Socrates left no written works such as those of either Plato or Aristotle. It was left to Plato to summarize the views of Socrates, who has been characterized as failing to set down his ideas in thematic order or even to develop anything like a philosophical system (Solomon & Higgins, 1996). The characterization of Socrates the man and the ideas, values, and ethics that he taught and modeled in his life that dominates history is the view presented by Plato who saw Socrates as envisioning the ideal of a perfect state, a "republic" that would be ruled by philosophers. Further, Plato depicts Socrates not as a pure, detached philosopher, but as a man with a mission that was both spiritual with respect to his own soul and political (Solomon & Higgins, 1996).
This is a radically different view of Socrates than that offered by Aristophanes, the comic dramatist of ancient Greece, who in The Clouds caricatured Socrates, linking this philosopher to the Sophists whom Aristophanes held in utter contempt (Strauss, 1966). In fact, Aristophanes is seen by Leo Strauss (1966) as little more than a gadfly, a laughingstock who may well have deserved the fate meted out to him by Athens.
It is important to recognize that when Aristophanes wrote The Clouds, which was produced in 423 B.C., the playwright was about 30 and Socrates was in his mid-forties (O'Connor, 2001). Consequently, he knew Socrates but was not, according to David O'Connor (2001), one of the philosopher's devoted companion. Aristophanes presents the only unflattering portrait of Socrates which stands in direct contrast to the views of Plato and Xenophon, Socrates' two greatest literary admirers (Euben, 1996).
The Clouds was chiefly an explication of the corrupt state of education in Athens and the cause of this corruption (Bates, 1906). From the perspective of Strauss (1966), Aristophanes' primary protest was directed against speculations of the Sophists and was...