_Ph._ Faugh! vulgar fellows--I know ’em. Dirty vagabonds, Like Socrates there and Chœrephon--a low set. _Str._ Pray hold your tongue--don’t show your ignorance. But, if you care at all for your old father, Be one of them, now, do, and cut the turf. _Ph._ Not I, by Bacchus! not if you would give me That team of Arabs that Leogoras drives. _Str._ (_coaxingly_). Do, my dear boy, I beg you--go and be taught. _Ph._ And what shall I learn there? _Str._ Learn? (_Confidentially._) “Why, they _do_ say That these men have the secret of both Arguments, The honest Argument (if there be such a thing) and the other; Now this last--this false Argument, you understand-- Will make the veriest rascal win his cause. So, if you’ll go and learn for us this glorious art, The debts I owe for you will all be cleared; For I shan’t pay a single man a farthing. _Ph._ (_after a little hesitation_). No--I can’t do it. Studying hard, you see, Spoils the complexion. How could I show my face Among the Knights, looking a beast, like those fellows? _Str._ Then, sir, henceforth I swear, so help me Ceres, I won’t maintain you--you, nor your bays, nor your chestnuts. Go to the dogs--or anywhere--out of my house! _Ph._ Well, sir, I’m going. I know my uncle Megacles Won’t see me without a horse--so I don’t mind. Indignant as he is with his son, the father is determined not to lose the chance which this new science offers him of getting rid of his creditors. If his son will not learn, he will take lessons himself, old as he is; and with this resolve he knocks at the door of this “Thinking-School,” the house of Socrates. One of the students comes to answer his summons--in no very good humour, for the loudness and suddenness of Strepsiades’s knock has destroyed in embryo a thought which he was breeding. Still, as the old gentleman seems an earnest disciple, he condescends to expatiate to him on the subject of some of the great master’s subtle speculations; subtle in the extreme, not to say childish, but yet not very unfair caricatures of some which we find attributed to Socrates in the ‘Dialogues’ of Plato. Charmed with what he hears, the new scholar begs to be at once introduced. The back scene opens, and discovers the students engaged in their various investigations, with Socrates himself suspended in a kind of basket, deeply engaged in thought. The extraordinary attitude of one class of learners arrests the attention of the visitor especially:-- _Str._ What _are_ those doing--stooping so very oddly? _Student._ They probe the secrets that lie deep as Tartarus. _Str._ But why--excuse me, but--their hinder quarters-- Why are they stuck so oddly up in the air?