“So now, I prithee, teach him both your Logics,\ The Better, as you call it, and the Worse\ Which with the worse cause can defeat the Better;\ Or if not both, at all events the Worse. …
Give him the knack of reasoning down all Justice.”
~ ‘The Clouds’ by Aristophanes (Benjamin B. Rogers translation. GB5 - p. 499)
The play starts with Strepsiades and his son Pheidippides in bed. Strepsiades is unable to sleep because of debts incurred by his son due to his horse-racing hobby. Pheidippides is fast asleep under 5 sheets of blankets, and even in his sleep, he is mumbling about horses, which frustrates his father even more. Strepsiades, a simple farmer with frugal habits, laments marrying his wife, a noblewoman with expensive tastes. She has raised their son as a spendthrift, and that has caused huge debts for Strepsiades. He has come up with a plan to send his son to Socrates’ Phrontisterion (school of philosophy/thinking) so that he can speak well and argue against the creditors. He wakes his son up and tells him that if he can go to the school and learn how to ‘speak and conquer’, he would be able to avoid paying the debts. The son rejects the idea, saying he doesn’t want to learn anything from those vagabonds. Strepsiades then decides to enroll in the Phrontisterion himself.
He meets a student at the entrance and gets chatting. He pokes fun at the seemingly silly things that they are studying - for e.g., measuring a flea’s jump using wax footprints, a lizard disturbing them while they are in deep thought, a person investigating the ground with his rump being pointed to the sky, etc. He finally gets to meet Socrates suspended in a basket to “walk on air and contemplate the Sun”. Socrates invokes the natural elements like air, ether, clouds etc., (as opposed to the gods) to initiate the new student into the school. The Chorus of Clouds appears, and they talk about how they influence everything in the world and travel to far-off places. Socrates then goes on to explain natural phenomena rationally, such as thunder, saying it is caused by clouds colliding and not by Zeus. When Strepsiades says that Zeus uses thunderbolts to punish perjurers, Socrates presents a logical argument to demonstrate that it is not so. But whatever Socrates says, Strepsiades interprets and internalizes them in his own way without understanding anything. His goal is not to get enlightenment but to learn to be dishonest and unethical so that he can get away from paying his debts. The Chorus lists the following requirements for effecting learning - a good memory, deep thinking ability, physical endurance and resistance to bodily pleasures to which Strepsiades says he has all that.