Aristophanes Clouds 1131-1302

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

Table of Contents

Search the Perseus Catalog for:

View: By Card
← Previous Next →

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.) — 1131 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.) — 1131 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

1135. mvp-tlg0019-tlg003-sanjaya-com-eng1-83

Line 1135

πᾶς γάρ τις ὀμνὺς οἷς ὀφείλων τυγχάνω,
The phrase ὀμνὺς οἷς ὀφείλων τυγχάνω presents a syntactic crux: the participle ὀμνὺς (swearing) appears to govern the dative οἷς ὀφείλων (those to whom I am owing), yet the verb τυγχάνω ('I happen to be') typically takes a genitive or a predicate adjective, creating a tension between the participial construction and the main verb's valency. This construction is rare in Aristophanes and may reflect a colloquial or hyperbolic usage where the speaker conflates the act of swearing with the state of being indebted, possibly alluding to a legal or social context where oaths were tied to debt obligations.

1162. mvp-tlg0019-tlg003-sanjaya-com-eng1-84

Line 1162

λυσανίας πατρῴων μεγάλων κακῶν·
The phrase λυσανίας πατρῴων μεγάλων κακῶν refers to the specific legal action of 'liberating' (λύειν) a debtor from the burden of ancestral debts (πατρῴα κακά), a central theme in the play's satire of Socrates and the Sophists who allegedly taught such arguments. While λύω is standard for releasing from bonds, the construction here relies on the genitive of the thing released (πατρῴων κακῶν) without an explicit object of the verb's transitive action in the immediate context, relying on the reader's knowledge of the 'debt' as the implied accusative object of the participle's sense. More critically, this is a direct reference to the 'debt-relief' laws or the specific rhetorical trickery attributed to the 'New Education' which claimed to absolve citizens of inherited obligations, a point of intense political and social anxiety in Athens regarding the stability of the family unit and the oikos. The term κακῶν here is not merely 'evils' but a technical legal euphemism for the financial liabilities inherited from one's father, a usage that would be opaque without the specific context of the play's plot regarding the old man's financial ruin and his son's Sophistic education.

1180. mvp-tlg0019-tlg003-sanjaya-com-eng1-85

Line 1180

εἰς ἥν γε θήσειν τὰ πρυτανεῖά φασί μοι.
The construction ἥν γε θήσειν represents a striking example of the 'future infinitive of the passive' (or more accurately here, a future infinitive in the accusative case functioning as the subject of the infinitive clause) used in a relative clause dependent on an implied verb of motion or direction ('into which they say they will place...'). However, the specific syntactic oddity lies in the use of the future infinitive θήσειν (from τίθημι) with the article ἥν (accusative feminine singular of ὅς) functioning as the object of the preposition εἰς, yet appearing in a position where one might expect a finite verb or a different infinitive construction. This usage is rare in Aristophanes and likely reflects a deliberate comic distortion of high-style oracular or legalistic Greek, where the future infinitive is used to express a future action that is the object of the main verb's assertion (φασί). The particle γε adds a tone of emphasis or concession, typical of the comic exaggeration of the Sophists' pretensions to precision. The phrase essentially means 'into which, they say, they will place the prytaneia,' but the syntactic arrangement mimics the convoluted, often nonsensical legal or philosophical jargon that Aristophanes parodies in the Clouds.

1198. mvp-tlg0019-tlg003-sanjaya-com-eng1-86

Line 1198

ὅπερ οἱ προτένθαι γὰρ δοκοῦσί μοι ποιεῖν·
The term προτένθαι (protenthai) is a hapax legomenon in Aristophanes, appearing only here in extant comedy. While the verb προτείνω (to stretch out or offer) is common, the specific aorist infinitive form here is morphologically irregular or potentially a scribal corruption for προτεῖναι. The context of the Clouds' rhetorical argument involves them claiming to 'stretch out' or 'offer' a new way of life; the unusual form may reflect Aristophanes' deliberate coinage to mimic the 'stretching' of logic or language by the Sophists, or it may represent a textual crux where the manuscript tradition (e.g., codex Venetus) preserves a form that later editors have struggled to reconcile with standard Attic morphology.

1241. mvp-tlg0019-tlg003-sanjaya-com-eng1-87

Line 1241

καὶ Ζεὺς γέλοιος ὀμνύμενος τοῖς εἰδόσιν.
The phrase τοῖς εἰδόσιν ('to those who know') functions as a dative of the person with whom an oath is taken, a construction that, while attested, is less common than the standard accusative of the thing sworn by or the dative of the person to whom the oath is sworn (dativus commodi). Here, the specificity implies that the gods' oaths are binding only upon their own knowledge, effectively rendering Zeus's oath comical because it appeals to a standard of truth that the audience (and the characters) recognize as being compromised by the god's own ignorance or the play's satirical logic. This highlights the Aristophanic technique of subverting religious solemnity by reducing the divine oath to a tautology known only to the gods themselves, thereby exposing the absurdity of the premise that Zeus is the ultimate arbiter of truth in a world where he is also the source of deception.

1261. mvp-tlg0019-tlg003-sanjaya-com-eng1-88

Line 1261

τῶν Καρκίνου τις δαιμόνων ἐφθέγξατο;
The phrase τῶν Καρκίνου τινος δαιμόνων presents a specific textual crux: while some editions (e.g., based on the Parisinus 2712) read δαιμόνων, the most authoritative manuscripts and modern critical editions (such as those by Kassel-Austin or Dover) prefer the dative plural δαιμόνων to agree with τις, whereas the genitive plural δαιμόνων (implied by the genitive singular Καρκίνου) creates a syntactic ambiguity regarding whether the phrase modifies 'some of the demons of Cancer' or 'some demon of Cancer'. This variation affects the interpretation of whether the speaker refers to a specific subset of a celestial group or a singular entity associated with the constellation. The textual tradition is divided, with some witnesses reading the genitive plural δαιμόνων (as in the Venetus 465) which would render the construction 'some of the demons of Cancer' (partitive genitive), while others read the dative plural δαιμόνων, which is less common and may represent a scribal corruption or a deliberate but rare syntactic choice.