Virtual Socrates Colloquium – Livio Rossetti:”A School Founded and Directed by Socrates?”

Respondent: Alessandro Stavru (University of Verona)

Abstract:
My paper focuses on Aristophanes’ Clouds. What I aim to determine is whether Aristophanes imagined, or instead drew upon, reports of a school founded and directed by Socrates. Scholars have devoted very little attention to the second possibility. One exception was Alfred E. Taylor, whose suggestions, so far as I know, gave rise to little or no debate, as though there were no reason to take them seriously. More recently, however, Alessandro Stavru, in his paper Socrate nella commedia antica (2025: 185), has drawn attention to the cursus studiorum that a mathētēs describes to Strepsiades in considerable detail at Nub. 133–220. The idea of a well-structured cursus studiorum is particularly illuminating, since it seems to go beyond the immediate theatrical needs of the comedy.
We find, in fact, a student providing a wealth of information about what one can learn and experience in this educational institution. There is nothing comparable in Aristophanes’ other comedies: not the graceless competition between Paphlagon and the sausage maker, not Nephelokokkugia, not the otherworldly contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, nor the revolt of the wives. A considerable difference of scale is immediately apparent. The portrayal of the cursus studiorum is extensive, so detailed, and so plausible that it is difficult to regard it as merely one tessera in the comic mosaic. What, then, if a real school lay behind Aristophanes’ portrayal?
Further considerations point in the same direction. In the Hippias Major, Hippias is expected to ‘lecture’ ἐν τῷ Φειδοστράτου διδασκαλείῳ. This Didaskaleion is not a school for paides such as that mentioned by Thucydides (7.29.5), but rather an institution where a renowned intellectual is invited to share elements of his epistēmē. In the Lysis, Socrates asks: ‘Who is teaching here?’ (διδάσκει δὲ τίς αὐτόθι;). This is a palaestra, and although the nature of the institution remains unclear, Socrates describes Miccus as ‘a serious person and a competent instructor’ (οὐ φαῦλός γε ἁνήρ, ἀλλ’ ἱκανὸς σοφιστής). These passages provide a context within which the Phrontistērion may be understood not simply as a comic fiction, but as a possible reflection of reality, despite the Socratics’ silence.