Aristophanes Clouds 985b

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.) — 985b 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.) — 985b 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 985

καὶ Κηκείδου καὶ Βουφονίων.
The text presents a crux regarding the identity of these two figures. 'Kek[e]idous' is almost certainly a corruption of 'Kek[e]idous', referring to the comic poet Cephisodorus (or potentially a confusion with the tragic poet Cephisodorus, son of Euphorion), but the manuscript tradition here is notoriously unstable, with some editors conjecturing 'Kephisodorus' or 'Cephisodorus' to make sense of the pairing. 'Bouphonion' is not a standard name but likely a corruption or a rare epithet; some scholars suggest it refers to the 'Bouphonia' (the ox-slaying festival) as a metonym for a specific priest or participant, while others argue it is a corruption of a name like 'Boupalos' or 'Boupalos'. The pairing of a comic poet with a festival name or obscure figure suggests a specific, lost context within the play's satire of intellectual fads, possibly mocking the absurdity of naming conventions in the 'Thinkery' or the pretensions of specific contemporary figures. The lack of clear identification for 'Bouphonion' makes this a genuine textual and historical puzzle requiring conjecture.

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Line 986

ἐξ ὧν ἄνδρας Μαραθωνομάχας ἡμὴ παίδευσις ἔθρεψεν.
The phrase ἄνδρας Μαραθωνομάχας serves as a specific historical synecdoche, referring not merely to 'men who fought at Marathon' but to the generation of Athenians born before the Persian Wars (c. 490 BCE) who were the direct victors of that conflict and the subsequent defenders of the city. By contrasting these men with the 'new education' (παίδευσις) of the Sophists and Socrates which the Clouds satirize, Aristophanes creates a sharp generational polemic: the old, natural education produced the defenders of the empire, while the new, artificial education (represented by the Stranger's arguments) produces the rhetorical sophists and corrupt youth of the 420s BCE.