The Clouds

“The Clouds “is a comedy play by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, originally produced at the Athens City Dionysia of 423 BCE. It is perhaps the world’s first extant “comedy of ideas” and lampoons intellectual fashions in classical Athens.

In the play, Strepsiades, an elderly Athenian mired in debt, enrolls his son Pheidippides in Socrates’ philosophy school so that he might learn the rhetorical skills necessary to defeat their creditors in court, although all he really learns is cynical disrespect for social mores and contempt for authority, which leads to Strepsiades burning the school down in disgust.

Phidippides takes to the new learning like a duck to water, and soon shows what progress he has made by beating his father and demonstrating that he is justified by all the laws, divine and human, in what he is doing. This opens old man's eyes, who sets fire to the Thoughtery, and the play ends in a great conflagration of this home of humbug. There he meets a student who tells him about some of the recent discoveries made by Socrates, the head of The Thinkery, including a new unit of measurement for ascertaining the distance jumped by a flea, the exact cause of the buzzing noise made by a gnat and new use for a large pair of compasses.