On trial before his fellow citizens, Socrates asserted that rather than simply answer the set of accusations placed before the court, he must respond to an assault from an older set of accusations. In addition to the official charges, Socrates believed that many of his judges would have been prejudiced against him from claims long part of the Athenian social climate. So ingrained were these older aspersions that Socrates believed they were possibly more dangerous than the official charges. These first set of accusations cast Socrates as a kind-of intellectual charlatan, divorced from the true concerns of society; always engaged in the duplicitous act of making the weaker argument the stronger and misleading his pupils. At a time of great upheaval and uncertainty in Athenian society, Socrates was seen to be a social revolutionary, turning accepted truths on their heads and urging Athenians to break with tradition and dramatically reorient their lives.Though we cannot be sure from whence such accusations initially sprang, there is a general scholarly agreement that these 'older accusations' were given a full-throated treatment by the comic playwright, Aristophanes. In The Clouds, most likely performed around 423 bce, Aristophanes portrays Socrates as an irreligious, some might say atheistic, teacher who instructs young men to disregard their parents, break with tradition, and disassociate themselves from their community. At a time when Athens must have keenly felt the world to be in dramatic upheaval, along came Socrates and the sophists, instructing young people in strange new doctrines and seeming to threaten the very foundations of all that Athens was defending in the great Peloponnesian War. It was hardly a comfortable time to be an Athenian.
While the outlandish Socrates of The Clouds must have been appreciated as a characterization, the context which gave rise to such a portrayal surely lent the play a note of relevance and reality. Here we see Socrates aloft, investigating all the things of the air and seemingly disconnected from earthly concerns. Yet rather than being a harmless and isolated intellectual, this Socrates has opened a school, what Aristophanes called the "Thinkery" or "Thinketeria." Instructing students, Socrates and the other resident sophists turn the gaze of the young towards all areas of knowledge and cleverness, except those which the typical 5th century Athenian would have prized. As the play reaches its finale we see that what is really at issue here are the concerns about how respect for the city and its important traditions will be balanced against the uncertainty of a changing world. Aristophanes' Socrates is engaged in nothing less than the creation of a new Athens.
At this remove we do well to remember that the Greeks had different conceptions of the proper life than our own. To be removed and disconnected from society, to willingly choose a life of isolation from one's fellow citizens, would have been barbaric; borderline unthinkable to many Greeks. When Aristotle wrote that man is by his nature the political animal, what he is saying in context is that man was meant to inhabit the polis. The socio-political sphere was the very foundation of the truly human life. This belief rendered the instruction of the young a concern of great consequence. If Socrates was truly engaged in corrupting his students, and turning them away from so much that was central to Athenian life, then he threatened not only the well-being of his pupils, but the very threads which bound together society: its citizens. To what extent Aristophanes' play was taken entirely seriously, we cannot know. However, with every brick that constructed an edifice of Socrates the revolutionary figure, so much higher was the wall of opinion opposing him. Aristophanes' work was to be remembered for the claims it made against Socrates. Claims that would, in 399 bce, help lead Socrates to his doom.
