LysistrataAristophanes
About Lysistrata
Aristophanes' was produced in 411 BC, late in the Peloponnesian War, after the disaster of the Sicilian Expedition. The plot is a double strike. Lysistrata of Athens persuades the women of Greece to refuse their husbands sex until the men make peace. The older women seize the Acropolis and the treasury that funds the war. Sex and money are both withheld.
The men, represented by a magistrate and a half-chorus of old citizens, try force and argument. They fail. Ambassadors from Athens and Sparta, visibly miserable, arrive to negotiate. Lysistrata brokers a settlement, and the play ends in a feast that reunites the divided city and the divided Greek world.
The comedy is bawdy and direct. It is also a political fantasy: women, excluded from the assembly, act as the one party able to stop a war the men cannot end. The play takes up war and peace, family, and the comic inversion of public and private power. Later ages return to it whenever they ask whether private life can compel public order to change.