Aristophanes Clouds 180

ed. F. W. Hall, ed. William M. Geldart

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Clouds. Aristophanes. ed. F. W. Hall, ed. William M. Geldart. Oxford. 1906.

Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.

Funding provided by The Annenberg CPB/Project.

Current edition Perseus

Νεφέλαι (Greek) (Aristophanes. Aristophanis Comoediae, Vol. 1. Hall, F. W. and Geldart, William M., editors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906.)

Translations (2)
Clouds Perseus (Aristophanes. The Comedies of Aristophanes, Vol. I. Hickie, William James, translator. Bohn: London, 1853.) — 180 focus
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.) — 180 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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τοῖς ἐκ Πύλου ληφθεῖσι τοῖς Λακωνικοῖς.
The phrase refers to the Spartan hoplites captured by the Athenians after the disaster at Sphacteria in 425 BCE, an event that precipitated a constitutional crisis in Sparta due to the large number of Spartiates held hostage. The perfect passive participle ληφθεῖσι (from λαμβάνω) emphasizes the resulting state of being held captive rather than the moment of capture, which is crucial for understanding the political leverage Athens momentarily held over Sparta and the specific context of the Athenian threat being invoked in the play.

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οὗτοι δʼ ἐρεβοδιφῶσιν ὑπὸ τὸν Τάρταρον.
The compound verb ἐρεβοδιφῶσιν is a rare hapax legomenon (or near-hapax in the surviving corpus) formed from ἔρεβος ('darkness') and δίφω ('I scratch'). The term functions as a vivid, onomatopoeic coinage by Aristophanes to describe the frantic scratching or digging sound of the cloud-chariot's wheels or the charioteers' frantic movements in the underworld, rather than a standard term for 'digging'. Its morphology and semantic construction exemplify the comic poet's tendency to create new compounds to match the specific auditory or visual grotesquerie of the scene.

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φέρε τίς γὰρ οὗτος οὑπὶ τῆς κρεμάθρας ἀνήρ;
The phrase 'οὑπὶ τῆς κρεμάθρας' presents a crux of textual criticism and syntactic interpretation. While 'κρεμάθρα' (a hanging basket or sieve) is attested, the prepositional phrase 'οὑπὶ' (a crasis of 'ὁ ἐπί') followed by the genitive is highly irregular for Aristophanes' typical usage, where 'ἐπί' usually governs the accusative for motion toward or the dative for location. Some editors, following a conjecture by Hermann, have suggested emending 'οὑπὶ' to 'ἐν' or reinterpreting the case as a rare dative construction implying 'under the influence of' the basket, reflecting a metaphorical 'hanging' state of confusion or intoxication. This syntactic irregularity is compounded by the ambiguity of 'κρεμάθρα' itself: while literally a hanging basket, in this comedic context it may allude to a specific prop or a metaphorical device for the 'Clouds' themselves, whose suspended nature is central to the play's satire of Socratic natural philosophy.