Clouds

In c. 423 BCE, Aristophanes’ comedic play Clouds was first performed in Athens. In 2026 CE, David Walsh built Phrontisterion—the library at Mona that draws its name from Aristophanes’ comedy. In the play, the ageing Athenian Strepsiades enrols at the Phrontisterion: a ‘thinkery’, or school, run by Socrates, and an altogether disreputable institution fit only ‘for wastrels and bums’; but where Strepsiades will nonetheless learn the art of rhetoric and thus escape his debts. The connection to Mona seems clear.

Mona’s pocket-size bilingual edition includes the 1924 Greek/English translation by Benjamin Bickery Rogers.