Lysistrata (link to reading)
Author: Aristophanes
Date: first performed 411 BCE
Location: Greece
Course Unit: Women
Context:
"Produced in the 21st year of the [Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta], and only two years after the miserable Sicilian Expedition (in which Athens lost 200 warships and 35,000 men), Lysistrata revolves around a suit for peace that is also a plot for love. The Greek women have revolted: their confederacy, made up of Athenian, Spartan, Boeotian and Corinthian wives and maidens, has secured the Athenian treasury and placed an embargo upon the city's wealth (needed to finance the war) and, more cruelly, upon all physical association with the menfolk. Until the fighting between Athens and Sparta ceases, there will be no sex. In this way the conflict is radically polarized: Athens and Sparta are soon allies.
Lysistrata is notorious for its racy, almost pornographic, humor, but the physical immediacy of its jokes seems somehow appropriate to the condition of a society deep into a bloody war (the center action of the play is in fact a siege). If it is coarse and blunt in its expression, these qualities correspond to the bluntness, the casualness of the deaths that overtook so many Athenian men in those war-torn days. In Lysistrata, there is naturally a sense of desperation, which Aristophanes sublimates into a truly hysterical comedy." (Aristophanes v-vi)
Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Edited by Edward Einhorn, Dover, 2007.
Topics/Questions to Consider While Reading:
How are women represented?
How do the women interact with each other?
Would we consider this a "feminist" text by modern standards?
Does it meet the requirements of the Bechdel test?