The idea of arguing both sides of the question is finely caricatured in Aristophanes’ comedy, the Clouds. This play was first produced in 423, but the extant edition is a revised one dating from a few years later. It features a father Strepsiades, his son
Pheidippides, and an establishment of higher learning, the ‘Thinkery’, presided over by Socrates, where the Clouds are worshipped as deities, and with the Stronger and the Weaker Arguments, the latter being that which wins unjust causes, both on hand (94-118). Strepsiades is old and dim-witted, Pheidippides is young, idle and extravagant and has brought his father into debt. Strepsiades plans that his son shall learn from the Thinkery how to argue a way out of the debts, but the outcome after many comic vicissitudes is that Pheidippides applies the new learning to justify beating his father, thus (1420-1424):
Strepsiades: But nowhere is it the law that a father be treated this way.
Pheidippides: Well, wasn’t it a man like you and me who originally proposed this law
And persuaded the ancients to adopt it? If so, am I any less free to establish in my turn a new law for the sons of tomorrow, that they should beat their fathers back?
After beating his father, Pheidippides is ready to justify beating his mother too, and goes on to jeer at Zeus, the traditional chief Deity (1469-1470):
Pheidippides: Listen to him, ‘Zeus of the Fathers’! How antiquated! Do you think
There’s a Zeus?
Strepsiades: I do.
Pheidippides: There isn’t a Zeus, because Whirl (Dtnos) is king, having kicked out Zeus.
And the play ends with Strepsiades, repenting of his flirtation with new ideas, setting fire to the Thinkery and putting Socrates and his pupils to flight.
This play is full of interest for our subject. It illustrates particularly vividly how sophistic ideas impinged on ordinary Athenians who would consider themselves right-thinking. We must remember, of course, that Aristophanes was writing satire, and that his picture is naturally exaggerated, but to be a successful caricature it must also be immediately recognisable to his audience. This audience would be huge (up to at least 17,000) and a mixture of all classes, men, women and children, Athenians, visitors and slaves. The viewpoint Aristophanes represents is a principled, broadly conservative one, which heartily disapproves of the amoralism and irreligion, as he presents it, of the new learning. The same viewpoint is consistently maintained throughout his plays, and we must assume that his audience were broadly happy to have it put forward, even though there were doubtless some dissenters.
We should note with E. Schiappa that the Clouds does not target rhetoric specifically. Its target, as Schiappa points out, is rather ‘the newfangled ‘‘higher education’’ more broadly, with its clever skills with argument in general’.9 Indeed the ‘Sophists’ in the Thinkery engage in a whole range of academic activities, parodying the range of pre-Socratic philosophers’ interests from grammar to cosmology and theology, as well as knowing how to win a case with unjust arguments. However, the crunch point, at which the sophists’ learning is presented as pernicious rather than merely absurd, is precisely where it is applied to creating unjust arguments which achieve victory by falsehood and fallacies. Schiappa himself grants that ‘with hindsight we can interpret specific portions of Clouds as an attack on Rhetoric’, and without denying that Aristophanes’ target as a whole is broader, I suggest it is fair to emphasise also the continuity between Aristophanes’ criticism of the sophists and later criticisms of rhetoric, particularly those brought by Plato. In both cases the same fault was found, namely a reckless and unprincipled disregard of truth, or real validity, in pursuit of winning the argument.10
A further obvious point of great interest in the Clouds is that Socrates is introduced as the arch-sophist. This may well astound modern readers of Plato, but we have to accept that the picture must have been recognisable to Aristophanes’ audience. It is very possibly true, as Plato makes Socrates say in the Apology of Socrates, that Aristophanes had set the stage for Socrates’ later trial and conviction as ‘corrupter of the youth’. But anyway Plato, if not Socrates himself, took it as an important challenge to demonstrate that Socrates was not in the same class as others called sophists, and furthermore to show that the relativism espoused by Protagoras is demonstrably false.
World History
