The portrayals are completely opposed. Whether or not they’re flattering doesn’t explain the vast differences in who they say Socrates really is.

Aristophanes portrays Socrates at age 40. If his views changed afterwards, then it makes sense that later portrayals would emphasize Socrates' later views. This explains the discrepancy in the stimulus.

We don’t care about other philosophers. We need to know why later portrayals of Socrates differed from the contemporaneous one.

We need to know more about Socrates as a controversial figure for this to be right. How did the controversy influence those later portrayals? Why were they so different than the one in Aristophanes? We simply don’t have enough information to choose this.

This doesn’t explain why Socrates was portrayed as an ethical and religious philosopher after his life. If this answer were true and he influenced philosophers concerned with natural science, why didn’t later accounts portray him as the scientific figure in Aristophanes?