This Clouds by S.D. Olson, author or co-author of now-standard critical editions with commentary of four plays by Aristophanes, is the second volume of the Michigan Classical Commentaries series, following Knights by Carl Arne Anderson and T. Keith Dix (Ann Arbor 2020). It will serve its contemporary audience of ‘intermediate’ readers as effectively as Kenneth J. Dover’s abridged student commentary (Aristophanes: Clouds (Oxford 1968)) has served earlier generations.
An introduction covers the essentials about Aristophanes, the play, its production and staging, Socrates and his portrayal, and metre. Suggestions for further reading are restricted to recent items in English, with a special recommendation of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Aristophanes and Socrates on Learning Practical Wisdom’, YClS 26 (1980) 43–97. Appendix I supplies fragments of the original play, Appendix II additional passages of comedy by Aristophanes and other comic poets referencing Socrates, and Appendix III scansion (but not analysis) of the solo and choral songs. There are indexes of people, places and objects as well as Greek words. The text is printed without an apparatus but the commentary regularly addresses textual issues, and interested readers will spot differences from the most recent critical editions of the play, by K.J. Dover and Nigel Wilson (Aristophanis fabulae (Oxford 2007)), and from the annotated bilingual edition of Alan Sommerstein (Aristophanes: Clouds (Warminster 1982)). Olson warns readers to be cautious about Wilson’s OCT edition and in the commentary flags its ‘large number of dubious conjectures’ (11).
For a ‘born-digital’ audience the commentary focuses on ‘explaining issues that are not easily dealt with by a click of a mouse’, such as word formation, syntax, usage, idiom and tone. Words that appear in precisely the same form in the text are boldfaced, and the constituent parts of compound lexical items are distinguished (for example, ἀ-πέραντον, 3). There are no references to standard grammars (readers are trusted to consult such resources ‘should the mood strike them’), but Olson’s explanations are lucid, often more so than in standard grammars and dictionaries. He introduces readers to finer points of idiom and syntax, citing ancient authors and works by their full, anglicized names, and generally providing all that his target readers will need.
The commentary also offers many insights, some new, about Greek literature, culture, philological methods, classical scholarship and textual criticism that will enhance the experience of readers and stimulate them to discover more on their own. Scholars important in the play’s text-critical history are more than just names, for example, at 215 a conjecture was made ‘by Richard Bentley, the great – and famously difficult – 18th-century British classical scholar’, and the choice among possibilities need not be purely technical, for example, at 664 a conjecture by Elmsley ‘seems unnecessarily frantic’. The notes are attentive to production (staging, costume, props) and to characterization, for instance, at 869 Socrates in his admission interview with Pheidippides is ‘testing’ for ‘a potentially nasty, insolent temperament’. The style throughout is succinct, blunt and often drily humorous. Thus Aristophanes’ image of Socrates ‘was true enough to appeal to the average member of the audience in the Theater, for whom the real Socrates was a familiar local crank rather than a legendary figure from the past’ (6–7); ‘Clouds raises serious questions, intended or not, about the place of free intellectual inquiry in a nominally democratic society dominated by nonintellectuals’ (7); the oven at 95–96 is compared to ‘a modern Weber grill’ (664 n.); and a barbaros (‘foreigner’) is ‘someone who does not know Greek, and thus by definition an idiot’ (492 n.).
Occasionally an interpretative rationale does not consider all relevant factors. At 421, the suggestion of taking ϕϵιδωλῆς (‘stingy’) with μερίμνης (‘anxiety’) instead of with γαστρός (‘appetite’) to eliminate a hapax 2-termination adjective does not seem to suit the passage’s phrasing. The case for identifying the person who answers the door at 133 as a slave and not a student (as the scholia and most scholars conclude) needs to consider the poverty of the school; that this speaker has some authority over the (other) students (195 ff.); and that Weaker Argument later answers the door instead of a slave (1145). At 550 n. Aristophanes’ claim to have attacked Cleon when he was μέγιστον (‘most powerful’) but not when he was κειμένῳ (‘down’) is not false if ‘down’ means not ‘destroyed by means of Knights’ but ‘in relative political eclipse’ before Aristophanes attacked him again in Wasps, that is, in 423 after the losses at Delium and Amphipolis, and Laches’ successful armistice, ratified at around the time of the play’s performance. By the time of Wasps in 422, after the revolt of Scione, Cleon was no longer ‘down’.
The edition is very well produced, though in the scansions in Appendix III we have ‘p’ instead of the sign ⁁ to indicate syncopation.
