The Clouds

The career of Aristophanes as a writer of comedies lasted forty years, from 427 to c. 386. At least forty plays were attributed to him in antiquity, eleven of which survived into the Middle Ages and thus to our own day: the earliest of these eleven is Acharnians(425) and the last Wealth(388). Clouds was produced in 423, and was placed by the judges third of the three plays competing at the City Dionysia that year.

The satire in this, one of the best known of all Aristophanes' comedies, is directed against the new schools of philosophy, or perhaps we should rather say dialectic, which had lately been introduced, mostly from abroad, at Athens. The doctrines held up to ridicule are those of the 'Sophists'-such men as Thrasymachus from Chalcedon in Bithynia, Gorgias from Leontini in Sicily, Protagoras from Abdera in Thrace, and other foreign scholars and rhetoricians who had flocked to Athens as the intellectual centre of the Hellenic world.-From the introduction to 'The Clouds' by Aristophanes.