The text of Aristophanes’s Clouds that has come down to us does not represent the play as it was originally performed. It is a revision—and an incomplete one at that. When Aristophanes first staged Clouds in 423 BCE, the play was awarded third place in its festival. This upset Aristophanes, who regarded Clouds as his most clever play. He resolved to produce a revised version of the play to set things right—Aristophanes himself tells us all this in the parabasis of the current Clouds. This second, revised version of Clouds is sometimes known as Clouds II to distinguish it from the original version of the play, known as Clouds I.

Clouds II was never performed, and there are signs that Aristophanes never completed the revision. For example, the revision departs at several points from the norms and conventions of Athenian “Old Comedy.” The term “Old Comedy” refers to the type of comedies produced in Athens during the fifth century BCE. Its most important proponents were the playwrights Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes. Of these, we now can read only Aristophanes—the works of Cratinus and Eupolis are known only from scanty fragments. In fact, almost everything we know about the structure of Old Comedy comes from the surviving plays of Aristophanes.