Figure 59 Interior of red-figure cup, attributed to the Triptolemus Painter, showing a man carrying a
provocatively phallic sack past a herm; diameter of figured scene 15.5 cm, ca. 490 BC. Berlin,
Antikensammlung, F 2298.
Source: Photo: Johannes Laurentius. © 2015. Photo Scala, Florence / bpk, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur
und Geschichte, Berlin.
It is clear that, at the time The Clouds was produced, a number of radical and potentially subversive ideas
were in the air, and Aristophanes seems blithely to have attributed the lot of them to the Athenian
Socrates, who at one point in the play is referred to as “Socrates of Melos,” as though he were
indistinguishable from the godless Diagoras, the most notorious inhabitant of Melos. Aristophanes
presents Socrates as being prepared, like Protagoras, to teach his disciples how to argue effectively for
any position, even an outrageously immoral one: At one point a young pupil of Socrates seeks to persuade
his father that he, the son, is justified in battering his father, having been shown how to use Zeus’
mistreatment of his father as a precedent. This portrait of Socrates, as a godless and immoral sophist who
taught the young men of Athens disrespect for tradition and for their elders, made an indelible impression
on the Athenians and nearly a quarter of a century later, in 399 BC, Socrates was successfully prosecuted
before a popular court for impiety. The specific charges were that “Socrates is guilty of not recognizing
the gods that the polis recognizes, importing instead other new divine entities; in addition, he is guilty of
corrupting young men.”
Obviously, charges like these are especially difficult to prove, and equally difficult to refute. But