The time is 399 BCE, the city of Athens. The three of you, time travelers, are searching for Aristotle's lost library. Your goal is to photocopy those books, many of which haven't been seen for more than two thousand years. Unfortunately, your Chronosensor, the device that allows you to travel in time, was damaged in an explosion, and you've been thrown course. Though you're in the right city, Athens, you're in the wrong time. In fact, Aristotle won't even be born for another eight years. To top it all off, one of your number, Eldia, is missing. You are searching the city for her. You've stopped to rest in an amplitheater.
<img src="http://imageweb-cdn.magnoliasoft.net/bridgeman/supersize/kw360466.jpg" width="400" height="200" alt="">
The amphitheater is empty except for a few actors on a stage who look like they might be rehearsing. You are far enough away that you don’t think you will disturb them, so you sit down to rest and decide on your next move. Even though you’re sitting in the top row of seats, the acoustics are so good that you can hear the actors on stage as though they are standing right in front of you.
Curious, you watch them. There are two men with masks. One stands in a basket suspended by ropes above the stage. The other is looking up at him. A group of women watch from the side of the stage. At least they look like women. You’d heard somewhere that all the actors in Shakespeare’s time were men. The women’s roles were played by boys dressed as women. Was that the case here as well?
The man in the basket speaks: “Mortal, what do you want with me?
“First, what are you doing up there? Tell me, I beseech you.”
“I" the actor in the basket pronounces pompously, "am traversing the air and contemplating the sun.
“I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven. I should have discovered nothing, had I remained on the ground to consider from below the things that are above; for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It's just the same with the watercress.”
“What? Does the mind attract the sap of the watercress? Ah! my dear little Socrates, come down to me! I have come to ask you for lessons.”
Socrates? That was Socrates? Not the real Socrates. An actor playing Socrates. This is that play, what was it called?
“This must be The Clouds,” John says, “the comedy Aristophanes wrote about Socrates. But that was performed years before this date. What are they doing rehearsing it now?”
“What do you know about the play?” you ask.
“Not much. If my Chronosensor was working I’d check up on it”
SOCRATES: descending: "And for what lessons?"
STREPSIADES: I want to learn how to speak. I have borrowed money, and my merciles creditors do not leave me a moment's peace; all my goods are at stake.
SOCRATES: And how was it you did not see that you were getting so much into debt?
STREPSIADES: My ruin has been the madness for horse racing, a most rapacious evil; but teach me one of your method of reasoning, the one whose object is not to repay anything, and, may the gods bear witness, that I am ready to pay any fee you may name.
SOCRATES: By which gods will you swear? To begin with, the gods are not a coin current with us.
The women step forward and begin to sing. You realize they are the chorus. Socrates tells Trepsiades that these women are the clouds, the muses that inspire sophists. You can’t really make out what they are saying, since the acoustics off stage don’t seem to be as good as on stage.
STREPSIADES: Oh! Earth! What august utterances! how sacred! how wondrous!
SOCRATES: That is because these are the only goddesses; all the rest are pure myth.
STREPSIADES: But by the Earth! is our father, Zeus, the Olympian, not a god?
SOCRATES: Zeus! what Zeus! Are you mad? There is no Zeus.
STREPSIADES: What are you saying now? Who causes the rain to fall? Answer me that!
SOCRATES: Why, these, and I will prove it. Have you ever seen it raining without clouds? Let Zeus then cause rain with a clear sky and without their presence!
STREPSIADES: By Apollo! that is powerfully argued! For my own part, I always thought it was Zeus pissing into a sieve."
"Oh, sovereign goddesses, it is only a very small favour that I ask of you; grant that I may outdistance all the Greeks by a hundred stadia in the art of speaking.
LEADER OF THE CHORUS: We grant you this, and henceforward no eloquence shall more often succeed with the people than your own.
STREPSIADES: May the gods shield me from possessing great eloquence! That's not what I want. I want to be able to turn bad law-suits to my own advantage and to slip through the fingers of my creditors.
LEADER OF THE CHORUS: It shall be as you wish, for your ambitions are modest. Commit yourself fearlessly to our ministers, the sophists.
STREPSIADES: This I will do, for I trust in you. Moreover there is no drawing back, what with these cursed horses and this marriage, which has eaten up my vitals.
[More and more volubly from here to the end of speech]
If I only escape my debts, if only I win the reputation of being a bold rascal, a fine speaker, impudent, shameless, a braggart, and adept at stringing lies, an old stager at quibbles, a complete table of laws, a thorough rattle, a fox to slip through any hole; supple as a leathern strap, slippery as an eel, an artful fellow, a blusterer, a villain; a knave with a hundred faces, cunning, intolerable, a gluttonous dog. With such epithets do I seek to be greeted; on these terms they can treat me as they choose, and, if they wish, by Demeter! they can turn me into sausages and serve me up to the philosophers.
CHORUS [singing] Clients will be everlastingly besieging your door in crowds, burning to get at you, to explain their business to you and to consult you about their suits, which, in return for your ability, will bring you in great sums.
[[The Rhetoric of Humor->The Sophists]]
“This play doesn’t make sense,” you tell John. “Socrates was a philosopher, along with Plato and Aristotle, among the greatest who every lived. He certainly wasn’t a sophist. He wrote against the sophists.”
“Everyone writes against the sophists,” a voice behind you says. “It’s one of the first things you do to establish your credibility as scholar and philosopher. The sophists were wandering teachers who built a reputation for wisdom and then charged huge sums to teach the children of the rich, thus making themselves rich. But, they taught sneaky techniques. Basically, you could see them as a Classical Greek ponzi scheme. They conned the rich, then taught the rich how to con the general populace. So, Socrates, like every other teacher of the time denied being a sophist. If you want to make yourself look good, you tell everyone you’re not a sophist, and you criticize those that are. A very sophist thing to do, don’t you think? It's ironic, really. After a while you can't tell who is wise and who is simply claiming to be wise."
You immediately recognize the man who told you about Socrates as the Itonia Gate.
“Are you an actor?” You ask.
The man laughs. “No, not I. No real talent for memorizing the lines, you see. No, I’m simply a student of the theater. This is one of my favorite comedies, and when I heard it was being rehearsed today, I couldn’t resist having a peek.”
“I’m not sure I get it,” You reply. You know it makes you sound dense, but you want to draw this man out. You’re starting to become a little suspicious after meeting him a second time.
“Ah, Aristophones’s humor can be quite subtle,” he replies. “Let me see if I can walk you through it.
“In the play, Socrates is suspended by a basket, and tells Strepsiades, that he wishes to ‘suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air.’” Let’s see if we can break that down. What is that intended to tell us?”
John answers immediately: “That he is high minded. As the greatest philosopher, his intellect is above the rest of mankind."
“There’s another possibility,” you say, “That he’s airheaded.”
“Socrates?" John responds. "He was a great philosopher. ”
“Okay, how about this? He’s godlike." You say this more to needle John than any other reason."
“We’re still talking about Socrates. He's a mortal, after all”
“What I mean,” you explain, “is that having him in a basket above the stage suggests he has the qualities of a god. Remember, this is a play. They used to have gods come down out of the sky at the climax to resolve the issues. That was called, ‘Deus ex Machina.’”
You can tell that John isn’t convinced. “I’m going to go with his thoughts being so high that they were in the clouds. That’s the title of the play after all.”
“Let me add one to the list, just to make this more interesting,” the stranger says. “Socrates is a philosopher; perhaps his ideas are so abstract that while they may have sounded good, they weren’t practical, not down to earth.
“So,” the stranger says, “We’ve come up with four possibilities, high intellect, airheaded, godlike, abstract. Which one do you think it is?”
STOP HERE. DO NOT GO ON UNTIL YOU HAVE DISCUSSED ALL FOUR POSSIBILITIES AS A TEAM. ONLY ONE MEMBER OF YOUR TEAM SHOULD GO GO ON PAST THIS POINT UNTIL YOU HAVE COMPLETED THIS CHALLANGE.
THE APPOINTED MEMBER OF OUR TEAM SHOULD GO TO THE NEXT SCENE AND READ THE POSSIBILITIES TO HIS OR HER TEAMMATES.
[[The Challenge->STOP HERE]]
Even though Socrates was intellectual, Plato depicts Socrates as being concerned with personal and civic virtue, and with how to teach virtue. His longest dialogue, The Republic, outlined a way to create a virtuous state. However, even he admitted that the state he created was an ideal that could not be created in fact.
Keep in mind that the play didn't intend to depict Socrates's high intellect, but to make fun of philosophers. It's a comedy, remember? In particular, this line of the play, "suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air," doesn't make the audience think of high intellect.
Return to [[The challenge->STOP HERE]] and try again.
Socrates was far from airheaded. However, like much Greek comedy, this passage is ironic. Note, that Socrates says that he is in the air because what is in his head is “of the like nature.” So, even though Socrates is venerated today as a great philosopher, the intent of these lines in the play was to make fun of him as an airhead.
This question illustrates our first point about comedy: It is about those who we see as less significant or lower on the social scale than ourselves. In the case of Socrates, this aspect of comedy is doubly ironic, because it depicts someone with a reputation for being wise as an idiotic windbag.
This is the correct answer.
Go on to the next question [[The Sophists II]]
Often in Greek mythology, men and women were venerated as demi-gods, half-human children of a god. Hercules was one of these. So was Pericles, and even Percy Jackson in The Lightening Thief. In Greek tragidy, most of these demigods ended, well, tragically. Oedipus, for intance, ended up ripping out his own eyes when he learned he had married his own mother.
The Clouds isn't a tragedy, but a comedy. So, the point wouldn't be to emphasize Socrates's godlike qualities, even if the people of Athens, who knew him well, thought he had any.
Go back to [[The challenge->STOP HERE]] and try again.
Sure, Socrates’s philosophy could be quite abstract. However, he was adept at explaining his ideas clearly through metaphors, allegories, and examples. Plato's writing about Socrates still contains some of the clearest explanations of abstract ideas. Perhaps the best known example of this is the Allegory of the Cave, though it’s unclear whether this allegory originated with Socrates or Plato. Interesting, but not the right answer.
Go back to [[The challenge->STOP HERE]] and try again.
“So,” the stranger says, "we know what we’re to think about Socrates, at least the Socrates portrayed in the play, but how are we to think about the sophists?”
“Well,” you reply, “the chorus are supposed to represent the sophists, at least they call the sophists their ‘ministers,’ and offer Strepsiades ‘eloquence.’ If I remember right, sophist means ‘wise’ or ‘seeker after wisdom.’ So, is Stepsiades being offered wisdom? Are we supposed to think about the sophists as teachers of wisdom?”
“But,” John interjects, “Strepsiades rejects the offer of eloquence from the chorus. Instead, he asks to be given the gift of argument. I can’t remember all he wants, but admits he wants to be a ‘bold rascal’ and a ‘shameless, a braggart.’”
“Ah, that is our question, then. Should we think about the sophists as teachers of wisdom or teachers of rhetoric?”
“Rhetoric? But I thought that was what Aristotle wrote about. How can rhetoric be bad?”
“Keep in mind,” the stranger reminded them. “We’re talking about the common belief about rhetoric--which doesnt get changed much by Aristote's book on rhetoirc. So, what do you think. Were the sophists teachers of philosophy or rhetoric?”
“Why not both?” John asks.
The stranger gives him one of those looks you are all too familiar with from your own teachers. “Why not neither? Why not a dozen or more possibilities? No, those are our choices. According to the words of the play, were sophists teachers of wisdom or teachers of lies, in other words, rhetoric?”
[[The Second Challenge]]
Whether this answer could be true depends on what you think wise is. If you see one requirement of wisdom as always speaking nothing but the truth, then you would not think of the sophists as wise. One of the most famous sophists, Protagoras, often claimed he could make the weaker argument the stronger, by which most people thought he meant he could so manipulate his listeners with language that they would not be able to tell what was the truth or what was a lie. Though the jury is still out on sophists in the modern era, it was certainly true that in classical Greece, sophists were seen as teachers of rhetoric, which, even after Aristotle wrote On Rhetoric, was often simply seen as a system of lying. The chorus in the play depicts sophists who will lie and cheat, and teach others the same.
Go back to [[The Second Challenge]]
There is no doubt that until Aristotle wrote On Rhetoric it was generally held in low esteem by many in classical Greece. Even so, anyone who sought public life would do his best to learn rhetoric. The ability to sway the crowd was both suspect and highly valued, making the ethos of rhetoric itself paradoxical.
This question deals with the second aspect of humor, that it often deals with significant issues, sometimes social issues, sometimes issues of right and wrong, what Socrates called 'virtue.'"
In this case, a big issue is whether wisdom can be taught, or at least whether those who teach for money can teach it, as well as the love of money--we remember what that's the root of.
There were only two choices here. If you got it right, give your team 2 experience points. If you got it wrong, none.
Go on to the final challenge [[Challenge Three]]
“So,” the stranger says, “We’ve come up with four possibilities, [[High intellect]], [[airheaded]], [[godlike]], [[abstract]]. Which one do you think it is?”
ONLY FOLLOW ONE LINK AT AT TIME, AND THEN ONLY AFTER DISCUSSING YOUR ANSWERS AS A TEAM AND AGREEING TO ONE OF THESE FOUR POSSIBILITIES
RECEIVE FOUR EXPERIENCE POINTS IF YOU GET THE RIGHT ANSWER ON THE FIRST TRY. SUBTRACT ONE EXPERIENCE POINT FOR EACH INCORRECT ANSWER YOU CHOOSE UNTIL YOU GET THE CORRECT ONE.
According to the words of the play, were sophists [[teachers of wisdom]] or [[teachers of lies]], in other words, rhetoric?”
STOP. ONLY ONE MEMBER OF YOUR TEAM SHOULD GO ON, AND THEN ONLY AFTER YOU DISCUSS THESE TWO ALTERNATIVES. IF YOU CHOOSE WRONG, LOSE THREE EXPERIENCE POINTS. IF YOU CHOOSE RIGHT, GAIN THREE EXPERIENCE POINTS.
"Well," the strangere said, "comedy is about character, or ethos. We've talked about Socrates's character, and that of the Sophists. What about Strepsiades, the man who goes to Socrates for instruction."
"That's a little easier," John replies. "You've already convinced us that comedy despicts those who have less virtue or honor than the audience. That's why, even though Socrates is a great philospher, he's depicted as a dunderhead. Strepsiades, on the other hand, is an idiot no matter how you look at him."
The stranger laughs. "That's right. But remember, one aspect of humor is strengthening community values by demonstrating what not to do. What poor behavior does Strepsiades demonstrate, and what good character, its opposite, does his example encourage?"
"Well," you reply, "Strepsiades has gone into debt, and is about to loose everything. So, he was obviously a extravagant an wasteful. Maybe we're being encouraged to be frugal and save."
"I think," John cuts in, "that his problem wasn't that he spent all his money, but that he looked for a dishonest way to get out of his poverty. He wanted to learn rhetoric as a way to take advantage of others in court. In Socrates' parlance, he lacked virtue."
"Very well," the stranger replies. "Those are our choices. Keep in mind that both may in some way be right. The correct answer would be the one that is more right."
STOP. YOU KNOW THE ROUTINE BY NOW.
[[extravagant]] [[Dishonesty]]
It's true, Strepsiades was wasteful. For the Greeks that showed a lack of virtue. However, simply being poor wasn't seen as unvirtuous, even if frankly, no one relished the idea of being poor--except Socrates, who often bragged about his poverty, if for no other reason, becauase it demonstrated that he wasn't a sophist.
This isn't the correct answer. Go back to [[Challenge Three]]
Everyone in this period valued honesty, or at least they claimed they did. Though many people learned rhetoric in order to be successful in court, it wasn't considered honorable or honest. The Greeks went as far as banning the practice paying someone to write a speech for you, which you could then memorize and repeat in court, since they thought such preparation obscured the truth of a man's word. This was why it was seen as dishonorable for Strepsiades to look for someone to teach him rhetoric.
This is the correct answer. If you got it right on your first try, your team gets 2 experience points. If you chose the other option, no experience points.
Go on to [[Leave]]
"This isn't helping us find Eldia," you tell John.
He nods his head. You both say your goodbyes to the stranger and walk out onto the noisy street.
Out on the street you stop. "Wait a minute!" You run back into the theater.
John runs after you. "What's going on?"
"That guy, where is he?"
"He's obviously left. What's your problem?"
"He talked about Aristotle's book on rhetoric. Aristotle hasn't been born yet."
"So how did he know about him, or his book?"
"He has to be a time traveler, like us."