The Clouds

The scenes following the second parabasis are marked by rising action, where tension escalates, as the play approaches its denouement, or resolution. After bringing Pheidippides home, Strepsiades turns away two Creditors, one after the other. This type of scene in which the protagonist turns away, outsmarts, or somehow defeats various interlocutors in succession is a convention of Old Comedy. A particularly illustrative example of this type of scene can be found in the second half of Aristophanes’s Birds.

Such scenes typically reveal the protagonist’s character. In the case of Strepsiades, he is very much in the wrong. For however unsympathetic a money lender would have been to an Athenian audience, Strepsiades never denies that he borrowed money from his creditors; his refusal to pay his debts is therefore unjustifiable in either legal or moral terms. The arguments Strepsiades uses to turn away his Creditors—ineptly cobbled together from Socrates and the newly-educated Pheidippides—are superficial. Strepsiades makes no real attempt to justify himself using the Wrong Argument he has been seeking throughout the play; physical force rather than argumentation chases away the Second Creditor.

Strepsiades’s cheating of his creditors, foreshadowed from the very beginning of the play, becomes a kind of red herring, or a distraction from the play’s real point, which comes in the scene that immediately follows. Pheidippides’s beating of Strepsiades violates the Greek taboo of inflicting violence on one’s parents. This initiates the second agon, where Pheidippides demonstrates clearly just how dangerous the “New Education” can be by arguing that he was justified in beating his father.

As disturbing as his case would have been to a contemporary audience, Pheidippides shows himself to be a much more adept debater than his father. Pheidippides’s skill—against which Strepsiades is completely powerless—only highlights the dangers of intellectuals represented by Socrates and the Thinkery, and how they subvert the most established and fundamental of values.

This is also when the Clouds show their true colors, revealing to the troubled Strepsiades that they deliberately misled him to show him the error of his ways:

We do the same to anyone that we

Perceive to be in love with wickedness:

We cast him into misery, so he

May learn that it is right to fear the gods (1458-61).

The Clouds, who had initially presented themselves as the gods of the Thinkery, are agents of none other than the traditional gods, who are denied by the Thinkery. In other words, the Clouds are not the Thinkery’s allies. Indeed, they don’t protest when Strepsiades decides to punish the Thinkery.

Strepsiades hasn’t learned anything. Though he admits that he “shouldn’t have tried to cheat [his] creditors out of their money” (1463), the revenge he plans flouts legal and moral justification. Strepsiades goes out of his way to forego legal recourse and takes matters into his own hands, rounding up his slaves and burning down the Thinkery.

The play ends here, on a dark and dismal note, replacing the Komos, or “revelry” scene, that concluded most of Aristophanes’s comedies; there is no cheery ode sung by the Chorus to end the play. Instead, the Clouds laconically announce the play’s ending as they follow the actors offstage.