Skip to main content

Gods and Clouds


Aristophanes, Greek playwright, was a contemporary of Socrates, the philosopher.  In his play, The Clouds, a philosopher named Socrates operates a ‘Thinkery’ which dismisses the gods. Socrates is questioned by his neighbour, a farmer.

“Who makes it rain if there is no Zeus?” asks the farmer.

“The clouds,” answers Socrates.  “If it were Zeus who made the rain, the clouds would not be required at all.  Zeus could make the rain from a clear sky too.”

“It must be Zeus who moves the clouds to the sky,” insists the farmer.

“No, you idiot,” says the impatient Socrates, “it’s the Convection-principle.”

“Convection!” the farmer wonders whether that’s a new god.  “So Zeus is out and convection is in.  Tch, tch!”  He thinks awhile and asks, “What about the lightning?  It must be Zeus who sends the lightning to kill liars.”

“It’s Zeus’s own temples that are frequently struck down by lightning,” mocks Socrates.  The philosopher goes on to demonstrate a large model of the universe and the function of the convection-principle in it.  The farmer is convinced.

A few days pass.  The farmer is unhappy that he lost his gods.  Socrates is responsible for the loss of his gods.  He gathers a few people who value gods.  The people march to Socrates’ house and sets it on fire.  The philosopher and his followers are burnt alive.

This drama was written when Socrates was still alive.  In reality Socrates was poisoned to death.




Labels:

Comments

  1. Roohi BhatnagarApril 7, 2015 at 4:26 PM

    Radicals were there then and radicals we have now.. The only thing that has changed, we have now the power of internet :) :P :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 7, 2015 at 7:12 PM

    there has nothing changed since then till today, thanks for sharing..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 7, 2015 at 7:42 PM

      Exactly, Shweta, it's amazing how little progress we have made as a species in two and a half millennia

      Delete
  3. UnknownApril 8, 2015 at 12:12 PM

    Alarming that things are still the same today :S :|

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 8, 2015 at 12:29 PM

      History can teach us very interesting lessons, Sreesha.

      Delete
  4. D.NambiarApril 8, 2015 at 5:59 PM

    That was a nice read.

    My favourite part -- “The clouds,” answers Socrates. “If it were Zeus who made the rain, the clouds would not be required at all. Zeus could make the rain from a clear sky too.”

    :)

    I wonder why the playwright decided to skip the Hemlock part.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 8, 2015 at 10:38 PM

      Hemlock came later. The play was written when Socrates was still alive.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...
14 comments
Read more

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...
11 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more