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The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Socrates and Aristophanes by Leo StraussReview by: Jacob KleinThe Massachusetts Review, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring, 1968), pp. 399-400Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25087721 .
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SOCRATES AND ARISTOPHANES
Jacob Klein
Whatever its intrinsic merits, this book1 can be best understood as
supplementing the author's lifetime work, the deep and challenging signifi cance of which has not yet been sufficiently recognized and appreciated. The
book deals with two stands man takes in this world of ours: the one bent on
apprehending this world without considering man's lot in it, the other tied
in varying degrees to the fact of civic life; the one rather seldom embarked
upon and necessarily impeded by the other, the other unavoidable and yet
little understood in its far-reaching implications. The tide of the book is somewhat?and deliberately so?ambiguous. The
confrontation meant by it is between Aristophanes as he reveals himself in
his comedies and the Aristophanean Socrates as presented in the Clouds.
Accordingly the book is divided into two parts: the first is devoted to the
Clouds, the second to all the other extant plays of Aristophanes. Both the
Platonic and the Xenophontic Socrates are never forgotten.
Except for the Clouds, the plays are taken up in their chronological order.
Most attentive reading is required to follow the transitions from the author's
straight reporting of the actions and statements in the plays to his interpre tative analysis of these actions and statements and to his own views?often
only hinted at?of what is at stake in them. It is the author's design to
"transform the specific two-dimensionality of [Aristophanes'] comedy into a
transcomic three-dimensionality." (p. 51) It is this new dimension that pro vides the author with the opportunity to match the poet's immediate comic
effects with his own subdued irony and dead-pan wit. Strauss is, on the whole, not
directly concerned with the surprising circumlocutions, the ingenious
punning, the burlesque and laughter-exciting situations in the plays. They all belong to the luster of that comic two-dimensionality. His task is to de tect the deeply serious in what is presented comically or even
farcically, with out ever reducing the poet's wisdom to a
dry exposition of thesis and an
tithesis. For "comedy itself is the most effective disguise of wisdom." (p. 64) Strauss seeks to find the sometimes outspoken, but mostly concealed position of the poet in what we hear or see from one?or more than one?personage in a given play, to find it in what the parabaseis state or do not state, to find
it in the relations that exist between the plays themselves with regard to what
the personages in them say and do. And it is this position of the poet which
is contrasted with that of Socrates in the Clouds. A most important role is
1 Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes. New York: Basic Books, 1966. $8.50.
399
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The Massachusetts Review
assigned to the Just Speech and the Unjust Speech in this play. The author reverts to them time and again in reviewing the other plays. Neither the
Just Speech nor the Unjust Speech, however, represents the position of
Aristophanes himself or that taken by his Socrates.
Strauss is inclined to consider the Aristophanean Socrates as the
youthful Socrates, who is concerned with "the things aloft," with astronomy and physiologia, but who is incapable of understanding men, who does not
know the secrets of Eros, who lacks phronesis and is both totally a-Music and
totally apolitical, (pp. 4, 51, 173, 313-314) He finds confirmation of this view in Plato's Phaedoy Parmenides, and Symposium as well as in Xenophon.
One wonders how Socrates could ever have acquired phronesis, how the
Aristophanean Socrates could ever have become the Platonic or the Xeno
phontic Socrates. As to the possibility of this change, Strauss refers, at the
very end of his book, to Muhammad b.Zakariyya al-Razi's The Philosophic
Way of Life. At any rate, what distinguishes Socrates in the Clouds decisively from Aristophanes himself is their respective relation to the civic community.
The Aristophanean Socrates disregards the "three fundamental requirements" of the City: the acceptance of divine rule, the prohibition of father-killing, the prohibition of incest; Aristophanes adheres to them. As to the first
requirement, the Socrates of the Clouds asserts that "Zeus does not exist," but he does not go beyond this assertion. It is precisely at this point that
Aristophanes can be said to gain an advantage over Socrates: ". . .not the
sophist-philosopher but the poet is able to raise and answer the question that
Socrates never raises, let alone answers, as to the godness of the gods." (p.
313) Wealth (Plutos) and Peace (Eirene), in the plays which bear their
names, "are each severally divinity itself" inasmuch as they embody the two
ingredients of the divine (p. 306): Eirene is a beautiful statue (which is in sensitive to pain); Plutos "is in need of man, of human help, in order to
come into his own or to be himself." (p. 296) Ultimately?as Strauss infers
from the Frogs?only "he is a god whom other gods proclaim to be a god"
(p. 245), and man is left uncertain about the veracity of this proclamation. This is only one, if perhaps the most
important, result of a most thorough
interpretation of Aristophanes' comedies. This brief review cannot presume to
convey the labyrinthine richness of Strauss' work.
400
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