Aristophanes
Clouds — the play Socrates was still answering at his trial
Νεφέλαι · Produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BCE, where the judges put it third of three — last. The text that survives is not quite that play. Aristophanes revised it some years afterwards, usually placed between 420 and 417, and the revision was on the usual view never staged: the parabasis at 518–562 steps out of the action to tell the audience this was the cleverest of his comedies and that they failed it. So a reader is holding a rewrite pitched at people who had already rejected the first version, with the seams visible — the agon between the two Arguments is widely thought to be new, and the ending was left unreconciled with it.
An Athenian farmer is being eaten alive by the debts his horse-mad son runs up, and he has heard there is a school next door where they teach you to argue your way out of anything. He enrolls, fails — he is too old and cannot hold a thought — and sends the son instead. The son learns beautifully. He comes home, wins an argument that beating your father is just, and offers to prove that beating your mother follows. The father burns the school down. The head of the school, hanging in a basket studying the sun and denying that Zeus exists, is a man named Socrates, who was in his forties, alive in the city, and had another twenty-four years to live.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
William James Hickie's Bohn's Classical Library Aristophanes of 1853 is a crib: prose, printed for students working through the Greek, and literal almost to a fault. That is why it is here — it is the one English Aristophanes on Perseus that can be published at all, the other being an anonymous Random House translation of 1938 that is in copyright until 2034 — and its literalness is genuinely useful, because it tracks the Greek clause by clause and rarely invents. Three habits of his will show up in almost every unit and are worth naming rather than re-discovering. HE USES ROMAN NAMES FOR GREEK GODS. Ζεύς is 'Jupiter' throughout, and Ἑρμῆς is 'Mercury'. This is a Victorian convention and it costs something specific in this play, whose whole religious joke is that Zeus has been deposed by Vortex — 'Jupiter' puts a Latin god in the middle of an Athenian argument about Athenian cult. HE IS PROSE WHERE THE GREEK IS VERSE, AND HE FLATTENS THE METRE. The shift between spoken iambics and sung lyric is a large part of how the play signals register — the Clouds' entrance song is in a different world of sound from Strepsiades' grumbling — and none of that survives. The Perseus divisions (strophe, antistrophe, anapests, pnigos) are the only trace of it left in this text. HE EUPHEMISES THE OBSCENITY, UNEVENLY, AND SOMETIMES THE JOKE GOES WITH IT. He is not squeamish everywhere: at 1083 he keeps the radish and the hot ashes, which are the punishments for an adulterer taken in the act. But at 1084 εὐρύπρωκτος — a coarse word for a man who has been penetrated, literally 'wide-arsed' — becomes 'blackguard', and that one substitution kills what follows: the Worse Argument's winning move is to poll the audience and show that the advocates, the tragedians, the politicians and finally most of the men watching are εὐρύπρωκτοι, which is a joke about a specific sexual role and not about being a scoundrel. Where a unit reads oddly prim, check the Greek before crediting the reading; the flatness is often his and not Aristophanes'. His names for the two Arguments are 'Just Cause' and 'Unjust Cause', for Κρείττων/Δίκαιος Λόγος and Ἥττων/Ἄδικος Λόγος. 'Cause' here is closer to a courtroom case than to a reason, and Λόγος is doing more work than either English word carries.