Surprisingly, Aristophanes was not the only comic poet to put Socrates on the stage that day. Ameipsias produced a play titled Connus, named after Socrates’ music teacher.[13] The chorus consisted of the Thinkers, Phrontistai. Socrates appeared on stage wearing a threadbare cloak. “Here you are, Socrates,” said one character, “the best man in a small gathering, the most empty-headed in a large one. You are long-suffering, I’ll give you that. Where in the world did you get that cloak?” Another speaker replied to the first, “This guy’s a walking insult to shoemakers,” pointing to Socrates’ bare feet. “Still,” said the first, “for all his hunger, he’s never kissed up to anyone.”[14]
Clearly, Socrates was making waves. Ameipsias acknowledged him as a hippy intellectual, one known for his hardy independence. And in this short excerpt that has survived of his play, he shows more insight than Aristophanes about Socrates. Socrates stands out in a small gathering where he can ask questions and pursue his inquiries. In a large crowd, where the sophists excel with their speeches and demonstrations, he is helpless.
At the end of the day the theatrical troops assembled for the awards ceremony. The winners were read out. First place goes to . . . The Wine Flask, by Cratinus. Second place goes to . . . Connus, by Ameipsias. Third place goes to . . . The Clouds, by Aristophanes. The playwright was livid. Third place! Out of three contestants![15] For the best comedy presented. He watched sullenly as the wreath was placed on another brow. Surely the judges could not be so blind. His play was not just funny, it was topical. It was important. It was a solemn warning to the state. It was not just a lampoon, it was a character assassination, an exposé, and apocalyptic denunciation of hypocrisy, fraud, and decadence.
A few years later Aristophanes set about revising his play, perhaps to restage it. But he never did produce it again. Rather, he published it as a text to be read. He included in it a new parabasis in which he addressed the judges and criticized them for their incompetence in judging his play. In his new finale, he had Strepsiades climb onto the roof of the Thinkery with torches and set the school afire in a vengeful act of immolation. In the apocalyptic ending the school goes up in a holocaust. When Socrates and his students run out, Strepsiades organizes a mob to destroy them. Aristophanes’ final judgment calls for a pox on Socrates’ house.[16]
As the sun was declining towards the west, the spectators began to disperse around the shoulders of the acropolis. They gathered into groups to talk of feasts and drinking bouts and other serious nocturnal devotions to the god. The talk was loud and boisterous and jolly. Surrounded by playful accusers and gawking strangers, Socrates surely held his own, maintaining that the playwright had not revealed half the scandalous truth. But a passionate band of earnest young men, led no doubt by the pale-faced Chaerephon, closed around him protectively. Surely the greatest of injustices had been committed under the open sky of Athens today; how could an intelligent man such as Aristophanes be so blind and ignorant about the most important things?
And so on a day in the month of Elaphebolion in the year of Isarchus, in the gathering twilight the clouds the playwright had invoked began to gather over Athens. Was it Necessity or Fortune, blind Fate or kind Providence, that set in motion the forces that would burst over the city in the next four and twenty years?
At the end of the festival, on the 14th of Elaphebolion, the people of Athens ratified a truce with Sparta;[17] but the Spartan general Brasidas violated the agreement in Chalcidice.[18] The war would go on. With exquisite irony a comedy foreshadowed a grand tragedy. The grinning comic masks would have much cause to frown in years ahead: ruin for the city, death for the philosopher, and an ongoing war for the minds and hearts of the thinking men of the city, and ultimately for thinking people in every age and time.
As Heraclitus the philosopher had said, “War is the father of all and king of all; and some he manifested as gods, some as men, some he made slaves, some free.”[19]
Sometimes with the vicissitudes of life the victim becomes the victor, the fool the wise man. And sometimes an ignominious death brings everlasting fame among mortal men.[20]
[13]. Plato Euthydemus 272c-d, 295d, Menexenus 235e-236a; see ch. 16* below and Dover 1968: li.
[14].Diogenes Laertius 2.28, Ameipsiasfr. 9 Kassel-Austin.
[15].From 423-414 three comedies were performed at the City Dionysia; at other times, five (Pickard-Cambridge 1968: 83).
[16]. For an assessment of Aristophanes’ treatment of Socrates, see Edmunds 1985.
[17].Thucydides 4.118 with Pickard-Cambridge 1968: 64.
[18].Thucydides 4.120-123.
[19].Heraclitus B53.
[20].Heraclitus B29.