The Clouds

They'll come up again in Apuleius, so they'll come up in our next conversation.

So about 20, 25 years before Socrates is executed and Plato and Xenophon write in response to that execution, we have a play by Aristophanes called The Clouds, which is a satire of Socrates.

And the daimon is not mentioned.

Socrates' personal daimon is never mentioned in this play, but daimonia or divinities are a central feature of the play.

I need to be...

Uh, in order to think, I need to, um, uh, I need to kind of a- um, speak the lang-" He doesn't use this language exactly, but, "kind of speak the language of air.

I need my mind and my thinking to be airy, to be ethereal." Um, and, and Socrates introduces to this man, he says, "There are, um, the gods that will, uh, that oversee this kind of airy thinking are the clouds." That's why the play is called The Clouds.

Mm-hmm.

They had a comic drama which constantly held up to ridicule philosophers and sophists and their vain doctrines.

We possess one play, The Clouds, of Aristophanes, in which Socrates is pilloried as a typical representative of impious and destructive speculations.

Apart from annoyances of this kind, Socrates reached old age pursuing the task of instructing his fellow citizens without any evil befalling him.

Then at the age of seventy, he was prosecuted as an atheist and corrupter of youth, and was put to death, three ninety-nine BC.

Yeah.

And this satire is all about Socrates' relationship to air, and the, it's called The Clouds.

And The Clouds are, Socrates reveals himself to be a, um, a follower of the clouds, which are said to be daimons.

The clouds are these beings of air that, um, uh, that Socrates believes trains him to think a certain way.

Now, s- Aristophanes is taking the piss out of Socrates, uh, so, so this is, this is, um, this isn't a flattering portrait of how a philosopher might deal with air.

It's kind of making him into literally an airhead.

The Akarnians , Knights , Peace are mainly political.

In The Clouds, he ridicules the new, of which Socrates is unfairly taken as a representative.

The Wasps, 423, satirizes the litigious character of the Athenians.

The Birds, 414, is a brilliant absurdity describing a city built in mid-air by the birds on the advice of two discontented Athenians.