Twenty-four years before Athens put Socrates on trial, it laughed at him. Aristophanes hung him in a basket over the stage, studying the sun.
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The only portrait of Socrates made while he was alive and walking the streets, and it is a cartoon. A farmer buried in his son's horse-racing debts enrols at Socrates' school, the Thinkery, to learn the kind of argument that wins a lawsuit it ought to lose. The book is in the press now. Nothing is readable yet, and a gift of any size moves it closer.
The Clouds was staged at the City Dionysia in the spring of 423 BC and came last of three. A few years later Aristophanes rewrote parts of it, and the revised script is the one that survives, though it was probably never performed. Socrates was in his mid-forties. At his trial in 399, in Plato's account, he names this play as the source of the stories the jurors had grown up hearing about him.
Socrates makes his entrance hanging in the air, and when asked what he is doing up there he says he walks on air and looks down on the sun. The verb is aerobatein, and Plato puts the same rare word into Socrates' mouth at the trial, quoting the comedy back at the jury. The chorus are the clouds themselves, new goddesses for a new kind of teacher, and by the end the son has learned enough to prove he has the right to beat his father.
Making an interlinear The Clouds is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, The opening scene gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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