What a fascinating play. Either Aristophanes was a man ahead of his time, or women in Ancient Greece were not the way I had previously learned they were.

Lysistrata is a woman who knows here mind, a woman confident in her sexuality, a woman who has her own thoughts and ideas about what is happening in her world, and she is going to do something with these ideas. She is tired of war, and she is going to stop it. Her friends are confident, sexually secure women. These are not timid women in arranged marriages, staying home to care for their families while their men make all the choices and decisions for them. These are women with a mind...Hear them Roar!

Yes, the play is satire, and there is a lot of talk and innuendo of sex and penises. But what I most took away from this story was how modern the women of Ancient Greece really might have been. And I find this fascinating.

If you want to call yourself a feminist - then read this. Women sorting the men out, more than 2400 years ago.

Shame on you present day Greeks! Although, this is one of those Ancients that they trot out on a regular basis here in Cyprus - it's a comedy.

"¡Oh sexo disoluto! ¡Y luego nos admiraremos de ser maltratadas en tragedias! Sólo servimos para el amor"

Esta comedia definitivamente es una de las que menos risa me ha causado de Aristófanes, sobre todo porque a mi parecer no tiene tanta, ni las situaciones y parlamentos son tan desubicados como de costumbre, aparte que las bromas creo yo están fundadas en palabras bastante subidas de tono que no me hicieron tanta gracia. El tema sin embargo conmueve un poco pues sabiendo el resultado que tuvo la guerra del Peloponeso y el argumento de la obra llama un poco a la reflexión.
La historia empieza con el llamamiento que hace Lisístrata a las mujeres, ella es una heroína en toda regla, quien harta de la Guerra Civil en Grecia entre Atenas y Esparta, decide reunirlas para lograr con ellas que los hombres hagan la paz. Su plan es privar a los hombres de tener sexo con ellas. al hacerlo muchas mujeres inicialmente impetuosas (cansadas también de verse privadas de sus maridos o a veces muertos) posteriormente van decayendo por sus propias "ansias". Entre ellas se encuentran Calónice, Mírrina y otras más.
Todo este alboroto llamará la atención a los ancianos y a otros magistrados quienes al inicio indignados y despreciándolas luego se dan cuenta que serán un hueso duro de roer.
Como menciono el final demasiado idílico contrasta con la dura realidad que pasó la ciudad de Atenas lo que me llama a compasión.

"Nosotras tenemos doble parte (en la guerra), pues primero parimos los hijos y los enviamos al ejército. Después, en vez de gozar en la flor de nuestra juventud de los placeres del amor, estamos como viudas, gracias a la guerra"

After listing this on my "read" shelf for years, I discovered last month that the "translation" I read as a teen was actually a very free adaptation, which only loosely resembles what Aristophanes actually wrote. Naturally, I wanted to correct that mistake; and since I was looking for a short read right now, and had promised a Goodreads friend that I'd soon review the actual play, I worked it in over the past couple of days. Note: the above Dover edition is not actually the one I read; I read the translation by Charles T. Murphy, in the collection An Anthology of Greek Drama.

As the short description above suggests, this play was written and presented against the background of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies, which included pretty much the whole Greek world), which at the time had dragged on for 20 years. (It would drag on for seven more.) Though he was a patriotic Athenian, Aristophanes had no liking for the war or any of the suffering and evils that it brought in its train; he'd written other plays with the message "End it now!" This is the best known of his anti-war productions, in which he imagines the women of Greece "fighting" for peace with a very elemental, and quintessentially feminine, weapon: sexual blackmail.

In assessing the play itself, it should be noted immediately that it's not as salacious as the Goodreads descriptions of some editions imply. There's no explicit sex or outright obscenity; and though the women's vow includes non-marital as well as marital sex, the former is hardly mentioned; it's taken for granted that the usual setting for sex is in marriage. It's also taken for granted that, in that context, it's a natural and normal function that both genders like, a lot. (At the time this was written, while Pythagoras' physical world-disparaging, anti-sex philosophy was on the landscape, it hadn't made nearly the intellectual impact on the literate classes that it would from the time of Plato on; voluntary celibacy wasn't a common phenomenon, and virtually all adults married early by our standards.) That's not, in itself, an unwholesome fact to recognize. That said, the treatment here does include a certain amount of earthy humor, and some that descends from earthy to crude. (My impression was that some of this was pandering to the tastes of the coarser and less mature elements of the audience; the erection references, for instance, struck me as being on the intellectual level of the flatulence references that my grandsons imagine to be funny --but one's in kindergarten and one's in preschool. :-( Some of the dialog in this vein also came across as forced and unrealistic. (Of course, not all the double entendres are readily apparent to modern readers.) Aristophanes also exaggerates, to make his point, the effect that sexual deprivation would have on both genders; even for healthy adults who are used to regular marital relations (and these were actually greatly interrupted anyway by the mens' military service, a contradiction the author mentions but glosses over!), I don't think five days would suffice to reduce the males to the straits it does here. (Five months, or five weeks, maybe. :-) ) For me as a modern reader, another difficulty was that I couldn't follow all of the topical, cultural, and mythological references that the original audience would have understood immediately. (This edition doesn't have notes.) That's not a fair criticism of Aristophanes' work, but it did effect my own personal enjoyment, and hence my rating. (I also couldn't follow the thought of a couple of the choral speeches, which I found confusing.)

But though all the factors above cost the play a couple of stars, I liked it (my rating would actually have been 3 1/2 stars if I could give half stars, though I didn't round up). The anti-war message, and the reminders to both sides that they have reason to feel gratitude, not enmity, to the other, comes through loud and clear, and I give Aristophanes a lot of kudos for that. (He's a testament to the long and honorable heritage of anti-war conservatism!) Moreover, the treatment of women is outstanding, especially in the context of a very sexist culture that disparaged them! Lysistrata is depicted as a strong, wise born leader; male canards about women are punctured and lampooned, and the men get the worst of the physical confrontations (which, in performance, would have had a gloriously slapstick flavor). In Greek theater parlance, a "comedy" is any play that's not tragic; but this does have plenty of actual humor, both verbal and situational.

IMO, the modern adaptation I read as a teen improved the work in some respects. Alas, I can't recall the exact bibliographic information!

Saving a real review until I read a better translation because the one I read for school was. not good.
This had a really interesting set-up but I think at the end of the day I like sex jokes much more than an entire sex comedy.

This was such a comic relief after weeks of Homer. This play is lighthearted and funny, though it deals with several important subjects. If it weren't on my syllabus, I probably wouldn't have heard of it for a long while. But I'm glad I got a chance to read it, though I'd be interested in getting hold of a more traditionally translated edition. I'm not sure I loved the liberties this translator took with the text.

Read this for work, since I'm (very excited to be) editing a project that's a very loose retelling of Aristophanes' play and set during the American Civil War (keep your eyes out in spring '24!). Listened to the audiobook, which the voice actor fully committed to narrating as if it were a feisty young adult romance––made for an unexpectedly wonderful reading experience.

Love – or at least lust – wins out over war in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; everybody knows that. But what stands out about this Penguin Books edition of Lysistrata is the way in which Lysistrata is brought together with two other, perhaps lesser-known plays from Aristophanes’ canon, all of which are united by the way in which the great Athenian comic dramatist uses comedy to confront the society of his time. Two of these plays -- Lysistrata itself and The Acharnians -- provide trenchant commentary on the Peloponnesian War in which Athens was then engaged against Sparta; the third, The Clouds, is equally successful as a comedy of ideas.

The title of The Acharnians (425 B.C.) made me ask, “Who were the Acharnians?” A quick bit of research showed me that Acharnae was a deme or district of Athens whose citizens were renowned for military valor; for a U.S. analogy, imagine an American playwright calling a play The Texans and thus capitalizing on Texans’ reputation for particular fighting spirit within U.S. culture. The Acharnians of The Acharnians are the play’s chorus – a group of old war veterans, the kind of guys who like to sit around and recount their courage of old, while expecting the younger generation to emulate their example. And these old Acharnians are anything but happy with the play’s protagonist, Dikaiopolis. You see, Dikaiopolis (whose name, to me, sounds more fitting for a city than for a person) sees the absurdity of the Peloponnesian War (The Acharnians was first performed in the war’s sixth year), and wishes to make what amounts to a separate peace. Working with the guidance of the immortal Amphitheus (whose presence in the play seems to indicate that the Olympian gods would smile upon an Athenian decision to turn away from war), Dikaiopolis successfully breaks with the militaristic policies of post-Periclean Athens, and enjoys the fruits of peace thereby. Aristophanes’ approval of Dikaiopolis’ brave and lonely stand is clear by play’s end, when the militaristic general Lamachus, the play’s chief antagonist, is reduced to begging Dikaiopolis to sell him three thrushes and an eel. Dikaiopolis scornfully replies, “Him? I wouldn’t sell him anything if he gave me his shield! Let him shake his crests at the salt-fish vendors!” (p. 51); and the play’s chorus heartily approves, addressing the Athenian audience directly: “Citizens, see the reward of his wisdom,/How peace wins him many a fine business deal” (p. 51). Clearly, Aristophanes was wishing that the citizens and the government of Athens would see the wisdom of Dikaiopolis’ stepping away from war.

The Clouds (423 B.C.) is probably most interesting to modern readers because of its depiction of Socrates. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates is a gentle, diffident figure, bringing his interlocutors to the truth through patient questioning. The Socrates of The Clouds, by contrast, lacks both the humility and the heroism of Plato’s Socrates. In contrast with The Acharnians’ Dikaiopolis, whose anti-war convictions mean that his heart is in the right place, the protagonist of The Clouds, the elderly farmer Strepsiades, is a thoroughgoing scoundrel. Debt-ridden because of the extravagant ways of his son Pheidippides, Strepsiades wants to learn the art of rhetoric because he believes that doing so will help him argue his way out of debt; and Socrates assures Strepsiades that “You’ll become a really smooth, smarmy talker – the finest flower in the oratorical garden” (84). The Socrates of The Clouds is marked in large part by his impiety toward the Olympian gods – when Zeus, the king of the gods, is invoked, Socrates scornfully replies, “Zeus? Who’s Zeus? What rubbish you talk! There is no Zeus!” (p. 88) – and perhaps it is no wonder that in one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates wonders aloud if Aristophanes’ portrayal of him in The Clouds may have led to the Athenian state’s decision to execute him 24 years later. As for the resolution of The Clouds, suffice it to say that neither Strepsiades nor Pheidippides benefits from this unethical attempt to use rhetoric as a way to avoid paying one’s bills.

Lysistrata (411 B.C.) is certainly the best-known of these plays; “oh, yeah, that Greek play where the women all go on a sex strike.” The very scenario seems replete with comic possibilities; and yet, as with so many of the greatest comedies, Lysistrata has a deadly serious subtext. By the time Lysistrata was first staged, the Peloponnesian War had been going on for nineteen years. Small wonder, then, that the satirical edge of Lysistrata seems harsher than that of The Acharnians, as the play’s protagonist and title character calls upon all the women of Athens to withhold sex from their husbands, and for the women of Sparta to do likewise, until the husbands of both warring city-states see fit to make peace. “We’re at home, beautifully made up, and we walk around the house wearing sheer lawn shifts and nothing else…and we keep our distance and refuse to come to them – then they’ll make peace soon enough, you’ll see” (p. 146). As translator and commentator Allan Sommerstein of the University of Nottingham points out, Athenian men in real life would have had other outlets for the release of their sexual energies; but within the fictive world set up by Aristophanes, Lysistrata’s brave scheme works. Seemingly against all odds, the Athenian and Spartan men do make peace, and Lysistrata gets the last word: “And let us for the future all endeavor/Not to repeat our errors, never ever!” (p. 191). Make love, not war. Give peace a chance. With 54 wars of varying intensity currently under way around the world, one wishes that Lysistrata’s vision might somehow come true.

In accordance with the tradition of excellence established by the Penguin Classics series, Sommerstein’s introduction footnotes do a great deal of good in setting these plays within the context of their times. For any student of classical culture, or of comedy generally, this collection of Aristophanes’ works is essential. Whether you want the high comedy of ideas or the low comedy of sex talk and bodily functions, Aristophanes is the comedian for you.

54. Lysistrata/The Acharnians/The Clouds by Aristophanes, translated by Alan H. Sommerstein
translated: 1973
format: 250 page Penguin Classics paperback (27th printing of a 1973 publication)
acquired: May
read: Aug 26-30
rating: 4 stars

This was a nice corrective after all the dire Greek Tragedies. Aristophanes is really a wonderful addition to the ancient literature. His plays are charming and actually funny, and also full of fart and sex jokes. He was much less prude than we are today.

There are two challenges to reading his plays. One is it's rife with contemporary references, and this leads to extensive notes. As a reader you kind need to let this stuff go, or it breaks up the play. The other is it's full of Greek puns and jokes that don't translate to English. Sommerstein chose to replace these with bad, not-at-all funny English ones. I'm not sure what a translator should do (remember, a live performance can't use footnotes), but I like to think there are more graceful ways to handle this.

But don't be put off by that. These are enjoyable.

The Acharnians 425 bce

The old farmer Dikaiopolis, opening the play with a yawn at the Athens assembly, makes for wonderful character in comedy. Tired of Athen's war with Sparta and with Athen's assembly's inability to deal with it effectively, he makes his own personal peace with Sparta, and then welcomes all the enemies of state to his farm for trade. His defense against the outrage of various officials is his innocence. In the give and take, Aristophanes manages to mock about every Athenian contemporary leader.

At one point the leader of the chorus addressed the audience in defense of the poet - that is of Aristophanes himself:

Be sure, though, and hold on to him. He'll carry on impeaching
every abuse he sees, and give much valuable teaching,
Making you wiser, happier men.

The Clouds 423 bce (only an uncompleted revised version survives, from ~419-416 bce)

When Strepsiades, another simpleton, finds himself overwhelmed with debt, he has the perfect solution, he'll head over the thinkery and learn how to argue himself out of the debt. He ends up under the personal tutorship of Socrates, who initiates him (playing on Orphic rites) and promises him success.

The play makes fun of the sophists, who taught the art of argument.

Socrates was active when this was performed. The play makes many crazy claims about him in humor. They are intended to be silly and were wildly untrue. Nontheless, the exact types of slights insinuated against Socrates here, such as that he was an atheist (he wasn't), were actually used against him legally some 16 years later. Socrates would be condemned to death. Anyway, here, it is actually entertaining, and it is hard to believe it was intended as more than in jest.

Lysistrata 411 be

Lysistrata is best encountered without a summary. So, in an effort not to spoil it, I'll just say that it was really funny in text and would surely be hundred times funnier in performance.

What strikes me in this collection overall is how unexpected and refreshing it was. Apparently raunchy humor was big part of Athenian drama, after all these plays were performed in celebration of the god of wine, Dionysos. But Aristophanes provides an intelligent humor. His plays are an argument for peace and against the ridiculousness of war. Too bad no one in power was listening. They never seem to.

Today Alyssa Milano called for a sex strike in response to Georgia's abortion ban, which raises two questions: 1) Alyssa Milano is still a thing?! and 2) Haven't I heard this before? I can help with the second thing. Milano got it from Aristophanes, who in 411 BC invented the sex strike and, for all you know, dildos.

n  n

It's 411 BC and Athens is deep in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta and everyone's pretty stressed about it. In Aristophanes' brilliantly simple idea, the women of both sides organize and throw a sex strike. "Stop fighting," they say, "Or no more humping!" The plot is that they say that and then it works. There's some stuff about dildos, for obvious reasons, but that's about all there is to it. Unfortunately it was a made-up story; in real life this didn't happen and Athens lost the war and that was basically the end of the Golden Age of Democracy. But the play is great - easily Aristophanes's best surviving play - funny and filthy and don't forget, the thing about Greek plays is that you can knock one out in an hour and a glass of wine, so why haven't you read this?


Translation and illustration courtesy of Valerie Schrag for The Graphic Canon

Alyssa Milano, who played a kid on the 80s TV show Who's The Boss and is now still a thing, isn't the first to try the Lysistrata strategy. It's been done in places as diverse as Colombia, Nigeria, and Italy. It comes up in the US every time Republicans do something particularly assheaded (so, daily).

It's not an ineffective strategy, and I don't mean to belittle Alyssa Milano, who performed the voice of "Bimini" in 2012's Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 and is totally still a thing. Georgia's abortion ban is a nightmare and if this is what it takes it's a small price to pay. (That's what she said! Dunked on my own dick!) And the play's not ineffective either. Like all the best ideas, it's extremely simple and it involves dildos.

Translations
Valerie Schrag, as mentioned above, has a comic version for the Graphic Canon that's super fun but pretty direly abridged.
Douglass Parker has one for this common Aristophanes collection that's fine but it's trying very very hard to be as cool as Aristophanes was and failing. If you've found a great translation, please do let me know.

I wanted to read this book for quite some time and... I have to admit, the expectations were high. First of all, I like Greek literature, especially the Drama & secondly, this play build-up around itself a kind of feminist mythos in it's afterlife. So... I'm sorry to report that the feminist mythos isn't really present here. I HAD fun reading the first act where the women plan their strike and have several fits of hysterics over losing their husbands'/lovers' dicks (because, you know, penis is essential for every woman's pleasure...). As a campy read that WAS kind of hilarious (unintentionally, sadly...), but then the drive kind of drops and... the rest of the play is really boring. Part of this might be my translation, which really wasn't great, but... this is my experience and I'm not sure if I want to invest more time into this and re-read it in a different translation... definitely not at the moment. I might try another play by Aristophanes in the future, but I'm not really enthused around it at the moment, which can't be said about getting my hands on the last couple of plays I didn't read from Euripides.

These are very generous three stars from me, I think my enjoinment for the most part was closer to two, but... since I didn't read the original, I'm being a bit more forgiving here...

Ladies! Ladies! Step right up and learn the mysterious lore of ancient Greece! Read Lysistrata and you, too, can learn to use the most fearsome Weapon ever devised to combat male Tyranny and lousy Government. By the time you finish this magnificent Book, you will know exactly how to wield the most powerful Secret Weapon in history! The best news of all: No purchase required. You're probably already carrying it with you!

P.S. The story of L is couched as a comedy, but I'm in a contant state of surprise that in the 2500 years since this play was penned, and after countless theatrical productions down through the years; after innumerable imitations and uncountable literary references, still nobody has learned the lesson. If you need proof of that, just look around you.

P.P.S. And if you need a nice dose of downer after finishing this one, try The Trojan Women.