How The Symposium drew on The Clouds
A documented line of influence: Plato demonstrably engaged Aristophanes’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Clouds
Aristophanes · 423 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
The Symposium
Plato · c. 385 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
6/10
On The Symposium’s page
- The Aristophanes who delivers The Symposium's origin-of-love myth is the same playwright who mocked Socrates in The Clouds — Plato seats his old antagonist at the table
- Read The Clouds first and the casting turns pointed: Plato has Socrates blame that very play for the slander that he "walks on air and studies things in the heavens," then stages a comic-but-serious counter-portrait
- The whole gesture is an answer to the comedy that helped sink Socrates
On The Clouds’s page
- Aristophanes put Socrates in a basket, mocked as a sophist who "walks on air and studies things in the heavens" — slander Plato later blames The Clouds for by name in the Apology
- Plato answered by seating Aristophanes at his banquet and handing him The Symposium's most famous speech, the origin-of-love myth
- The comic playwright who lampooned Socrates becomes a character in Socrates' own circle — a reply written across decades