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By Root 1857 0

meeting house in Croton, one of the Greek cities in Magna Graecia, southern Italy. Their conversation would perhaps have been about the stars, mathematics, the nature of the universe, the nature of society, the nature of love. This think-tank engaged with the world around them in the most vigorous of ways. But others were there too, in the shadows. As the radical group of thinkers settled down to business, the door was barred – from the outside – and a torch put to the tinder. All the Pythagoreans within were burned alive.

In his new version of Clouds, Aristophanes imagines a similar, awful fate for Socrates and the others in his ‘Thinkery’.

SOCRATES [coughing in the smoke]: Help, I’m going to suffocate!

CHAEREPHON [still inside]: Help, I’m being prematurely cremated!

STREPSIADES [descending the ladder, followed by his slave XANTHIAS]: No more than you deserved; people who cock snooks at the gods and argue about the arse of the moon must pay for it. [Kicks SOCRATES on the bum.] Get them! Stone them! Revenge! Revenge for the injured gods! Remember what they did! Revenge.20

This time, Socrates and his companions escape. But the scene, even if it had a happy ending, was ugly.

And how did Socrates react to such public blackballing? Well, with equanimity, we’re led to believe. Aristophanes, after all, appears (from Plato’s Symposium) to have been an acquaintance of his; friend, not foe. The two would drink together, sharpen their wits on one another. Was this perhaps a feisty, testy tale written with a kind of wry affection? According to a later anecdote, after Socrates had watched himself on the stage ‘peering at the arse of the moon,’ he stood up and bowed to the crowd. He smiled. What a society, where men can be parodied, in public, in front of anyone who is anyone, as well as those who appear to be nothing, and laugh at their own trouble.

Of course comedy is where Socrates belongs. Where else could he be? The ugly, pot-bellied eccentric. The wrong-footing genius; the stonemason’s son who understands how fragile and foolish mortal life is, and yet at the same time how sublime. The soldier commended for his bravery who stands, like a snowman in the middle of a winter campaign, caught in one of his embarrassing staring fits. All the other characters in Socrates’ story – Alcibiades, Pericles, Aspasia – could appear in tragedy, in epic drama. Socrates, unique, world-class as he is, is at the same time a queer middle-aged man with feet of clay. A curiously comforting, curiously unsettling pilot-passenger in the leaky lifeboat. A man easy to mock.

At the time of this production of Aristophanes’ Clouds, many experimental thinkers were being lambasted and lampooned in Athenian theatre – yet tolerated too. But theatre was, after all, a religious experience. The ideas floated here had surprising weight. And times would change, once – in the future, at the beginning of a new century – Socrates was isolated, his fellow radicals persecuted and exiled, and his city-state the loser in one too many battles, the roar of Athens’ crowd would be sharper, the laughter hollow.

In good democratic style, at this juncture maybe Aristophanes was simply trying to ensure that a man who walked strong and tall in this democratic city did not get a swollen head. But he still made it clear that Socrates could act very un-democratically when he meddled with young men’s minds. The children sitting in the Theatre of Dionysos had been given something distinctly unpleasant to lodge in their cortical memory. At the time of Socrates’ trial these youngsters will be grown men, just thirty, old enough to vote, old enough to be judges in a law-court. As Socrates strode off at the end of the day’s entertainment, home to his mother’s house in Alopeke, with his waddling gait, his darting eyes, his hairy hands, perhaps they giggled and sneered at him behind his back. Come 399 BC, and Socrates’ trial in a religious court, the philosopher was certain that this appearance in the theatre had been immensely damaging.

First, then, it’s right for me to make my defence,