In Clouds and Electra, Aristophanes and Euripides distinguish the evolution of maturity in Strepsiades, Orestes and Electra through each character’s response to preexisting misfortunes and the methods by which they acquire their education. While intertwining suffering and maturity develops each of these characters, not each character receives their education by means of suffering. Strepsiades receives his education through repeatedly failing to escape debts, Orestes receives his education by killing his father’s murderer and Electra acquires her education through continuous suffering.
Strepsiades embodies the distinction between receiving an education and learning from an education. In pursuit of eliminating his debt to others, Strepsiades approaches Socrates with a “yearn to learn” oratory (Clouds i.183). But, as Socrates proceeds with teaching Strepsiades the foundations of sophistry, Strepsiades clarifies that he has “two kinds [of memory]: if someone owes me money, it’s very good; but if it’s me that owes, it’s awful bad” (Clouds iv.484-486). In clarifying that his memory is selective, Strepsiades alludes to his inability to distinguish between what is morally proper and ethically inappropriate. Similar to his selective memory, Strepsiades chooses to accept the concept of “god” as Socrates suggests and later, in an argument with his son, he exclaims, “damn, I must have been insane, to drop the gods because of Socrates” (Clouds xiii.1476-1478). Strepsiades applies this practice with choosing arguments as well. For instance, when Socrates asks Strepsiades whether he would like to learn “measures, or diction, or rhythm”, Strepsiades responds, “I don’t want to learn that stuff” (Clouds v. 636-638, 656). Rather, he wants to le...
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...ontrary, matures through avenging his father and is educated through renewing his confidence in himself and his actions. Strepsiades is educated through his failure to recognize the difference between what is morally correct and ethically incorrect. While Electra and Orestes acknowledge their imperfections and mistakes, Strepsiades refuses to acknowledge that his son’s unconventional behavior is a result of his failure to teach him to pursue truth rather than to allow greed and ego to cloud one’s judgment. For these reasons, Strepsiades fails to mature and is confined by his inability to absorb the education that Socrates and his son both offer him.
Works Cited
Aristophanes, and Jeff Henderson. Aristophanes' Clouds. Newburyport, MA: Focus Information Group, 1992. Print.
Euripides, Janet Lembke, and Kenneth J. Reckford. Electra. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Print.
Throughout Aristophanes’ “Clouds” there is a constant battle between old and new. It makes itself apparent in the Just and Unjust speech as well as between father and son. Ultimately, Pheidippides, whom would be considered ‘new’, triumphs over the old Strepsiades, his father. This is analogous to the Just and Unjust speech. In this debate, Just speech represents the old traditions and mores of Greece while the contrasting Unjust speech is considered to be newfangled and cynical towards the old. While the defeat of Just speech by Unjust speech does not render Pheidippides the ability to overcome Strepsiades, it is a parallel that may be compared with many other instances in Mythology and real life.
In Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, the reader is introduced to Socrates Fortlow, an ex-convict who served twenty-seven years for murder and rape. Fortlow is plagued by guilt and, seeing the chaos in his town, feels a need to improve not only his own standards of living, but also those of others in Watts. He attempts this by teaching the people in Watts the lessons he feels will resolve the many challenges the neighbourhood faces. The lessons Fortlow teaches and the methods by which he teaches them are very similar to those of the ancient Greek philosopher for whom Fortlow was named: “‘We was poor and country. My mother couldn’t afford school so she figured that if she named me after somebody smart then maybe I’d get smart’” (Mosley, 44). Though the ancient Greek was born to be a philosopher and Fortlow assumed the philosopher role as a response to the poor state of his life and Watts, both resulted in the same required instruction to their populations. The two Socrates’ both utilize a form of teaching that requires their pupil to become engaged in the lesson. They emphasize ethics, logic, and knowledge in their instruction, and place importance on epistemology and definitions because they feel a problem cannot be solved if one does not first know what it is. Socrates was essential in first introducing these concepts to the world and seemed to be born with them inherent to his being, Fortlow has learned the ideals through life experience and is a real-world application in an area that needs the teachings to get on track. While the two men bear many similarities, their differences they are attributed primarily as a result of their circumstances provide the basis of Fortlow’s importance in Watts and as a modern-...
For these two articles that we read in Crito and Apology by Plato, we could know Socrates is an enduring person with imagination, because he presents us with a mass of contradictions: Most eloquent men, yet he never wrote a word; ugliest yet most profoundly attractive; ignorant yet wise; wrongfully convicted, yet unwilling to avoid his unjust execution. Behind these conundrums is a contradiction less often explored: Socrates is at once the most Athenian, most local, citizenly, and patriotic of philosophers; and yet the most self-regarding of Athenians. Exploring that contradiction, between Socrates the loyal Athenian citizen and Socrates the philosophical critic of Athenian society, will help to position Plato's Socrates in an Athenian legal and historical context; it allows us to reunite Socrates the literary character and Athens the democratic city that tried and executed him. Moreover, those help us to understand Plato¡¦s presentation of the strange legal and ethical drama.
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