Boeotia
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lysistrata loosely translated to "she who disbands armies", is an anti-war Greek comedy, written in 411 BCE by Aristophanes.
Plot
Led by the title character, Lysistrata, the story's female characters barricade the public funds building and withhold sex from their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War and secure peace. In doing so, Lysistrata engages the support of women from Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth. All of the other women are first aghast at Lysistrata's suggestion to withhold sex. Finally, they agree to swearing an oath of allegiance by drinking wine from a shield. This is ironic and therefore comical, because Greek men believed women had no self-restraint, a lack displayed in their alleged fondness for wine as well as for sex.
The play was originally performed at either the Dionysia or a smaller Festival of Dionysus, called the Lenaia festival. A different comedy by Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria, was also produced that year, and it is not clear which play was produced at which festival.
Some people believe that the play also addresses the contributions women could make to society and to policy making, but cannot because their views are ignored as all such considerations are the prerogative of men only. See the exchange between Lysistrata and the magistrate who comes to try to browbeat the women into giving up their plans.
While many people today treat the play as a proto-feminist dialouge, it is not. The play would have been highly comic to Aristophanes' contemporaries, they would not have seen woman having the power as a real occurance, but as a comic idea. While the playwright was extolling the virtues of peace gained by any means, this is overall a comic play. The "woman" would have been played by men, and their inability to deal with the lack of sex as well as their addiction to alcohol makes it even more comic. Throughout, the masculinely portrayed Lysistrata is the only female not entirely connected with the domestic and not weak.
Lysistrata touches upon the poignancy of young women left with no eligible young men to marry because of deaths in the wars: "Nay, but it isn't the same with a man/Grey though he be when he comes from the battlefield/still if he wishes to marry he can/Brief is the spring and the flower of our womanhood/once let slip, and it comes not again/Sit as we may with our spells and our auguries/never a husband shall marry us then."
As with all Greek comedies, the actors portraying male characters wore phalluses, but since audiences of the day were accustomed to this convention, there would be no shock-humour as might be experienced by the modern audiences of today. The dirty joke and double-entrendres present in the play, however, would have been appreciated in the same way that they are today.
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