At the heart of Aristophanes’s Clouds is the conflict between old and new values. Aristophanes uses his play to reflect upon and ridicule the growing tendency among intellectuals and sophists to challenge and subvert traditional Athenian and Greek values. The fictionalized figure of Socrates typifies ideas that were perpetuated by many fifth-century BCE intellectuals, who championed wrong arguments and so-called scientific discoveries. The foolish Strepsiades falls prey to these new ways before realizing that he was misled.

The contrast between new and old values rests on the idea that Athenians had begun to go astray in the second half of the fifth century BCE. Though Athens had had a glorious past, a new crop of intellectuals were questioning the old values of military discipline, piety, and self-restraint and replacing them with new values, such as an interest in the arts, scientific inquiry, florid oratory, and, in some cases, novel and subversive ideas about the gods.

When the play begins, Strepsiades wishes to take advantage of “New Education” to evade his debts: Since the sophists teach oratory and logic, Strepsiades hopes he can learn to argue his case so effectively that he can cheat his creditors.