The festival officials moved out onto the orchestra and the crowd grew quiet in anticipation of the three comedies to be performed. Now it was time to hear The Clouds. The officials retreated. The double doors of the scene building were thrown open, and the eccyclema, a stage on wheels, was pushed out of the doors.
On this platform an old man stands next to a couch; a young man lies wrapped in blankets on an adjacent couch. “Oh, oh!” moans the old man.
King Zeus! What an endless night this is!
Will day never dawn?
Long ago I heard the cock crow.
But the house slaves snore on!
As he carries on the young man stirs in his bed, and cries out, “Philo, you’re cheating! Stay in your own lane!” The old man responds, “That’s the evil that is ruining me. Even in his sleep he dreams horses!” He introduces himself as Strepsiades and explains that his rich wife and her spoiled son, Pheidippides, the one dreaming of horseraces, are burying him in debt. He awakens Pheidippides and tells him he has a plan to solve all their financial problems. He will send Pheidippides to be a student in a school just there (pointing to a facade on the right side of the scene building): “That is the Thinkery of wise souls. There dwell men who say with conviction that the heaven is a stove placed round us, and we the coals.” He gestures meaningfully to a pot-bellied stove in the bedroom. “They teach—if one gives them money—the speaker to win all lawsuits, whether just or unjust.”
“Who are they?” The son asks.
“I don’t exactly remember; deep thinkers, gentlemen.”
“Oh no! I know who you mean: bastards! Braggarts, palefaces, barefooted rascals, including that wretch Socrates, and Chaerephon!”[4]
They argue; the spoiled son refuses to demean himself. Strepsiades the father is left alone on stage.
Though prostrate, I won’t take it lying down.
I’ll pray to the gods and go myself,
go to the Thinkery to learn.
But how will I, an old man, forgetful
and slow, learn the hairsplittings of logic?
But go I must.
Moving over to the door of the school, Strepsiades knocks; some students answer the door, and explain to him their scientific researches: how far a flea jumps, how a gnat makes a buzzing noise, what the outline of Greece is on a map. Suddenly, the crane swings out over the orchestra, holding a basket, and in the basket a figure. Who is it? Strepsiades asks. All eyes in the audience strain to see the figure: a man with protruding belly, wearing a comic mask with a snub nose and bulging eyes. It is Socrates himself! Strepsiades calls to him: “O Socrates! Yoohoo, O Socky!” A titter runs through the audience.
“Why do you call me, creature of a day?” Socrates bellows. A laugh runs through the crowd.
“First, I beg you, tell me what you’re up to!”
“I walk on air, and contemplate the sun!”
“Then from a basket you look down on the gods, but not from the earth.”
“Never would I have discovered astronomical truths if I had not mixed my thought and light wisdom with its kindred air. If I had looked up from below, never would I have discovered anything. For in truth the earth draws by force to itself the humor of thought. . . . The same thing happens to water-cress.” A laugh from the audience.
In the audience, according to an ancient anecdote, the foreigners start asking, “Who is this Socrates?” In front of them a stocky man in his 40s stands up and turns around. He has bulging eyes and a snub nose like the mask. He has come to watch the play about himself.[5]
On stage, Strepsiades begs Socrates to come down and teach him to avoid his creditors. The crane lowers him to earth and he disembarks. Socrates offers to arrange an introduction for Strepsiades to the deities of the sky, the Clouds. Socrates calls them with a loud voice. The chorus enters the orchestra in a slow curving procession. Twenty-four boys dressed as women, covered with fluffy white piles of wool from the knees to the neck, sing in unison:
Everlasting Clouds,
We arise shining with natural dew,
From our father Ocean . . .
To high mountain peaks,
covered with trees.
Socrates teaches Strepsiades how the goddesses control the sky. “These are the only goddesses; the rest are nonsense.”
“Our Zeus,” Strepsiades protests, “by Earth, isn’t he an Olympian god?”
“What Zeus? Don’t talk nonsense. There is no Zeus.” Boos from the audience.
“What are you saying? Who rains? Tell me this first of all.”
“These goddesses do! I will convince you with powerful proofs. Tell me, where did you ever see it rain without Clouds? Yet according to you it might rain from a clear sky, when they were away.” Laughter and catcalls.
“By Apollo, you have blown me away with your reply. Yet before, I thought rain was Zeus peeing through a sieve. But tell me, who thunders? That gives me goose-bumps.”
“These ladies make thunder by rolling around. When full of much water they are carried about by necessity, hanging full of rain, then being heavy they bump into each other and, BOOM!”
“Who is it that forces them together so as to move—isn’t it Zeus?”
“No way. It’s heavenly Eddy [Dinos], the whirlwind guy,” roars Socrates, spinning around with his hands outstretched to imitate a tornado.
“Eddy? This is news to me. Since Zeus doesn’t exist, in his place Eddy now is king. But you’ve explained to me nothing yet about crashing and thunder.”
“Don’t you remember how I told you the Clouds being full of water bumped into each other and crashed because of their compression? I’ll let you prove it for yourself. Haven’t you ever been full of stew at the festival of the Panathenea, and then your bowels were upset, and suddenly an explosion rumbled out?’
“By Apollo, it does upset me right off, and just like thunder the stew crackles and roars. Quietly first it goes pappax, pappax, then louder papapappax, until, I swear, it thunders PAPAPAPPAX, just like the cloud ladies.”[6]
By now a roar of appreciation was echoing through the crowd.
Socrates continues with irrefutable logic. What about the thunderbolts that Zeus hurls against the wicked? Why, he never hits perjurers with his bolts, but rather Cape Sunium, and old oak trees, which never did Zeus any harm! Thunderbolts are just a dry wind that breaks out of a cloud with an explosion. Getting into the spirit of the explanation, Strepsiades recalls how a sausage he was barbequing exploded in his face.
[4].Aristophanes Clouds 2-104. The play as we have it is a version partially revised from the originally staged script (Hypothesis I, with Dover 1968: lxxxx-xcviii). Chaerephon may have played an important role in the original version, but he is merely mentioned in the extant version; see also lines 144-47, 156-58, 501-4, 831.
[5].Aelian Historical Miscellany 2.13.66-79.
[6].Aristophanes Clouds 126-391.