The Clouds

**Read Νεφέλαι at the source, before centuries of translation made its language familiar in other forms.**

## The Work and Its World

The Clouds, preserved here as Νεφέλαι, is one of the works through which ancient Greek literature and thought continue to speak to later centuries. A debtor enrolls in Socrates' comic Thinkery to learn dishonest argument, satirizing education, rhetoric, and intellectual fashion.

Nepheles is a comedy by Aristophanes that was presented for the first time at the Great Dionysia in 423 BC. where he won a third prize (the first was won by Kratinos with the comedy Pytini and the second by Amipsias with the comedy Komastai). Aristophanes, who believed that Nepheles was one of his best works, radically corrected it in order to present it to the public again. The Nepheles that survive to this day are the second version.

It is one of the most famous and much-discussed works of Aristophanes, the unsolved riddle in Aristophanes' production and one of the biggest questions in the history of literature.

The great comedian criticizes the sophists' schools in Athens and the "progressive" education provided by Socrates at that time. It exposes the negative consequences that the modern Sophistic movement had on the private level, the effects of Sophistic argumentation in the family area and presents the undermining of ancestral morals and norms, analyzing the crisis of ethics and politics in Athenian society, the decline of the old educational system and the struggle of the two generations. The comedy satirizes the sophists of Ancient Athens and, in particular, Socrates, who supposedly corrupts the young with his teaching, even though Socrates never taught sophistry. The name of the play is due to the Nepheles (the nebulous ideas of philosophy), which, according to the poet, Socrates considers goddesses, along with Chaos and Language, and with them he replaces the gods of the city.

Strepsiades, an old Athenian peasant, married to an aristocrat Athenaia, they settled in Athens and had a son, Pheidippides, who, brought up as an aristocrat, went so far as to bring his father into debt with his extravagance and profligate life. Squeezed by his creditors, Strepsiadis makes the decision to send his son to Socrates' School to learn the unjust and the just reason, so that he can be justified in the trials and escape from the various loans and the creditors. Phidippidis has no desire to be confined to the school, so the old Strepsiadis is forced to attend the Preschool himself. But Socrates quickly dismisses him as unfit for learning and finally convinces his son to attend the school of the great philosopher. He will soon realize that all the lessons his son took, he will pay for himself and bitterly...

## Why It Still Matters

Approaching The Clouds in its original language brings the reader closer to choices of rhythm, argument, image, and dramatic emphasis that translations must inevitably interpret. The work is not important only because it is old: it remains a living point of reference for writers, philosophers, historians, theatre makers, and readers confronting related questions today.

## Author and Legacy

Aristophanes was the leading poet of Old Comedy, using fantasy, parody, obscenity, and political satire to confront Athenian public life.

Aristophanes (445 BC – 386 BC) was an Athenian comedian of the 5th century BC. Aristophanes is, along with Eupolis and Cratinus, one of the most important representatives of the period of ancient Athenian comedy characterized as "ancient comedy" and the only one of which survives intact works, with the exception of Menander, of whom only one work survives intact. During the 5th century BC, he wrote 46 comedies. Of these, 11 have been preserved intact, while 924 fragments have been handed down.

We have very little independent information about his life and, often, evidence of his biography is drawn from his comedies themselves, and must therefore be treated with great caution. The ancients disagreed about the poet's birthplace, some asserting that he was a citizen of Lindos or Camiros of Rhodes, others of Naucratida in Egypt, and others of Aegina. These dichotomies resulted in the unfounded information that the demagogue Cleon was seeking a "writ of exile" against the poet. It is a given that Aristophanes stayed most of the time in Aegina, as he owned estates that had been given to his father when Athenian clergy had settled there. It is said that he was an example of a moral, modest, conservative person who watched the political life of the Athenians from Aegina and satirized its vulnerabilities.

He was born in Athens in 445 BC. about, and died in the mid-380s BC. He lived in Athens and grew up in the years that began for Athens and its inhabitants an era of peace and prosperity, during which the political life was dominated by the personality of Pericles (peace with Sparta and Persia) and which lasted until the beginning of the thirty-year Peloponnesian war in 431 BC.

He was the son of Philip, a genuine Athenian, from the municipality of Kydathinaion, so he is also considered a genuine Athenian citizen. About his life, however, only little is known to us today.

In this collection, the author's importance is approached through The Clouds. The work shows how a particular genre or method could become a durable instrument for examining human action, public life, knowledge, memory, and the demands of justice.