How sweet it is to live among new-fangled thoughts! What pleasure to subvert the old morality! Zeus is out; the vortex principle is in! So learns Strepsiades, an old Athenian, and his son Pheidippides who, snowed by debts, enter The Thinkery (this house of Babbledom) to master the art of public speaking and so cheat their creditors. Logic (there are two kinds:—moral and immoral), Learning (always to be clever, always always talk to win, to fight for dear old Blather) and Language are spoofed in The Clouds, eminently readable for its ribald wit, fast-paced slapstick, and high-spirited rhetoric. The New Learning—Great Chaos, The Clouds, and Bamboozle. The Clouds—goddess of men of leisure, from them our sharpess comes and our casuistic bent... patrons of the sophists and prophets and long-haried fops with rings and of dithyrambic poets and astrological frauds... These are the only gods there are. The rest are puffles. Aristophanes brilliantly, bawdily spares few from his barbs. Socrates—high priest of poppycock. Aeschylus—a fourth-rate poet at least; quite pompous, unpolished, quite turgid and spouting. Scholars—barefoot charlatans with the look of Death. Even Himself, in a tongue-in-cheek appearance on stage—I always dream up something fresh and clever, no two of them alike, and all of them funny! The Clouds vigourously bares the folly of the old and new morality and ends hilariously with Strepsiades thrashed by his newly educated son—while the old god Hermes has the last word. The play is set in the Athens of the 5th century B. C., where men have forgotten the gods and turned to rhetoric and dreams. Aristophanes ridicules the degenerate old order as well as the Sophistic new.