Lysistrata

Fiction | Play | Adult

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Prologue-Choral Episode 1

Scene 1-Choral Episode 2

Scenes 2-3

Scene 4-Ending Scene

Character Analysis

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Themes

Aristophanes and Athenian Politics

As distinguished from the later genres of Middle and New Comedy, Aristophanes’ Old Comedy is highly political and interested in engaging in civic discourse. Aristophanes’ commitment to raunchy humor is equal to his commitment to tackle serious issues of his day; neither approach weakens the other.

Aristophanes was critical of Athens’ democratic system as it stood in his day. While modern audiences might balk at anti-democratic sentiment, the weaknesses of Athens’ particular brand of democracy which were on full display in the years leading up to Lysistrata. While the Athenian system is touted as the forefather of modern democracy, there were stark differences between it and modern systems of democratic governance.

“Democracy” comes from the Greek words demos (people) and kratos (power), literally meaning “people power.” Athens pioneered the concept of accountable government, and its citizens took great pride in civic engagement (in fact, the word “idiot” is derived from the Greek word idios, which indicated a person who took no part in public life). However, the especially radical form of democracy established in Athens—in which any adult male citizen had the right to an equal vote–also proved volatile. Power changed hands quickly and sometimes at a whim. The procedure of “ostracization” meant any citizen could be expelled from the city for ten years by popular vote. These and other fair-weather practices contributed to instability, a lack of cohesive vision for the governing of state, and—to some highly educated and elite thinkers like Aristophanes—a dangerous level of power afforded to the uneducated and unwise. Aristophanes was especially critical of demagogues (“leaders of the people”) who secured clout through an appeal to desires and biases of the common man (the politician Cleon, his favorite punching bag, was a demagogue).

Lysistrata features several political and topical call outs. It attacks the political leadership of its day, especially the wartime board of the probouloi (represented by the Councilor character). Aristophanes is uniformly distrustful of leaders who rely on the support of the poor and reliably hostile towards constitutional safeguards, especially the payment of jurors. Athens’ commitment to egalitarian governance meant that many democratic services—like jury duty—paid a subsistence wage. While this measure was meant to ensure the courts would not be dominated by the rich, it also created a class of professional leeches who, with no legal training, effectively made a living by misinterpreting the law. Aristophanes jabs at the chorus of old men for being jurors for this reason (e.g. line 380).

Aristophanes also did not spare intellectuals of his day. He loves to mock tragedians, none more so than Euripides, who was perceived in some circles as dangerously brainy and progressive. Aristophanes consistently favors the old over the new (like the older tragedies of Aeschylus) and a traditional education over the clever words and arguments of new-wave philosophers like Socrates, another of his favorite targets.

Finally, Aristophanes makes clear his opinion that Athens should stop pursuing the war and make peace with Sparta as soon as possible. Readers should be careful not to mistake this for anti-war sentimentality. Pacificism would have been a foreign concept to the Greeks, who prized warfare as an important part of their culture. Some Athenians, though, did criticize their city-state’s aggressive foreign policy and refusal to cooperate with their neighbors. Moreover, the Peloponnesian War was a controversial endeavor from the start. Aristophanes’ criticism of it goes back as far as Acharnians (425), where the hero makes a private peace with the Spartans and even mocks an Athenian general. Aristophanes believed—and many scholars agree—that this was Athens’ conflict to end, and it was their greed for money and empire which prolonged it.

The Peloponnesian War and an Appeal to Panhellenic Unity

As in many of his plays, most notably Frogs, Aristophanes uses Lysistrata to suggest that Athens was being weakened not only by its internal deficiencies, but by the Peloponnesian War effort itself. To fully understand the role of the war in Lysistrata, some background context is useful.

The Peloponnesian War lasted almost thirty years (431-404 BCE) and affected nearly every part of the Greek world. It was ostensibly caused by disputes in the 430s between Greece’s most powerful city-states—Athens and Sparta—on how to deal with each other’s allies; both powers variously aided each other’s enemies and embargoed their friends. These disputes notwithstanding, the underlying cause of the war was fear. The Spartans feared Athens’ unbounded imperial domination of the sea, while Athens feared losing freedom of action. Its continued expansion was an important source of funding for its system of government (true democracy does not come cheap).

While Sparta’s hoplites (heavily armed foot soldiers) could easily defeat the Athenian infantry, the Athenian navy had control of the sea. Access to food and supplies from its port of Piraeus meant Athens could hunker down and settle in for the long haul. With the dominant land force, the Spartans focused on invading the Attic region every summer, ravaging the countryside and attempting to engage in open battle on foot. This strategy created untold suffering for the Athenian lower and middle classes. The situation was made even worse when a deadly plague hit Athens in 430 BCE, likely brought about by unsanitary conditions in an overpopulated city.

Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata on the tail end of a war which broke down social and political harmony in Athens and destroyed the Athenian economy. Country dwellers had to annually allow their property to be destroyed by the Spartans as they took refuge in the city, often in unhygienic, uncomfortable public places. Agricultural workers were stricken by poverty. Women took on jobs as wet nurses, weavers, and vineyard arborists. Death was everywhere as a result of combat, starvation, and disease.

Lysistrata also came only a few years after the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415-413 BCE. An Athenian attempt to secure the strategically important island of Sicily was severely undermined by democratic mismanagement and pettiness, resulting in a devastating defeat. A large part of the Athenian empire was in revolt, and the Spartans and their allies took heart at the prospect of a decisive victory. They had not only hammered Athens in Sicily; they now enjoyed an alliance with the powerful Persian empire and had been joined in the Aegean sea by a Syracusan fleet, suggesting they might finally overcome the Athenian navy.

While the war would not end for another decade, some scholars consider the Sicilian expedition to be the moment the tides turned. It was not only a substantial hit in terms of finance and manpower; it was a demoralizing loss. That the war lasted another ten years spoke more to Athenian stubbornness than their real potential for victory, a stubbornness Aristophanes encourages them to overcome in Lysistrata. He, like many of his day, still dreamt of a unified Greece standing together against foreign foes. As Lysistrata urges in lines 1133-4: “You see barbarian armies threating, / But you destroy the towns and lives of Greeks.”

The Rights and Roles of Greek Women

As a comedy centered on the lives of women—and possibly the first in western literature to feature a female heroine—Lysistrata is sometimes read as a proto-feminist play. There is no question that Aristophanes was highly sympathetic to the lived experience of women. Lysistrata focuses especially on their hardships during wartime. For Athenians of Aristophanes’ day, the character Lysistrata’s complaints of dead husbands and delayed marriages were not a philosophical exercise. The worst effect of the Sicilian disaster was the sheer loss of Athenian manpower; tens of thousands were said to have been killed. Their absence must have been felt keenly in the city in 411 BCE.

While Aristophanes is concerned with the experiences of women, it would be inaccurate to call him a feminist. His portrayal of women is complicated to say the least. For every positive depiction of women like Lysistrata, there are also negative, stereotypical characters (like the housewives). Above all, unlike more progressive thinkers like the tragedian Euripides, Aristophanes was a traditionalist. He called not for social revolution, but for a return to orthodox Athenian values.

So what was the traditional role for Athenian women in the fifth century? In the private sphere, they were the managers of the household and the bearers and raisers of children. They were also important to public life, participating in festivals and serving as priestesses. Under Athenian democracy, women could control property and land through inheritance and dowry, but they faced more restrictions than men in terms of selling or gifting that property. Generally speaking, they could only inherit if there were no male heirs. Women of a certain socio-economic status spent most of their time in their own home or in the homes of women of equal standing, avoiding contact with men outside their household or station.

This lifestyle was, of course, limited to women of a very particular class. Poorer free women had more engagement with society working as vendors, innkeepers, agricultural laborers, or sex workers. Others like the hetaerae (elite sex workers) and metics (foreign free people) were learned, musically skilled, independent, and even wealthy. They could publicly interact with men and controlled their own sexuality, but they could not legally marry and lacked the rights of full citizens. Finally, enslaved women (and men) would have been sexually available to Greek men, sex embargo or no. So it is important to note that while Lysistrata works to unite women, she simultaneously excludes many.

Crucially, while Lysistrata was shocking and funny to the Greeks in its subversion of gender roles, that subversion only went so far. Lysistrata and the other women do not ask for permanent changes to society. As Lysistrata makes clear, she would rather play the part of a quiet, obedient girl (773-5). The outrageous behavior of the women is only warranted by the topsy-turvy nature of society due to perpetual war. If men insist on a disordered world in which war never ends, then women have license to create the same disorder the domestic sphere, from which they draw their civic identity. Aristophanes extends this topsy-turvyness to the women’s ability to physically overcome the men, out-debate them, etc., concepts the ancient audience would have found comic and silly. Any threat the audience might have felt from women behaving badly is nullified by the ending: peace is achieved when male control is restored.