Aristophanes Clouds 707

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.) — 707 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.) — 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.

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ἐξ ἀρνακίδων γνώμην ἀποστερητρίδα;
The phrase employs a rare and striking hyperbolic synecdoche where 'lambs' (ἀρνακίδων) stands for the entire flock or the shepherds who tend them, while γνώμην ἀποστερητρίδα ('a judgment that deprives') personifies the concept of a legal verdict as an active agent of theft. This construction relies on the specific context of the Clouds' trial of Socrates, where the 'new learning' is satirically depicted as stripping the youth of their traditional inheritance (the 'flock') through deceptive rhetoric. The genitive plural ἀρνακίδων, while grammatically straightforward, carries a heavy ironic weight here, reducing the complex social and economic structures of the polis to a pastoral metaphor of stolen livestock, a device characteristic of Aristophanes' early comic style which often blends domestic imagery with high legal discourse.