Clouds

Clouds is one of the representative works of the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, performed around 423 BC and revised between 419 and 418 BC. The protagonist is Strepsiades, an old man from the Attic countryside who is drowning in debt because his son Pheidippides is obsessed with horse racing. With old and new debts falling due at once, his creditors prepare to take him to court on the "old and new day" to claim principal and interest. Strepsiades, both stingy and eager to dodge his debts, hears that Socrates' "Thinkery" can teach people to twist right and wrong through sophistry, and pins his hopes on this "learning." He first sends his son to study, but Pheidippides decides the whole lot are madmen and refuses to go. Left with no choice, the old man enters the Thinkery himself; old and with a poor memory, he learns with great difficulty, and the Cloud goddesses advise him to send his son instead. Pheidippides eventually masters "crooked argument," and Strepsiades uses this sophistry to drive off each creditor who comes to collect, believing himself victorious. Yet at a family banquet afterward, father and son turn against each other, and the son actually strikes his father, arguing with the logic learned at the Thinkery that "a son beating his father" is entirely reasonable. The old man sees the error of his ways, bitterly realizing that "he who harms others harms himself," and leads his servants to set fire to the Thinkery. The play satirizes the sophistical education and newfangled "science" fashionable in Athens at the time through exaggerated farce, and is an important text for understanding Aristophanes' comic style and the intellectual history of Athens. This translation is rendered from the ancient Greek texts edited by Rogers and by Foreman, and is Luo Niansheng's classic translation.