Scriptaoke
The Clouds
by Aristophanes from 423 BCE
About
Aristophanes' The Clouds (423 BCE) is the most intellectually ambitious of his surviving comedies — a savage satire on the new philosophical education embodied by Socrates, who appears as a charlatan running a 'Thinkery' that teaches students to argue any side of any question for profit. The play famously caricatures Socrates so effectively that Plato later held it partly responsible for the prejudices that led to Socrates' trial and execution. Aristophanes' target is not Socrates specifically but the entire Sophist movement: the commodification of intellectual skill for rhetorical manipulation. It is one of the primary documents of the tension between traditional values and the new learning in fifth-century Athens.
Translated from the original Greek.
The Clouds
- Characters
- 19
- Words
- 12.2k
- Duration
- ~1 hr 32 min
Characters
1 section
12.2k wordsMore scripts
