Unit 1: 1: Democracy & Comedy

DEMOCRACY AND COMEDY

Laughing at the heads in the clouds
"the pupil's mind is a growing organism ... it is not a box to be ruthlessly packed with alien ideas" Alfred Lord Whitehead "That is a thinkery of wise souls....If someone gives them money, they teach him how to win both just and unjust causes by speaking." Aristophanes, Clouds 94 ff. "For many have accused me to you, even long ago, talking now for many years and saying nothing true....it is not even possible to say their names, unless a certain one happens to be a comic poet..." Plato, Apology 18b-d ----->>>> [Note: Key terms are in bold. Blue links to external websites provide further reading to explore.] SOCRATES was born in Athens around 470 BCE and grew up during the city's meteoric rise to political and economic power and its heyday as the capital of intellectual and artistic culture in the wider Greek world. Athens was a proud "democracy " - a city ruled by its citizens (the freeborn male ones). It prized and encouraged free public speech and heated debate. Freedom of speech was called parrhesia, which means literally "say everything." Such freedom of speech was encountered in many public venues including the citizen political assembly and the litigious law courts. But it was also in the city's public theater, where choral songs and dramas were staged in competitive contests, where the license to say any and everything was enjoyed and experienced by the Athenians. Our earliest, and one of the most intriguing and difficult, pieces of evidence for Socrates the man is in the Clouds, an early Athenian comedy (Old Comedy ) by the comic poet Aristophanes (pictured at right). The Clouds was originally produced and staged in 423 BCE, when Socrates was in his late 40s and clearly already a very well known local Athenian character. The merciless parody of

Bust of Aristophanes (c. 446-c. 386 BCE)

Socrates as a stereotypical "sophisticated" intellectual in town depends partly on it seeming at least somewhat to match the man's public image or reputation. On the other hand, like all parody it is a caricature, and it is also clearly a composite figure meant to depict and ridicule the contentious debate over education (paideia) and the role of rhetorical training (later called rhetorike, a term possibly coined by Plato) in the city's quickly changing culture. All of the young men of Socrates' circle of friends and acquaintances--including Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines of Sphettus--grew up in this bustling and intellectually heated urban culture; they also, along with all their contemporaries, were familiar with a Socrates already made notorious by the public humiliation he was treated to in Aristophanes' play. As we will see in coming weeks when we learn about Socrates' trial and conviction, in 399 BCE, for "impiety" and "corrupting the youth," the impact of the Clouds seems to have hung like a dark cloud over the name of Socrates, who Plato would call "the most upright man of that day" (see Plato's Seventh Letter in Unit 8). Our first reading and textual focus for discussion and discovery of fifth-century Athenian culture, then, will be Aristophanes' Clouds, our earliest evidence for Socrates. It is a problematic text for exploring the "historical reality" of a person, as we will clearly see. Indeed, our main question in reading the Clouds together will be: what, if anything, in the comedy's caricatured depiction of "Socrates" can be taken as useful evidence of what Socrates the man was like, how he behaved, and what he thought. This is a question that to this day scholars debate without end and with little solid consensus. Proceed to Reading: Aristophanes "THE CLOUDS" ---->>>> Then chime in on the questions in the Weekly Discussion Forum --->>>>

Socrates in a basket (as in the Clouds) from a 16th cent. woodcut book illustration