:—

And amidst the roars of delighted laughter with which the Athenian “gallery” would be sure to receive this sally of buffoonery, the advocate of justice and morality declares that he throws up his brief, and joins the ranks of the dissolute majority.

The creditors of Strepsiades have not been quiescent meanwhile. We find him, in the next scene, calculating with dismay that it wants but five days to the end of the month, when debts and interest must be paid, or legal proceedings will be taken. He is come to the School, to inquire how his son gets on with his studies. Socrates assures him that his education is quite complete; that he is now furnished with a mode of argument which will win any lawsuit, and get him off scot-free of all liabilities, even in the teeth of a thousand witnesses who could prove the debt. He presents the youth to his father, who is charmed at first sight with the change in his complexion, which has now the genuine disputatious tint. He looks, as Strepsiades declares, “all negations and contradictions,” and has the true Attic expression in his face. The father takes him home rejoicing, and awaits confidently the summons of his creditors.

The devices with which the claimants are put off by the new learning of Pheidippides, turn so entirely on the technical expressions of Athenian law, that they have little interest for an English reader. Suffice it to say that the unfortunate tradesmen with whom this young gentleman has run up bills for his horses and chariots do not seem likely to get their money. But the training which he has received in the “Thinking-shop” has some other domestic results which the father did not anticipate. He proceeds, on some slight quarrel (principally because he will quote Euripides, whom his father abominates), to cudgel the old gentleman, and further undertakes to justify his conduct on the plea that when he was a child his father had often cudgelled him.

The unlucky father finds himself quite unprepared with any reply to these ingenious arguments. Too late he begins to see that this new liberal education has its inconvenient side. He protests it would have been better for him to allow his son to go on driving four-in-hand to his heart’s content, than to become so subtle a philosopher. The only comfort which the young student offers him is the assurance that he is quite as ready to beat his mother, if occasion should arise; but it is much to the credit of domestic relations at Athens that, although the old gentleman has complained of his wife, in the earlier part of the play, as having been the cause of all his present difficulties, he shows no desire to accept this kind of consolation. He curses Socrates, and appeals to the Clouds, who, he complains, have terribly misled him. The Chorus reply with truth that the fault was his own; he had sought to be instructed in the school of Injustice, and the teaching has recoiled deservedly on his own head. But he has his revenge. Summoning his slaves, he bids them bring ladders and mattocks, and storm the stronghold of these charlatans and atheists. He mounts the roof himself, torch in hand, and proceeds to set fire to the timbers. When the students rush to the window in dismay to ask what he means by it, he tells them mockingly he is only

Socrates is at length aroused from his lucubrations, and inquires what he is doing up there. Strepsiades retorts upon him his own explanation of his position in the hanging basket—

And the piece concludes with a grand tableau of the Thinking-school in flames, and Socrates and his pupils shrieking half-smothered from the windows.

The comedy, as has been said above,[37] was not so far successful as to obtain for its author either the first or second place in the award of the judges; Cratinus being placed first with his comedy of ‘The Bottle’—the child of his old age—and Ameipsias second. It has been thought necessary to account for this on other grounds than the respective merits of the three pieces; though, as we are not in possession of the text of either of the others, we have no means of ascertaining how far the award was or was not an honest one. It has been suggested by some critics, that ‘The Clouds’ was too clever for the audience, who preferred a coarser article; and indeed (unless the two gamecocks were produced upon the stage) the jests are more intellectual than practical, and the comic “business” has little of that uproarious fun with which some of the other plays abound. The author himself, as would appear from some expressions put into the mouth of the Chorus in his subsequent comedy of ‘The Wasps,’ was of opinion that his finer fancies had been in this case thrown away upon an unsympathetic public. Another explanation which has been given is, that the glaring injustice with which the character of Socrates is treated was resented by the audience—a supposition which carries with it a compliment to their principles which it is very doubtful whether they deserved, and which the author himself would have been very slow to pay them. There is a story that the result was brought about by the influence of Alcibiades, who had been already severely satirised in the poet’s comedy of ‘The Revellers,’ and who felt that the character of Pheidippides—his extravagance and love of horses, his connection by his mother’s side with the great house of Megacles, his relation to Socrates as pupil, and even the lisping pronunciation which his teacher notices[38]—were all intended to be caricatures of himself, which seems by no means improbable; and that he and friends accordingly exerted themselves to prevent the poet’s success.

It is not probable that the broader caricature of the great philosopher, any more than that of Cleon in ‘The Knights,’ had any special effect upon the popularity of its object. The story told by Ælian, that the subsequent condemnation of Socrates was due in great measure to the prejudice raised against him by this comedy, has been long refuted by the observation that it at least did not take place until more than twenty years after the performance. A traditionary anecdote of a very different kind, though resting upon not much better authority, has more of probability about it,—that the philosopher himself, having been made aware of what was in store for him, took his place among the audience at the representation, and laughed as heartily as any of them: nay, that he even rose and mounted upon a bench, in order that the strangers in the house to whom his person was previously unknown might see how admirable a counterpart the stage Socrates was of the original.