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Clouds, Mysteries, Socrates and Plato

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

A.W.H. Adkins
A.W.H. Adkins*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

Scholars have observed that in Aristophanes’ Clouds entrance to the phrontisterion is likened to initiation into the mysteries; but there seems to have been no discussion of the effect that such a comparison would be likely to produce upon an audience of the period. In the present paper I wish to explore this question; and also to consider the relevance of Aristophanes’ words to anything Socrates may himself have said or done, and Plato’s attitude to the situation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 4 , 1970 , pp. 13 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1970

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References

1 See most recently, Dover’s, K.J. edition (Oxford, 1968), p. 41,Google Scholar and notes on 143, 254 ff.; to this work I, and the present discussion, owe much.

2 Except in so far as Forman, in his edition, comments on 260 ‘all this is a close parody of purification () as practised by itinerant superstition-peddlers on ignorant dupes. See the Frontispiece (“Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries”).’ Such lofty detachment from the attitudes and beliefs of the society in which the Clouds was produced simply prevents readers from understanding the play.

3 Who married the goddess Nephele, which gives the joke greater point (Dover, ad loc).

4 Those who cite the Symposium of Plato, in which the comic poet and the philospher are members of the same social gathering, conveniently ignore (a) that if this is a record of a real social gathering, i.e., an occasion on which the persons mentioned were actually assembled for a symposium, it does not follow that two friends of the host are themselves friends; (b) that Plato has the strongest of motives for inventing such a situation, to counter the effect of one of the most powerful documents attacking Socrates, by implying that it was all in fun. There is no reason why we should draw this inference if the play itself suggests the contrary.

5 Dover himself is by no means concerned thus to ‘defend’ Aristophanes, pp. lii ff.; but the statements that I quote in the text could be so used.

6 Even if an unsophisticated ‘average’ Athenian could have read the play—which is a possibility; see Dover’s interesting, and to the present writer convincing, argument on p.xcviii—he would not have done so in an analytic and detached manner.

7 Any attempted comparison with the Bacchae—which I should not myself propose—fails, since there the audience believes in Dionysus.

8 For which see, e.g., Andocides, De mysteriis, passim.

9 Cf. e.g. Deubner, Attische Feste, pp.69ff.Google Scholar (‘Mysterien’), pp.91f. (‘Eleusinia’), and also pp.9ff. (‘Arretophoria’), pp.50ff. (‘Thesmophoria’).

10. Nor is the Thesmophoria profaned, mocked or parodied, or its secrets revealed in the Thesmophoriazusae.

11 Dover cites the words referring to Prodicus in his note on 634.

12 Plato, of course, was far too young to have been present at the first performance, or to have remembered such details had he been present; but the Apology indicates that the play was not forgotten, so that he could have learnt much about the production from others; and the passages cited in the text themselves seem to bear this out

13 Note also the insistence that Hippias was discoursing in sharp contrast to the subject-matter of the dialogue proper.

14 The fact that and span physical beauty and honourable behaviour lends ethical overtones to beauty and ugliness, and the possession of good or bad physique; but these in themselves would not bring a man to court.

15 Even the details of Prodicus’ blankets might have some link with the scene (6g4ff.) in which Strepsiades is forced to lie under blankets so that he may philosophize. The scene presumably alludes to some New Thinker, since, though bugs are part of the stock jokes of Old Comedy, the relevance of the blankets to this scene is insufficiently explained in the play. Aristophanes might have borrowed the detail from the behaviour of the invalid Prodicus, to whom Plato, on this theory, is re-attributing it. (Prodicus in the Protagoras is not asleep but philosophizing, 316 a.)

16 Note also the confident tone with which the Phaedrus myth is introduced, 245 c. The mention of Stesichorus at 244 a is overtly whimsical and ironic.