Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes

Reconciling Science and Religion

The Clouds is a play primarily concerned with education. Nevertheless, it is a play

with a strong moral message and a tragic arc that ends with the reassertion of the
gods: Strepsiades shrieks, "Revenge for the injured gods!" as he stones the fleeing
sophists (II.i.1506). This religious reassertion is especially intriguing because The
Clouds is not a particularly pious play. It is doubtful that even underneath the many
layers of satire and gross physical humor—down to where the play's undeniable
moral center sits—we will locate a religious or even broadly spiritual motive or
lesson. Rather, Aristophanes's comedy seems to be preaching honesty and
responsibility: basic secular, or civic, virtues. Nonetheless, Aristophanes leaves his
audience with religion. Why?

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.
Anaxagoras, for instance, considered the sun, moon, and stars to be the fiery
objects that humans more or less understand them to be today—unseating the
prevailing religious notion that the sun, moon, and stars were gods or divine beings.
However, atheism was a prosecutable offense in fifth-century Athens, a charge akin
to treason. How, therefore, could these new scientific hypotheses be granted the
imaginative and theoretical space of consideration when the prevailing religious
milieu considered them treasonous, or heresy?

The strangeness of Aristophanes's turn to the gods suggests the awkwardness of

this period in intellectual history. His defense or reassertion of the Gods is satirical:
a critical examination of the Athenian's illogical, unwavering adherence to their
gods. Divine sanctity guards not only divine beings but also the study and criticism
of the divine. Aristophanes is suggesting, by considering science with religion in this
play, that the two often-conflicting concepts must be equally open to inquiry, to
criticism, and even to satire.

The Quest for Proper Education

As mentioned above, The Clouds is a satire that is primarily concerned with

education. (In fact, its full title reads: The Clouds, or The School for Sophists.)
Aristophanes employs the "Thinkery" (I.i.93) because it represents comically and
exactly what he believes a school should not be: dishonest, overly serious, and
entirely divorced from the practices and concerns of the real world. Aristophanes is
fundamentally a conservative thinker. Fittingly, satire is a conservative form: a
comedic genre that draws its punch from hysterical deviations from an agreed-upon
and socially condoned standard of values and behavior. Aristophanes would most
probably side with Right Argument who, in spite of his lustful distractions, prescribes
an educational system based on careful study of classical literature supplemented
with a good dose of physical fitness. (Undoubtedly, this is the kind of education that
Aristophanes himself enjoyed, although the specifics of biographical detail are
unavailable to us.) Right Argument's educational model was respected and well-
rounded: both mind and body were exercised to their fullest potential in order to
provide a holistic experience.

Aristophanes, however, is never one to settle for less. There are problems with this
traditional model and he knows it. This is why he paints Right Argument as a
pedophile and why he allows Right Argument to utter such vacuous statements as
"Be ashamed when you ought to be ashamed," (I.ii.1013). This last example
demonstrates precisely why Aristophanes feels that the traditional model of
education needs to be satirized along with the new: Aristophanes believes in the
importance of satire and criticism in Athenian society. He believes that decades,
even centuries, of not questioning or challenging the authority of the older models
have left them stagnant. The circular, vacuous statement above illustrates how, a
traditional system left unexamined might lose sight of the convictions and values
upon which it was founded.

Educational Playwriting

As mentioned above, Aristophanes is fundamentally a conservative thinker. Fittingly,

satire is a conservative form: a comedic genre that draws its punch from hysterical
deviations from an agreed-upon and socially condoned standard of values and
behavior. Therefore, it is understandable when, in the "parabasis," the Chorus of
Clouds digresses from the action of the play to address the audience about
playwriting in general and about Aristophanes's career in particular that the Chorus
uses the chance to defend Aristophanes's moral aims. Since education itself is the
primary concern of this play in particular, the reminder of satire's educative purpose
is twice as resonant. The Chorus argues that, without the good and bad examples
gleaned from satire, how would the Athenian citizenship know right from wrong?

This "parabasis" serves as both a moral thesis in favor of playwriting as well as a

carefully timed defense. Cleon, whom the Chorus of Clouds mentions, is the
powerful Athenian politician who, a year or two prior to the original production of
The Clouds had taken Aristophanes to court for slandering Athens in the presence of
foreign dignitaries. Cleon's court case was in response to Aristophanes's festival-
winning play The Babylonians which had been performed at the grand City Dionysia
festival to which crowds flocked from far and wide. Aristophanes exploits the venue
—an educative satire on education itself—to explain his moral and educative aims
and to make his benign intentions crystal clear.

Reconciling Education with Daily Life

As mentioned above, The Clouds is concerned with the question of a proper, moral
education. Right Argument seems to offer an appealing curriculum—well-rounded
and grounded in practical experience. However, lack of fresh insights have rendered
Right Argument's traditions stale, vacuously circular, and out of touch with the
current ideas. The alternative to Right Argument is Wrong Argument, and in
particular Socrates's school for sophists and other slippery-thinkers. However, as
Pheidippides disgustedly gasps early in the play, such sophist-masters and their
followers are an unlikely lot: "stuck-up white-faced barefoot characters" (I.i.93) who
are so removed from the real actions and transactions of everyday life and the
world that they appear floating in a basket above it! Aristophanes dislikes Socrates
and the sophists because they are dishonest: their Wrong Arguments are morally as
vacuous as Right Argument's morally upright maxims are semantically empty. Also,
as the conflicts between the pig-headed pragmatist Strepsiades and the ethereal,
esoteric Socrates demonstrate, sophistic learning is necessarily separate from the
world. Socrates, at one point, berates Strepsiades for his disinterest in the minutiae
of sentence rhythms, but meanwhile all Strepsiades wants out of his education is to
learn to keep his money. Aristophanes is a realist: he understands that moral
messages are best digested within a comic coating—a fact that demonstrates the
inescapability of the funny, grubby, popular world.