The Clouds by Aristophanes
“Clouds in the sky look big and substantial, but in fact they are mere clumps of thin vapor—a fact that the new scientific advances were beginning to appreciate.”
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The Clouds by Aristophanes
Aristophanes * He was a comic playwright of the ancient Athens. * Eleven of his 40 plays survived virtually complete. * A realist and was against the sophist such as Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, Protagoras, Hippon, Korax, and Gorgias. * The Father of Comedy and The Prince of Ancient Comedy
The Clouds * Comedy * It was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and it was not well received, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. * It was revised between 420-417 BC and thereafter it was circulated in manuscript form. * No copy of the original production survives, and scholarly analysis indicates that the revised version is an incomplete form of Old Comedy. * This incompleteness, however, is not obvious in translations and modern performances. * The Clouds can be considered not only the world's first extant 'comedy of ideas' but also a brilliant and successful example of that genre.
Note: In the fifth century BCE, around the time when Aristophanes wrote The Clouds, the first stirrings of what today would be considered "scientific theory" were being felt.
Characters
STREPSIADES * Strepsiades is the anti-hero of Aristophanes's play (The Clouds). He is an older Athenian citizen and a farmer. He married a well-to-do girl. * Strepsiades is a practical man: he has a problem—he is in debt—and he finds an existing solution for it in the theories and arguments taught at Socrates's school. In spite of the fact that he places his hopes on the slippery rhetoric and shady morals of the new sophistry and "new education," Strepsiades is a countryman and a traditionalist at heart. He wishes that his son Pheidippides were a farmer like him and his father before him. * fundamentally
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The Clouds by Aristophanes
Aristophanes * He was a comic playwright of the ancient Athens. * Eleven of his 40 plays survived virtually complete. * A realist and was against the sophist such as Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, Protagoras, Hippon, Korax, and Gorgias. * The Father of Comedy and The Prince of Ancient Comedy
The Clouds * Comedy * It was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and it was not well received, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. * It was revised between 420-417 BC and thereafter it was circulated in manuscript form. * No copy of the original production survives, and scholarly analysis indicates that the revised version is an incomplete form of Old Comedy. * This incompleteness, however, is not obvious in translations and modern performances. * The Clouds can be considered not only the world's first extant 'comedy of ideas' but also a brilliant and successful example of that genre.
Note: In the fifth century BCE, around the time when Aristophanes wrote The Clouds, the first stirrings of what today would be considered "scientific theory" were being felt.
Characters
STREPSIADES * Strepsiades is the anti-hero of Aristophanes's play (The Clouds). He is an older Athenian citizen and a farmer. He married a well-to-do girl. * Strepsiades is a practical man: he has a problem—he is in debt—and he finds an existing solution for it in the theories and arguments taught at Socrates's school. In spite of the fact that he places his hopes on the slippery rhetoric and shady morals of the new sophistry and "new education," Strepsiades is a countryman and a traditionalist at heart. He wishes that his son Pheidippides were a farmer like him and his father before him. * fundamentally