X	RELIGION    AND     EDUCATION	277
judgment. Of all this the play gives us hardly more than a
few superficial features, but perhaps enough to enable us to
understand the poet's real intention. In accordance with
popular misconceptions, in accordance also with the comedian's
natural desire to make as much fun as possible of the c philo-
sophers', though at the same time in order to denounce the
spirit rather than the man, Aristophanes attacked Sokrates as
the true sophist, as the incarnation of all sophists.1 Thus, for
instance, all sophists are said to be dirty and unkempt, though
in fact they were not.2 Both parties are brought nearer to
each other and made similar. By adopting this or a like point
of view, it has been possible for later writers to draw historical
conclusions entirely contradictory of the usual moral judg-
ment It is well known that Hegel, and many writers since,
have sided with Aristophanes, or rather with Sokrates' real
accusers, against Sokrates In doing so they overlooked the
fact that the real Sokrates actually fought for the old ideals
with new weapons and for new reasons. In part, however,
these ideals, too, were filled with new meaning, the ideals of
arete^ eusebeia and sophrosyne, of goodness, piety and self-control.
All such questions, or rather the one great question of the
historic Sokrates, are not only very hard to answer, but they
he, in fact, outside the scope of the problems which we are
discussing here. So we may leave this aspect of the question,
the more as, no matter to what other conclusions we may
come, one fact at least is incontestable the poet could safely
depict Sokrates as a sophist, even as the very embodiment of
the sophists, and be sure of interesting the people in this
picture This remains true in spite of the failure of the Clouds
and its having to be rewritten because the poet found the play
1 This does not mean, as one of my reviewers put it (American Htst Rev LI,
194.6, 293) that I prefer 4to convict Aristophanes of intellectual dishonesty rather
than of misunderstanding' (cf also the similar view expressed by Professor
Greene AJP LXV, 1944, 268) Why should the comedian, who could not
know what was to happen twenty-four years later, not have chosen to depict
Sokrates as the absurd sophist just because the people saw him hie that? There
was no moral compulsion whatsoever for him to describe in their true colours
anybody or anything he wanted to ridicule It is for this reason that I try in general
to find the facts not in but behind the plot — For Aristophanes' conception of
Sokrates cf also the beginning of the gist chapter of Lessing's Hamburgische
Dramaturgte (cited by Meder, note 5 8)