Pheidippides: And who are they? Strepsiades: I do not know their name exactly. Deep thinkers, fine gentlemen. Pheidippides: Ugh, scoundrels, I know them. You mean the frauds, the pale ones, the barefoot ones, like that wretched Socrates and Chaerephon. Strepsiades: Hey, hush, do not say anything silly. If you care at all about your father's bread, become one of them for my sake, and give up the horses. Pheidippides: I would not, by Dionysus, not even if you gave me the pheasants Leogoras keeps.

Here Socrates enters the play by name, before he is ever seen, and it is the young aristocrat who knows him. To Pheidippides the Thinkers are a recognisable type: pale from never going out in the sun, barefoot, full of themselves. Chaerephon is named alongside him, Socrates' devoted friend, the one who later asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and a favourite target of the comic poets. Strepsiades does not know the name of what they do, so he calls them merimnophrontistai, worry-thinkers, and kaloi kagathoi, the phrase Athenians used for real gentlemen. His son would not join them for anything, not even for the famous birds, or horses, kept by Leogoras, a rich Athenian whose luxuries everyone had heard of.