Proud in your chariot
Strepsiades talks about his wife and the dreams she used to have regarding their son’s future. Soon after he was born, the mother wanted to see her son succeed, be a famous and respected person. She wanted him to have a high social status and to have everything he wanted. Because of this, the mother portrayed her son as sitting proud in a chariot, ringing it in the city where everyone could see him. Thus, Strepsiades’s son is portrayed as a child who was thought from a young age he must a proud man and that the most important thing is life is the way the rest of society sees you.
Strange men
After Strepsiades is accepted into the school, he enters the interior yard and sees various groups of people, looking lost, looking at the ground or at the sky. Strepsiades does not understand what those men are doing and so he asks the Disciple about the various things they are studying. Strepsiades describes them as wretched people, resembling in many ways slaves and war captives. The image created here has the purpose of transmitting the idea that those who follow the religion and the ideas promoted by Socrates and not entirely sane and may suffer from serious mental problems. This image is thus used to characterize and describe the entire movement as a whole while also criticizing its leader.
The women
When the clouds come before Strepsiades, they come before him as women, capable of changing their form and thus becoming every shape they want to be. Socrates points out how this tricks many and how humanity in general is unable to distinguish between reality and illusion. The fact that the shadows appear as women is also important because it shows the way women were portrayed during the time when the play was written. Thus, this image also transmits the idea that women were seen as a negative influence, as people who had the power to create illusions and to fool everyone they came across.
Natural assurances
In the time when the play was written, the natural phenomena like rain, thunder, and lightning were all explained in relation with the Gods. For the people of the time, all these elements were created by Gods in one form or another. Socrates has a different view on them and instead of portraying them as being mysterious and impossible to understand, Socrates portrays them as natural accruing events which should not be mystified and made to appear as the creation of supernatural beings who created the universe.
