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Socrates taught his students contempt for the gods, how to defraud creditors, and useless trivialities about flea-jumping. Or at least, that's how Socrates appears in the comedy Clouds. If you want to understand something of the Athenian hostility to the great philosopher which eventually reached its climax in sentencing Socrates to death, it helps to see how he was lampooned in front of Athenian audiences by his contemporary, the comedian playwright Aristophanes. But Clouds is more than just (dirty) jokes. It is a profane and self-critical attack on educational innovation, and a call to return to the old ways, the ways which produced heroic men like Aeschylus, who with his fellows turned the Persians back at Marathon and saved Greece. The new form of education, in Aristophanes' view, threatens to reduce Athens to a pathetic bunch of weak and impious nerds. But even in his mockery of the new, Aristophanes seems well aware of the inner weakness of the old ways and the reason for their defeat. So it shouldn't be too surprising that his conclusion simply seems to be: Burn it all down.

Aristophanes' Clouds trans. by Alan H. Sommerstein: https://amzn.to/4hEaykY

Aristophanes' Clouds trans. by Peter Meineck: https://amzn.to/4o7lr0R

Aristophanes' Clouds trans. by William James Hickie: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0241%3Acard%3D1

Henri-Irénée Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149

Hesiod's Works and Days: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780674997202

Herodotus' Histories: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781400031146

Plato's Republic: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780465094080

Leo Strauss's "The Problem of Socrates" (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism): https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226777153

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

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Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

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