This is an intelligent and unusually thought-provoking reading of Aristophanes' Clouds . O'Regan focuses on logos , or the power of argument, and its effects, and on the self-awareness of the second as a comedy of directed toward an audience made resistant by devotion to the body. Within and without the play, meets defeat when confronted with human nature and desire. The argument conveys much insight into fifth-century thought and the play's workings, the more so because it balances rhetoric with comedy, and reminds the reader that this is a comic —explored in the comic mode, and connected with the intentions and vicissitudes of the first and second .