The Clouds

Aristophanes · 423 BCE · Play · Greek · Classical

Ruined by his son's taste for racehorses, an old farmer enrols at the Thinkery next door, where Socrates hangs in a basket studying the air and undertakes to teach a man how to argue a bad case into a good one. Too slow to learn it himself, he pushes the boy in, and the Better and the Worse Argument fight on stage for the pupil. The text that survives is a revision Aristophanes never staged, and Plato has Socrates name the play at his trial as the source of the old prejudice against him.

Open The Clouds in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Attributes

Closest analogues

• Martin Chuzzlewit
  Charles Dickens · 1844 CE · Novel

  62% · 12 shared
  ComedySatireAppearance vs RealityWealth & GreedEverymanTricksterEpisodicIronic Reversalvs Societyvs PersonComicSatirical
• Mandabi
  Ousmane Sembène · 1968 CE · Film

  62% · 12 shared
  ComedySatireTraditionWealth & GreedEverymanTricksterEpisodicIronic Reversalvs Societyvs PersonComicSatirical
• Frau Jenny Treibel
  Theodor Fontane · 1892 CE · Novel

  62% · 11 shared
  ComedySatireTraditionAppearance vs RealityWealth & GreedEverymanTricksterIronic Reversalvs Societyvs PersonSatirical
• The Alchemist
  Ben Jonson · 1610 CE · Play

  56% · 12 shared
  PlayComedySatireAppearance vs RealityWealth & GreedTricksterIronic ReversalFirevs Societyvs PersonComicSatirical
• The Government Inspector
  Nikolai Gogol · 1836 CE · Play

  56% · 12 shared
  PlayComedySatireAppearance vs RealityWealth & GreedEverymanTricksterIronic Reversalvs Societyvs PersonComicSatirical
• The Producers
  Mel Brooks · 1967 CE · Film

  56% · 11 shared
  ComedySatireAppearance vs RealityWealth & GreedEverymanTricksterIronic Reversalvs Societyvs PersonComicSatirical