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.

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