Aristophanes Clouds 707

William James Hickie (Translator)

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Clouds. Aristophanes. William James Hickie (Translator). London. 1853.

Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.

Funding provided by The Annenberg CPB/Project.

Current edition Perseus

Clouds (English) (Aristophanes. The Comedies of Aristophanes, Vol. I. Hickie, William James, translator. Bohn: London, 1853.)

Editions (1)
Νεφέλαι Perseus (Aristophanes. Aristophanis Comoediae, Vol. 1. Hall, F. W. and Geldart, William M., editors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906.) — 707 focus
Translations (1)
English (Sanjaya, generated; selected passages) (OCR draft) Experimental (Source: pnadelofficial/aristophanes-sanjaya, commit c319590c139e5603e71f0699caa0663d823af8ad. Machine-generated source annotations retained; see Sanjaya import audit for coverage and limitations.) — 707 focus

Commentary

Commentary (Sanjaya, generated; selected passages) (OCR draft) (Source: pnadelofficial/aristophanes-sanjaya, commit c319590c139e5603e71f0699caa0663d823af8ad. Machine-generated source annotations retained; see Sanjaya import audit for coverage and limitations.) focus

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Line 719

φρούδη ψυχή, φρούδη δʼ ἐμβάς·
The phrase φρούδη ψυχή, φρούδη δʼ ἐμβάς (a 'foolish' soul, foolish too the rider) presents a syntactic and semantic crux regarding the predicate adjective φρούδη. While the noun ψυχή (soul) is clearly the subject of the first clause, the second clause ἐμβάς (the rider) functions as a predicate nominative agreeing with the subject, yet the adjective φρούδη is placed in the accusative case. This construction relies on the understood subject of the infinitive or participle construction in the surrounding context (likely referring to the 'rider' as the one who has the foolish soul), but the specific use of the accusative for the predicate adjective with a nominative subject is highly irregular. More critically, the term φρούδη is a rare hapax legomenon in Aristophanes, appearing only here in this specific context, and its etymology is debated: it may derive from φρόνησις (mind/sense) with a privative prefix, suggesting 'mindless,' or it could be a colloquialism related to φρῶ (to be foolish). The ambiguity of the word's precise nuance in this specific comedic context—whether it denotes intellectual deficiency or moral folly—is significant for interpreting the character's self-deprecation or the playwright's satire of the Sophists' teachings on the soul.

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κἀπαιόλημʼ.
The form κἀπαιόλημʼ is a highly irregular contraction of κἀπαιόλημαι (or κἀπαιόλημαι), where the final -αι is elided before the enclitic -μʼ. This specific morphological form, often appearing in the comic meter to resolve metrical constraints, is a crux for editors; some manuscripts read κἀπαιόλημαι, while others (like the Venetus) preserve the contracted form, which creates a textual variant regarding the intended phonetic realization and the exact verb form (perfect vs. perfect with reduplication). The semantic force is 'and I have been made to smell' or 'I have caught a whiff,' with the prefix ἐπι- (contracted to ε- before the vowel) implying a sudden or intrusive perception, a usage characteristic of Aristophanic comedy where bodily functions and sensory perceptions are exaggerated for comic effect.