The Paradox of 'Making the Weaker Speech the Stronger': on Aristophanes' Clouds, 889-1114

In this paper, I deal with a much-discussed passage of Aristophanes’ Clouds, namely the contest between two dramatis personae of the play – the Stronger Speech and the Weaker Speech (889-1114). This part of the play contains paradoxical features since the aim of both contestants is to overturn the arguments of the other. The contest ends with the paradoxical triumph of the Weaker Speech and the defeat of the Stronger Speech: the Stronger Speech surrenders and switches over to the other side, that is, to the Weaker Speech. This switching over, or change in identity, has been perceived as paradoxical ever since antiquity: in his Apology, written decades after Aristophanes’ Clouds, Plato recalls this play as the comedy in which Socrates “made the worse argument the stronger” (Ap. 18a-c). Kenneth Dover demonstrated that the contest between the two speeches deals with two opposing models of education that are themselves paradoxical: old vs new education. Old education propounds the age-old value of temperance (sophrosyne), but its obsession with homosexual voyeurism makes it incapable of upholding this value. New education, on the other hand, differs strikingly from the ascetic education taught within Socrates’ school as it pleads for an unbridled life of pleasure. My essay attempts at making sense of the paradoxical features of the passage. I claim that the two speeches stand for different stages of Socratic education. Both represent ideas of education that are characteristic of fifth-century Athens. Whilst Socratic education is, on the one hand, the evolution of the educational system propounded by the Stronger Speech (i.e. the age-old education of the ‘Heroes of Marathon’), on the other, it forms the bedrock of the new education peculiar to the Weaker Speech (i.e. the education of the younger generation, such as that of Socrates’ most renowned pupil, Alcibiades).