Clouds and Two Other Plays: Frogs and The Birds

This glowingly exhibits Aristophanes' unbridled imagination and his unrivalled skill at making bellies dance with laughter.

In his Clouds, he puts Socrates high into the ether because his Philosophy is ethereal and beyond the reach of mere mortals. It is, Aristophanes declares, about as useful as knowing which end of its anatomy, its mouth or its bum, a gnat farts. This then becomes a contest between Good Education" and "Bad Education" and which is more useful to us.

In his Frogs, he travels in the other direction, to Hades' world, which is also beyond the reach of mere mortals. He goes down there to resurrect one of his stage colleagues. All three had died, Sophocles only days before he wrote the play.

His TheBirds is a silly, playful thing where he lets his imagination roam wherever it wants. Athens is a mess of lawyers, of idiot politicians and of complicated, intrusive bureaucracy. After the debacle of the Sicilian Expedition the only thing an author of comedies could write was an airy fantasy. Life in Athens had become intolerable so his two ageing heroes leave this city and, with the aid of birds, found their own, up, midway between the ether of Socrates and the hypogeous world of Hades - a land which they called, "Land of the Cloudy Gum Cock".