Lysistrata

Overview

Lysistrata is about eighty pages and was staged in 411 BCE, probably at the Lenaea. The date is the whole context. The Sicilian expedition had been destroyed two years earlier, with the loss of perhaps two hundred ships and forty thousand men. Sparta had occupied a fort in Attica year-round. The treasury was nearly empty, Athens’ subject cities were in revolt, and within months of the performance the democracy was suspended in an oligarchic coup. Aristophanes wrote a farce about a sex strike.

The name means something like disbander of armies, and it is worth registering that Aristophanes gave his heroine a programmatic name and then made her the most competent person on stage.

There are two plots and they are often confused. The young wives refuse sex, which produces the comedy. The old women occupy the Acropolis, where the treasury is kept, which produces the pressure. The second is the serious half: without money the war stops.

A word on the bawdy. This is the filthiest thing on the shelf and any translation that cleans it up has removed the play. The second half depends on a series of increasingly desperate men walking on stage with obvious erections, and the Greek is explicit about it. Older translations render whole speeches in Latin or replace them with dashes.

What happens

Lysistrata waits at dawn, furious, because she has called a meeting and nobody has come. The women arrive late, gossiping. She asks whether they do not miss their husbands, all of whom are away, and gets a chorus of complaint: not a lover to be had, not even a decent piece of leather from Miletus since the Milesians revolted.

Then the proposal. If they want the war over, they must give up sex entirely: no husbands, no lovers, nothing, until a treaty is signed. The women who a minute ago promised to walk through fire begin backing away. Kalonike says she would rather walk through fire. It takes Lampito, the muscular Spartan, to agree first and shame the rest into it, and they swear an oath over a bowl of strong Thasian wine, on the grounds that a sacrifice would waste it.

Meanwhile the older women have taken the Acropolis. A semichorus of old men arrives with logs and fire to smoke them out, wheezing about the weight, and a semichorus of old women arrives with water jars and puts them out. The two choruses quarrel for most of the play and are reconciled at the end.

A magistrate comes with archers to get the money, because the fleet needs paying. Lysistrata comes out to meet him and the scene becomes an argument. He asks what business war is of theirs. She answers that they are the ones who bear it: they give birth to the soldiers and send them out, and they sit at home while their husbands make decisions and are told not to ask. Asked how women could possibly run the city, she explains it as wool-working, and the metaphor is sustained for twenty lines, washing the fleece to get the filth out, picking off the burrs, carding out the cliques that clump together for office, and winding the good wool into one ball to weave a cloak for the people. Then they dress the magistrate in a veil, hand him a basket, and tell him to go and weave, and offer to lay him out for burial.

The strike nearly collapses. Wives invent reasons to go home: wool that will be eaten by moths, flax that needs beating, and one who has stuffed a helmet up her dress and claims to be in labour. Lysistrata drags them back.

Then the scene everyone remembers. Kinesias arrives, visibly suffering, carrying their baby to soften her, and Myrrhine comes down. She agrees, and then requires a bed. Then a mattress. Then a pillow. Then a blanket, then perfume, then different perfume, fetching each in turn and finding one more thing missing, until she disappears entirely and he is left alone with the child.

A Spartan herald arrives in the same condition, and negotiations begin because neither side can stand it. Lysistrata addresses both delegations. She reminds them they sprinkle the same altars at the same festivals, that Sparta once sent an army to save Athens from a helot rising and Athens once freed Sparta from a tyrant, and that while they fight each other the barbarian is waiting.

The territorial negotiation is conducted over the body of a naked girl called Reconciliation, with the delegates pointing at parts of her while naming places they want. It is the crudest joke in the play and it is also an accurate picture of how the map was carved up.

Peace is made, everyone gets drunk, and the play ends with Spartans and Athenians dancing and singing together, in Doric, to Athena.

How to read it

Get a frank translation. Sommerstein and Sarah Ruden are both good and neither flinches. A bowdlerised Lysistrata is unreadable, because the plot is the bawdy.

Read it aloud if you can, or better, watch it. This is farce and much of it is physical.

Keep 411 in view. The audience had lost sons in Sicily two years before and the city’s institutions were about to collapse. The play is a comedy written to people in that condition, and the fantasy of an easy peace is addressed to an audience that had just discovered how hard peace was.

Weigh the feminism carefully rather than settling it. On one side, Lysistrata is competent, her analysis of the war is the only serious one in the play, and she is given a Homeric line to invert. On the other, the comedy runs largely on the assumption that women are drunks who cannot go a week without sex, the heroine’s authority rests on being unusual, and at the end everyone goes home to their husbands. Both readings are supported.

Notice the wool speech. It is a real political programme, expressed in the only technical vocabulary its speaker is supposed to have, and the joke and the argument are the same thing.

Questions it raises

• Is this an antiwar play, or a comedy that uses the war as a premise? What would the difference look like in the text?
• Lysistrata’s analysis, that the war continues because the men who run it cannot be seen to stop, is never refuted. Does the play take it seriously?
• The women’s power is sexual and financial. Which does the plot actually turn on?
• The reconciliation is negotiated over a naked woman’s body. Is that a joke at the delegates’ expense, at hers, or both?
• Aristophanes gives a woman the best arguments in a city where women could not speak in the assembly. What was an Athenian audience laughing at?
• The war did not end in 411, and Athens lost in 404. Does knowing that change how the ending reads?