In the seventh thesis of his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, Søren Kierkegaard claims, “Aristophanes in Socrate depingendo proxime ad verum accessit.” One of three Greek writers who record the figure of Socrates, Aristophanes preserves the gadfly in the form of comedy. As such, when given the task of identifying the real Socrates, the comic poet is an unlikely candidate. Plato and Xenophon record the philosopher’s words in the form of dialogue, on the surface a more realistic mode of representation. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard maintains that Aristophanes helps us discover a