Clouds

Clouds, first performed in 423 BC and later revised into the text that survives, satirizes the new intellectual culture of sophistic education by depicting Socrates, conflated with sophists he actually opposed, running a 'Thinkery' where students learn rhetorical tricks and a skeptical natural philosophy that replaces the traditional gods with the Clouds themselves. The farmer Strepsiades, drowning in debts run up by his horse-obsessed son Pheidippides, enrolls first himself and then his son at the Thinkery hoping to learn how to argue away his creditors, only to watch Pheidippides turn his new rhetorical skill against Strepsiades himself, justifying beating his own father with clever argument. Aristophanes's caricature, however unfair to the historical Socrates, became notorious for the role Plato's Apology suggests it played in shaping Athenian suspicion of Socrates decades before his actual trial and execution.