Aristophanes is making it crystal clear that he thinks Socrates is a sophist. Surely this is wrong? As we’ll see, both Xenophon and Plato show Socrates clashing repeatedly with sophists. But of course, sophists could and did clash with one another. So Aristophanes evidently saw little distinction between Socrates and his sophistic contemporaries. After all, both Socrates and the sophists left their
