Episode 36: War and Peace and Sex

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 36: War and Peace and Sex. This program is about the play Lysistrata, written by the classical Greek playwright Aristophanes, and first staged in the city of Athens in about 411 BCE. Lysistrata might be the single most famous work of ancient Greek comedy. It’s a magnificent, hilarious, gross, and in the end, heartwarming and optimistic play, and a fine example of how comedy was a cornerstone of classical Athenian society. Aristophanes himself grew out of a long and rich tradition of political satire, political satire enabled by Athens’ unique democratic system. In the hands of Aristophanes and other theatrical comedians, comic plays could make and break political careers, deflate pomp and demagoguery, and even change the course of history.

In today’s program, we will first hear the story of Aristophanes’ playLysistrata. Then, we’ll learn about the historical climate that produced this wonderful play – what was going on in Athens’ history during the turbulent winter of 411 BCE, what Lysistrata likely meant to its original audience, and how the play fits in with Aristophanes’ other and less famous surviving works.

The title of this episode – Episode 36 – is War and Peace and Sex. And that should serve as a warning to you. There is a lot of graphic nudity in this play. There are explicit references to sex, and male and female bodies, and the entire story is focused on what we might call a sexual emergency in Greece. There are four letter words that I will not bleep out, because they occur in the original text. I generally avoid harsh language in order to ensure as family-friendly a show as possible, but we’re talking about Aristophanes here, and Aristophanes is rated R. So, if bad words and R-rated humor sound disagreeable to you, I respectfully advise you to consider listening to something else. And otherwise, let me say that for all ofLysistrata’s crudeness on the surface, it’s actually quite a kind story. People have been reading, circulating, copying, acting in, producing, staging, and watching this play for 2,400 years. That means, that even if it’s filled to the brim with references to penises, and vaginas, and that kind of thing, the play Lysistrata says something profound and enduring about the human condition. So, let me offer you just a moment minute of background information upfront, and then, we’ll dive right into Aristophanes’ most famous play. [music]

Lysistrata‘s Time and Place: Athens in the Winter of 411 BCE

Let’s talk about the city of Athens in 411 BCE. Aristophanes lived from about 450 until about 385. When he was twenty years old, his city became embroiled in a war. This war would last for twenty-seven years. And, as students of ancient Greek history know, this war, fought from 431-404 BCE, was called the Peloponnesian War. During the most productive period of his life, between the ages of twenty and forty-seven or so, Aristophanes lived, often under siege, in wartime Athens, as Athens fought Sparta and its allies. Because Aristophanes was producing comedy, set in contemporary Athens, Aristophanes’ plays contain dozens of references to the Peloponnesian War – to important statesmen, generals and citizens who influenced the course of the war, and to events taking place during this period of history that were affecting all of Greece.

The play that we’re about to read – again, Lysistrata, was staged in 411 BCE, in Athens, and it was supposed to take place in 411 BCE, in Athens. That’s easy enough to understand, but it sets the work of Aristophanes and other comedic writers apart from Athens’ tragic writers. The most famous works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are set in the remote past, in times of legend. Their characters – the Agamemnons, and the Oedipuses, and the Medeas – are most often mythological figures who would have been familiar to audiences by means of collective oral, musical, and theatrical traditions. Aristophanes’ work, on the other hand, reflects the pop culture, the fads and oddities, and the controversies and political realities of an in-crowd of Athenians who attended his plays. The pervasive focus on contemporary history at the heart of Aristophanes’ plays makes them perfect for a podcast like ours, because we’re going to get to laugh at all of his naughty jokes, but we’re also going to walk away with a deeper understanding of what it actually would have been like to be an everyday Athenian, living at the end of the 400s BCE.

Because Lysistrata is set in Aristophanes’ Athens, during a specific moment of ancient Greek history, we know a lot about specific events that compelled Aristophanes to write Lysistrata, and other related plays. By the year 411 BCE, the Peloponnesian War had been on and off for 21 long, complicated years. Political figures had risen and fallen, generals had come into prominence and then died, new cult religions were spreading and flourishing, and various other trends had swept through ancient Greek civilization. We’ll get into this history with some degree of detail after the play, but what you really need to know is that when this famous production was first staged, an ugly, two-decade long war was almost done pulverizing ancient Greek civilization.

The Peloponnesian War was not, like the Persian Wars that had happened two generations before, a fight to preserve Greek independence from a distant foreign conglomerate. The Peloponnesian War of 431-404 was a conflict between Greeks, and other Greeks – a war in which egotism and poor diplomacy, profiteering and ambitious politicking kept armies on the field, year after year. Economies were drained, commerce was disrupted, and prejudice and factionalism thrived as opportunistic leaders lashed the masses into renewed campaign seasons. For anyone with a panhellenic, or collectivistic Greek, sensibility, it would have been an absolutely infuriating and disgusting time to live. And indeed, the stage comedy that survives from ancient Greece demonstrates that as army after army was put on the field – as spears were put in hands and a perpetually withering population of rowers were seated on the benches of warships, ancient Greece’s satirists went to work. They satirized everyone, and everything under the sun, but a special target of Peloponnesian War era satire were the powerful politicos and military men who gained followings and fortunes through warmongering and bellicose rhetoric. And if in the 420s, or 410s BCE you were an Athenian demagogue, or a politician turned general taking advantage of the pain and desperation of your city, there was one man who scared you more than any Spartan general or Theban admiral. And man this was Aristophanes. Enemies on the field might send profiteering military leaders to honorable deaths. But Aristophanes, with a play like Lysistrata, could incinerate their reputations and end their political careers in front of an entire city.

The play Lysistrata is set just outside of the Acropolis at Athens. In 411 BCE, this was the religious center of the city, and also a place where emergency stores of money were maintained. These emergency stores of money are a crucial element of the play’s plot. The main character of the play, a woman named Lysistrata, has a house down at the foot of the Acropolis, and her friends live nearby. As the play opens, Lysistrata is just outside of her house, and she’s waiting for her friends to arrive.

There’s just one other thing to keep in mind before this play begins. The play Lysistrata has an unusual feature, in that it has not one chorus, but two choruses. We’ve seen a lot of choruses in this podcast – from the conservative elders and bloodthirsty monsters of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, to the Theban citizenry of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, to the violent and drunk zealots of Euripides’ Bacchae. But we have not seen two choruses onstage at the same time. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the first chorus is a group of old men. The second chorus is a group of old women. And because the central feud in Lysistrata is essentially girls against boys, the pair of choruses are able to enact this dichotomy in ways that are amusing, profane, and utterly entertaining.

With all that said, we’re ready to begin the play. Unless otherwise noted, quotes in the summary you’re about to hear will come from the Alan Sommerstein translation, published by Penguin Books in 2002. So settle into your Ancient Greek theater bench, enjoy the springtime breeze off of the Aegean Sea, and get ready for one of humanity’s most beloved plays. [music]

The Opening: Lysistrata Lays Out Her Plan

It was early morning at the western edge of the Acropolis, in the city of Athens. A residential neighborhood sat quietly in the shade as the city began to come to life. From the door of one of the houses, a woman emerged. Her posture was impatient and ever so slightly surly. She looked around hastily, in search of any inbound arrivals, and saw no one. While she was just a single woman, of average size and appearance, she had quite an imposing name. Her name was “Lysistrata.” And Lysistrata means the “Liquidator of Armies.”¹

Lysistrata was displeased at the sight of the empty street. She had summoned an assembly of women, and they weren’t there. Lysistrata said that if she had tried to bring everyone together for a celebration, they’d already be in attendance. But soon enough, Lysistrata’s neighbor appeared. Her name was Calonice. And Calonice said it was reasonable that the other women hadn’t shown up yet. After all, they their duties to attend to – their waiting on their husbands and taking care of babies. Hearing her friend Calonice reciting all the chores that women had to do, Lysistrata interjected, “But damnit, there are more important things than that!. . .Why, Calonice, we women have the salvation of all Greece in our hands. . .if all the women join together – not just us [Athenians], but the Peloponnesians and Boeotians as well – then united we can save Greece.”²

Lysistrata’s friend Calonice was confused. Women, after all, could do little more than wear soft gowns and pretty makeup and ornamental slippers. How could they stop the war? Lysistrata said they would stop the war with those soft gowns and pretty makeup and ornamental slippers. They would stop the war, and no one would fight for an entire generation. Except, where were those other women who were supposed to show up?

Finally, after Lysistrata and Calonice talked a bit further, some other women showed up. One of them was called Myrrhine. Additionally, a Spartan woman named Lampito showed up with some Theban and Corinthian women. Together they were a colorful lot. Lysistrata told Lampito that the Spartan that Lampito looked gorgeous, and strong – like Lampito could take down a bull. To showcase her fortitude, the Spartan woman demonstrated a high jump. In fact, Lampito the Spartan was a source of fascination to Lysistrata’s friend Calonice, as well, who touched the Spartan woman’s breasts admiringly. More female-on-female body inspections followed in earnest. A Boeotian girl’s dress was lifted and her “fine broad lowlands” (144) and “carefully plucked. . .herbage” (144) were proclaimed splendid. A Corinthian woman’s belly and breasts were pointed out and declared perfectly curvy. After the women complemented one another’s bodies, it was time to get down to business.

Lysistrata asked her friends how long it had been since they’d seen their husbands. Calonice, Lysistrata’s Athenian neighbor, said hers had been gone for five months. Myrrhine, the other Athenian woman, said hers had been gone seven months. And Lampito the Spartan said hers had been absent on and off as long as she could remember. Lysistrata asked the assembly a question. Did they want to stop the war, she asked? Calonice the Athenian said she’d give up everything to stop the war. Myrrhine the Athenian said she’d cut herself in half and donate half of herself to stop the war. Lampito the Spartan said she’d climb an enormous mountain southwest of Sparta. Lysistrata nodded. She looked around at the women and chose her words carefully. Lysistrata said, “Women, if we want to force the men to make peace, we must renounce” (145). Lysistrata broke off, looking around, and they urged her to continue. And after some prodding, Lysistrata explained her plan. “We must renounce – sex” (145). [sound effect]

The women grew pallid. There were tears. Heads shook. They began to move away from Lysistrata. Myrrhine the Athenian said yes – she’d cut herself in half, or walk through fire – and Calonice the Athenian agreed – they would do anything at all. But they couldn’t possibly give up sex! Only the Spartan Lampito, once asked, said yes. It would be difficult, but she could relinquish sex.

Lysistrata turned to the others. Wouldn’t they reconsider? She was asked exactly how this giving up sex would aid the war effort. Lysistrata explained. All the women of Greece would slink around their homes in gauzy gowns, nude underneath, and “we walk round the house wearing sheer lawn shifts and nothing else; the men are all horny and can’t wait to leap on us; and we keep our distance and refuse to come to them – then they’ll make peace soon enough, you’ll see” (146). The assembly of women considered it. What if, said Myrrhine the Athenian, the men were okay without sex? What if the women were all just disregarded? Lysistrata assured them that if worst came to worst, they would all still have their dog skin leather dildos. And in the likely event that you’re wondering, yes, indeed, dog skin leather dildos were evidently part of classical Greek history.

The dog skin leather dildos fallback plan did not convince the assembly of women that Lysistrata’s scheme would work. Myrrhine the Athenian asked what would happen if the men beat them, or raped them, and Lysistrata said that against these they could employ frigid resistance and cold censure.

The Swearing of the Oath

And finally, the gathering of women was won over. They would, they resolved, deny their husbands sex until the war finished. After a question from Lampito the Spartan, Lysistrata explained some of the fine points of her plan. Atop the Acropolis, there was a large emergency fund of money, stored in the Temple of Athena. The women, said Lysistrata, would occupy the Acropolis, thus hindering Athens’ war effort.

Now that they had a plan, the women decided that they needed to swear an oath to carry their mission through. There was talk of a sacrifice, and then, possibly, the sacrifice of a white stallion, but in the end, they decided on using a large container of unmixed wine as the centerpiece of their ritual. The women then gathered around the wine, and repeated the solemn vows that Lysistrata recited. The women vowed not to let their husbands approach them with erections. They vowed to wear thin dresses and enticing makeup. They vowed that if they were forced into sex, they would not thrust back, or assent to lift their feet up to the ceiling. They vowed not to – well – they vowed not to do some other stuff, which Alan Sommerstein in the Penguin edition translates as “I will not adopt the lioness-on-a-cheesegrater position” (149). There’s a footnote that explains that one – I invite you to buy a copy of the book and find out for yourself.

As the women took their vows, sudden news arrived among them. The Acropolis had indeed been overtaken by women! I – uh – I guess that in the ninety seconds in which Lysistrata and company took their vows, the Acropolis had utterly fallen to a bunch of unseen women who had somehow skipped the vows. Anyway, the Acropolis had fallen, and the women resolved to hold it, no matter what. Now, a scene change takes place. Probably at the original production, a wheeled platform called an ekkukelma brought out a new skene, or scene painting, depicting the Acropolis. Lysistrata and her companions then hurried into the secured Acropolis, prepared to guard it to the last. [music]

The set for the remainder of Lysistrata would have been a recognizable image of the Acropolis. The painting is Reconstruction of the Acropolis and Areus Pagus in Athens by Leo von Klenze (1846).

The Male Chorus Arrives

Once Lysistrata and her companions had gone into the Acropolis, a company of old men arrived onstage. These old men will serve as the one of the play’s two choruses, observing and reacting to the unexpected sexual boycott. The play Lysistrata, as I mentioned earlier, is unusual in its use of two choruses. One is a chorus of old men, and the other is a chorus of old women – this is the first time we’re seeing either of the two choruses. The old men of the male chorus brought with them logs of green wood, and torches, and containers filled with hot coals. Their intention was to send smoke and fire through the Acropolis, and to retake it from the usurping women.

Looking up at the occupied Acropolis, the chorus of old men cursed the insubordinate women. The old men likened the insubordinate women to adulteresses, and then, to a Spartan tyrant who had once held the Acropolis some hundred years before. The old men were resolute, and yet as they tried to stoke the fires of their hot coals, the smoke blew into their eyes. They tried to stoke the coals several more times, having the same problem, and when they tried to set their coal pots down, smoke poured into their eyes again. I imagine this was a great piece of physical comedy when it was originally staged. Eventually, the old men managed to set their pots down, and continued to try and light the wood they had brought with them. Their efforts weren’t successful, but they did manage to attract some attention. Specifically, they attracted the attention of the female chorus – a chorus of old women who will naturally serve as counterpoint to the first chorus of old men.

The Female Chorus Arrives

The second chorus – the one made up of old women – saw the smoke caused by the first chorus and hurried onstage. And just as the old men had brought fire, the old women brought water, in a nice symbolic pairing of the male warmongering and female peacemaking that’s at the heart of the play Lysistrata. Naturally, a confrontation soon took place.

The leader of the women accosted the leader of the men. She said they were treacherous scum, profaning the sacred environs of the gods. The leaders of the two groups squared off against one another. The male leader said it was time for the men to put down their sticks, and give the women what they deserved – a punch in the eye. The female leader announced that if he did, she would retaliate by tearing his testicles off. Tempers rose quickly. Violent threats were voiced by the two chorus leaders. The leader of the men was called an “old corpse” (155) and the leader of the women was called a “rotting relic” (155), and I think these lines remind us that even though frightful threats are being voiced in the play, those voicing them are sufficiently feeble that the whole altercation was comedic.

Fortunately, no real violence unfolded. The women dashed their water all over the men, and soon the men were shivering and thinking of using their coal pots to get warm again. The situation seemed to be defused, but then, a new group appeared onstage. There was a stern magistrate, dressed in the most formal clothing. He brought with him two slaves bearing iron bars, and four heavily armed police officers from the northeastern lands of Scythia.

The Magistrate Attempts to Take Control

The magistrate looked around witheringly. The mess at the foot of the Acropolis, the magistrate said, of course just a result of women practicing one of the newfangled religions. Women were insolent, and their carelessness and faddish tendencies were harmful to everyone. The leader of the male chorus saw the magistrate and voiced his complaint – he and his companions, he said, had been assaulted, just as humiliatingly, they’d been made to be soaking wet, as though they had all peed themselves!

The magistrate was unsympathetic. Men, he said, did everything they could to nurse women’s vices. Using memorable innuendoes involving necklace pins sliding out of holes and tender pinkie toes needing to be loosened up, the magistrate emphasized that men were always catering to their wives’ most carnal desires. The magistrate said it was time to put an end to Lysistrata’s absurd occupation of the Acropolis, and a moment later, he had his slaves move in with their iron bars to force their way inside. [music]

Lysistrata Speaks with the Magistrate

Lysistrata, standing in the threshold of the Acropolis, said “No need to use crowbars; I’m coming out of my own free will. What’s the use of crowbars? It’s not crowbars that we need, it’s intelligence and common sense” (157). The magistrate told an officer to grab Lysistrata and restrain her, but Lysistrata said there would be dire consequences if he did. The magistrate ordered a second officer to grab Lysistrata and tie her up, but at this – and I’m quoting Alan Sommerstein’s stage directions in the Penguin edition, “a ferocious-looking OLD WOMAN comes out of the Acropolis and belligerently confronts them” (157). And what did this old woman say? She said, “If you so much as lay a finger on her, by [our ancestors], I’ll hit you so hard you’ll shit all over the place!” (158).

Everyone stared at the old woman, but the magistrate regained his composure and ordered the errant women to be restrained. Only, a second old woman appeared from the Acropolis, and said she’d give anyone who touched Lysistrata a black eye, and then a third that any assailant of Lysistrata would have their hair torn out. The magistrate told his four police officers to charge – and fighting broke out onstage. Lysistrata called out to the “daughters of the porridge and vegetable market” (158) and soon a large group of formidable elderly women set upon the police officers and trounced them.

After some more dialogue, the result of the quarrel onstage was clear. The women were superior in numbers and resolution, and so the magistrate was forced to result to questioning them, rather than attacking them physically. The magistrate asked why Lysistrata and the others were there. Why had they taken the Acropolis?

Lysistrata was quite clear. She said she and the other women wanted to stop the war, and keep the city’s money out of the hands of warmongers. The magistrate objected – there was no link between war and money! – but Lysistrata corrected him. Money and its uses had often been causes of fanning the flames of war. Against the objections and incredulity of the magistrate, Lysistrata said that she and her companions would take charge of the state’s money, and end the war, and make sure the men were safe, whether the men liked it or not.

The magistrate demanded to know more. Where, he asked, was all this coming from? Lysistrata told him. Greek women, she said, had patiently watched their husbands’ diplomatic blunders. Greek women had watched all of this, and when they tried to speak up, they were shushed, or worse, threatened, by their husbands. What did the men say? Lysistrata asked. Oppressive Greek husbands, said Lysistrata, would quote Homer’s Iliad – a speech that the Trojan champion Hector gives to his wife, the core of which is the line “Let war be the care of the menfolk” (161). The magistrate heard this quote and rallied, saying, “Quite right, too, by Zeus” (161). The magistrate – uh – evidently forgot that Hector, after making this proclamation, died and lost the war.

Lysistrata continued. She and her supporters had taken the Acropolis because it was getting to the point where there were literally no men left. Bursting into song, Lysistrata told the magistrate that he should be the one veiling himself from the sun, and working at the loom, because Greece’s women were going to take care of the war, now. In the song, the women steeled themselves, saying that they’d do whatever it took, and once the tune reached its conclusion, Lysistrata said that as long as men and women suffered from lust, she and her compatriots would be able to bring the war to a stop.

The first step, they said, would be to scale back the extent to which Athens had become ridiculously militarized. Men were going to the marketplace dressed in full armor, bearing weapons with them. Wasn’t a man with a gigantic shield and blade, buying sardines at the fishmongers, a bit of a silly sight? Wasn’t it a bit much when a cavalry officer rode into the marketplace on horseback, having the porridge he bought spooned into his helmet? What about a man sent to buy figs, armed with a javelin, who made the poor old woman who ran the fig stand faint with fear? This militarization, Lysistrata and her companions agreed, needed to be scaled back.

When asked to further explain her strategy for peace, Lysistrata said that it would be a bit like the way women spun wool. The situation in Greece was a messy, dirty knot, just now, said Lysistrata – the first thing they would do would be to send little runners out on diplomatic missions as they unraveled the wool ball. Then it would be like a typical day’s work at the spindle – the ball would continue to be unraveled, irregularities would be sorted out, and dirty spots, and eventually, from a hulking foul mess, Greece would become a tidy warm cloak.

The magistrate said this was a stupid analogy, and women had done nothing for the war. Lysistrata said that in actuality, they had birthed every single soldier involved in the war, and now they were alone, without their husbands, and young women were growing up with no marital prospects. The magistrate began to object, but the women started dressing him up in a farcical costume until he lost his temper, storming off and growling that he would inform other magistrates of the absurdities taking place at the top of Acropolis. [music]

The Central Feud Between the Two Choruses in Lysistrata

So the magistrate left, and Lysistrata went back into the Acropolis, leaving the male chorus and the female chorus facing one another onstage. The two choruses then had another altercation. The male chorus first removed their outer garments. The men said what was happening was clear – the rebellious women were being manipulated by Spartans – and they would lead to the downfall of Athens! The leader of the male chorus said he wasn’t falling for anything – that he would bear arms and armor into the marketplace – and that he would stand proudly, sword in hand, like the strapping young man who had once assassinated a tyrant of Athens. The male chorus leader added that he would give the leader of the female chorus a punch in the face.

The female chorus didn’t take this bluster sitting down. The female chorus members began by removing their own overgarments. Then the women said that they had once been young priestesses atop the Acropolis, and they’d undertaken sacred rites and rituals, and been chosen for select religious performances. The point was that they had once been professionally and blessedly associated with the Acropolis, and so they weren’t some riffraff who could be smacked and tossed aside. The old men, on the other hand, were freeloaders on the city of Athens – a bunch of gasbags living off of tax revenue and salaries from their state jury service. The old men, said the old women, had spent money, and squandered it on a war, and now the city was on the verge of becoming insolvent.

Naturally, the men had to answer to this, and so they took off the rest of their clothes. Now, if you saw this onstage, you would find it strange for two reasons. Both choruses are taking off their clothes as their argument escalates. The explanation for their removal of clothing is a single line in which the male chorus leader says, “Let’s not be wrapped in fig leaves – let’s be men / Who smell like men! Come on now, strip again!” (167). Again, a strange argumentative strategy. We need to escalate this debate, so let’s get naked and let them smell us. I’m glad that we don’t do that in political debates today. Or am I? Anyway, the second reason you would find this stripping scene odd to watch if you’d been there in 411 BCE is that onstage, the men would have worn close fitting garments that the audience would have understood indicated their nudity, and they would have been wearing large leather penises. And if there’s one thing that’s not particularly intimidating, it’s a crowd of naked, feeble old men with huge phalluses made of animal hides strapped onto them. The costuming here is important to keep in mind – the words are going to get harsh, but the overall timbre of the scene, if you had been watching the play, would have definitely been comedic.

The men recalled the glories of old battles, and they said it was time to reawaken their masculine virility, and be young once more. The leader looked at the women with anxiety, saying that the women, if left unchecked, would start constructing warships. They’d create a powerful cavalry, too – after all, women could stay on a galloping stallion, couldn’t they? They sure could ride, couldn’t they? Wink wink. In any case, said the leader of the men’s chorus, the women needed to be seized. After voicing this resolution, the male chorus leader tried to grab the female chorus leader, but she evaded him.

The female chorus leader then threatened the male chorus leader with dire physical violence. And then the female chorus, taking a cue from their leader, removed all of their clothes. The old women were confident that their nudity would intimidate their elderly male adversaries, and made clear that any other males who charged them would have their teeth knocked out and their scrotums smashed. It was time to call an end to their stupid war, and braggadocio, and idiotic decrees. The female leader attacked the male leader, and he fled, which caused the male chorus to flee from the Acropolis gates. [music]

The Women’s Resolution Wavers

With the latest confrontation between the two choruses concluded, Lysistrata came out of the Acropolis. There was a crisis, Lysistrata said. Somewhat formally, the female chorus leader asked what was amiss? Tell her, the female chorus leader said – Lysistrata couldn’t keep the troubles to herself, could she? And then Lysistrata voiced one of the more famous, and more profane lines in Aristophanes. Lysistrata proclaimed, “Few words it takes to say: we need a fuck” (169). The women began singing. Lysistrata elaborated. A woman had escaped on a cable dangling down the Acropolis, and Lysistrata herself had intercepted another deserter.

Abruptly, a woman appeared in the archway that led up to the Acropolis, sneaking along, but Lysistrata saw her. Lysistrata asked the woman where she was going. The woman said she was heading home. She had some – uh – fleece – all balled up at home – and it – uh – needed to be spread out on the bed. Lysistrata told the would-be deserter that she wouldn’t be spreading anything out on any beds any time soon – not while the conflict was still going on.

A second woman emerged, and Lysistrata confronted her. The second woman’s excuse was that she had a really nice – uh – bunch of flax that needed to be pulled apart. Yeah. Just a quick errand. She just needed to head home and strip the flax into threads. Lysistrata glowered. There would be no going home and stripping, Lysistrata growled.

A third woman emerged all in a fluster and hurry. This third woman said she needed to get home, immediately. Why, she was about to give birth! Lysistrata frowned. Uh – Lysistrata said. The woman hadn’t been pregnant the day before. What was – uh – up with that? The woman stammered – she was – well, she was pregnant, now, and she needed to give birth. Lysistrata knocked on her stomach. That was quite a strange pregnancy, she noted, and, when she lifted up the third woman’s top, she saw a bronze helmet. The third woman, said Lysistrata, could stay on top of the Acropolis until her bronze helmet was born, couldn’t she? Lysistrata told them to imagine their husbands, and how much their husbands were enduring privations, as well. Lysistrata said she’d heard an oracle – that if the little female swallows could keep away from the great big crowing cocks, then the order of things would indeed change. But if they couldn’t, said Lysistrata, “if the swallows rebel and fly from the sacred enclosure, / Then ’twill be patent to all that there’s no bird that’s so nymphomaniac” (171). Having voiced this prophecy about swallows and cocks that she may or may not have totally just made up on the spot, Lysistrata ushered her wayward compatriots back into the Acropolis. [music]

Cinesias Arrives to Beg for Sex

With Lysistrata and the rebellion’s leaders offstage, the nude male chorus rejoined the nude female chorus onstage. The old men sang a song about a virginal, brawny hunter who shunned the company of women. A moment later, the male leader said he’d like to kiss the female leader, but soon, they were bickering again once more. The women, in response to the men’s tale of the hunter, told a story about legendary hero who loathed all men, but by contrast deeply loved women. Soon the argument had degenerated into insults regarding one another’s pubic hair. Before things could get any worse, though, Lysistrata and her Athenian friends Calonice and Myrrhine came out of the Acropolis. They had seen a man coming. He was hurrying toward the Acropolis, said Lysistrata. And he looked aroused.

Soon enough, the newcomer was recognized. It was the husband of Lysistrata’s friend Myrrhine. His name was Cinesias, and stage directions indicate that he wears an exceedingly large and erect fake penis. Not exactly subtle, but, the meaning is clear: Cinesias was not enjoying the sexual boycott. For Myrrhine’s husband Cinesias, it had been very, very hard.

Cinesias asked if he could see Myrrhine, and after a short delay, she came out. Cinesias begged her to come down from the Acropolis. He had brought their baby, and the poor thing needed its mother. Seeing the infant, Myrrhine consented to comfort it. Her husband then began begging for sex. Myrrhine said she’d only come home – as would all the other women – if the men figured out a way to wind up the war. He promised he’d do this – only, would she have sex with him just once, immediately, to seal the deal?

Myrrhine hesitated. Their baby was taken away by a servant. Where was this sex supposed to take place? She asked. Her husband Cinesias suggested the ground at the foot of the Acropolis. Myrrhine rejected this. He suggested a nearby cave called Pan’s Grotto, and said she could purify herself in a nearby spring afterward, prior to climbing up the Acropolis again. Myrrhine said she’d fetch a bed, and returned with one a moment later. Myrrhine then delayed three more times. She said she needed a mattress, and got one. Then it was a pillow – she said she needed a pillow, of course, and ran off and brought one back. Meanwhile, Cinesias was all but losing his mind with lust. Just as it seemed he would be satisfied, Myrrhine said she required a blanket. Cinesias became increasingly explicit and profane about what he required – I won’t go into details, but anyway, Myrrhine brought back a blanket, and had her husband lie on the bed. As he nearly fainted with desire, she first put one perfume on him, and then a second, and just as he was about to draw her toward him, he looked up and saw that she was gone.

This nearly did in Cinesias, the husband of Myrrhine. He writhed and groaned, and said that his lust was unendurable. The male chorus pitied him, and Cinesias proclaimed that his wife had become a villain, and prayed that she would get what was coming to her.

A Spartan Herald Arrives

At just this moment, as Cinesias lay in a miserable state, a new male character appeared onstage. He was a Spartan herald, and he had a very conspicuous bulge protruding from his cloak. This visibly erect Spartan herald announced he was looking for the leaders of Athens. In a series of hilarious and difficult to translate puns, Cinesias pointed out the newly arrived Spartan herald’s erection, and said they were undergoing the same difficult experience. Spartan women, the herald lamented, weren’t letting men get anywhere near them!

And in a rush, the truth dawned on Cinesias. All the women in Greece were in on the scheme. No one was going to get laid until peace was established. In two amusingly swift lines, Cinesias resolved to put peace brokering documents in front of his Athens’ high council. He told the Spartan herald to bring peace delegates to Athens, and the two ran off opposite sides of the stage.

Now, while all of this had been happening, the male chorus and the female chorus had been hanging around the wings of the stage, eying one another. The old women had got hold of the old men’s clothes. A dialogue began between them of much the same ilk as earlier dialogues – the men accused the women of being pitiless and stubborn. Yet this time, the women’s leader asked that if the men knew how stubborn they were, how absolutely unyielding – if the men knew this, then why did they always work against their female counterparts? The women said that the old men looked rather ridiculous, standing there naked, and then, the women gently dressed the male members of the chorus with their garments. The old male leader of the chorus had something in his eye, and the female chorus leader gently looked in his eye and helped extract an insect that had flown into it. The male chorus leader thanked her sincerely, and then not just one of his eyes was giving off tears, but, for some reason, both of them were. The old woman wiped his tears off and then – quite to his surprise – gave him a kiss.

Lysistrata‘s Climax: The Two Choruses Unite

All in a flood, the old women began kissing the men, and the men, exasperatedly, against their wills, admitted that they were at a loss without women in their lives. Peace, they consented, needed to be made. The two choruses, previously groups of twelve, united into a single group of twenty-four, and sang a long song together. As the song came to its conclusion, an envoy of Spartans appeared, all of them bearing large swellings in their crotches.

The Athenians greeted them and asked how they were doing. In order to answer the question, the Spartans dropped their tunics and revealed their rigid fake penises. The male chorus leader said that indeed the Spartans looked like they were in dire straits. Then, from the other side of the stage, an assembly of male Athenian leaders arrived, also sporting bulging erections. The Athenians, just like the Spartans, removed their clothing, showcasing their own stiff members. This, by the way, must be a record in theatrical history for the largest quantity of jumbo fake penises onstage. The male chorus leader expressed sympathy for the affected men onstage, and then, he recommended that everyone put their clothes back on. The male chorus leader, along with the two groups of delegates from Athens and Sparta, all decided it was time to have a talk with the instigator of this crisis. It was time to talk to Lysistrata

Spartans, Athenians, and Sexy Reconciliation

Lysistrata came out of the Acropolis, and the men all greeted her respectfully. Lysistrata was informed that the Spartans and Athenians were all there, ready to submit to whatever peace decree she formulated. And Lysistrata summoned an assistant. She was a stunningly beautiful young woman, and she was completely naked, and her name was Reconciliation. This nude woman would help abet the peace process.

Lysistrata asked the naked woman Reconciliation to bring the Spartans to her, and to do it in a gentle, diplomatic fashion. It was, Lysistrata implied, time to do away with the rough treatment and the diplomatic blunders that characterized the war’s beginning. So the naked woman Reconciliation brought the Spartans to stand on one side of Lysistrata, and then the Athenians on the other. Lysistrata told the men that she had blunt words for all of them, and began her speech. Lysistrata said:

You worship the same gods at the same shrines, Use the same [purifying] water, just as if You were a single family – at Olympia, Delphi, Thermopylae – how many more Could I make mention of, if it were needed? And yet, though threatened by [Persian] foes, You ruin Greece’s towns and slay her men. Here ends the first part of my argument. (186)

Now, this was certainly a strong start. Lysistrata’s reasoning was difficult to counter. And even more difficult for the men was the fact that a beautiful, naked young woman stood in front of them, reminding them of the rewards that would come with peace. One Athenian interjected, “How much longer? I’m dying of erectile hyperfunction!” (186). Nice translation there by Alan Sommerstein in the Penguin edition, by the way. But Lysistrata wasn’t done.

She reminded the Spartans of how, back in the 460s, Athens had saved Sparta from ruination. And she reminded the Athenians of the pivotal part Sparta had played in the days of their grandfathers and great grandfathers in freeing Athens from despotism and paving the way for democracy. The Spartans and Athenians alternately admired Lysistrata’s noble deportment and the naked Reconciliation’s body. Soon peace negotiations began being worked out in detail – on the nude body of beautiful Reconciliation.

The Spartans, looking at gorgeous young Reconciliation’s bottom, said they wanted to have the rocky mound of Pylos. The Athenians, looking at Reconciliation’s crotch, said they wanted the Malian Gulf and the city of Megara. There are many extremely pornographic puns in the original text, in which Spartans and Athenians point to this or that feature of the naked woman and make territorial claims involving Greece. Once the leaders on who would have possession of which parts of the Aegean, following the war, Lysistrata then said both groups would need to discuss the negotiations in detail with their allies. The Athenians and Spartans said no discussion was necessary. Everyone, after all, wanted the same thing – this being, obviously, sex. With the agreement made, Lysistrata led the bulging Athenians and Spartans into the Acropolis. [music]

The Spartans and Athenians Celebrate

The united chorus sang a song of celebration. In the Acropolis, meanwhile, people were drinking heavily and celebrating. A couple of Athenians staggered out the door in a buoyant mood. One of them remarked that the Spartans were actually wonderful company – great to drink with, in fact. The second Athenian said that in the future they should always undertake diplomatic missions to Sparta while drunk. On diplomatic missions, they agreed, people read into things too much, and brought back contradictory reports, as had happened a few years earlier. What really needed to happen was boisterous fun and the consumption of huge amounts of wine. Soon enough, some Spartans also tottered out from the Acropolis. One of them was carrying a wind instrument, and began a song. A Spartan man danced and sang to the tune. His song was about the Persian Wars of seventy years earlier – a time when Sparta and Athens fought together at land and sea, and distinguished themselves equally. At the end, the Spartan singer and dancer prayed that no self-serving politicians would jeopardize their peace.

At the song’s end, Lysistrata appeared, dressed in the ceremonial garb of the goddess Athena, the same garb that priestesses used to officiate marriages. Lysistrata said that now that peace was settled, the Spartans and the Athenians could get back together with their wives. They did so, and the old members of the chorus also paired off into couples.

Lysistrata performed a song in which she said she hoped that peace – the peace that love had awakened – would last. The chorus joined in the song, and then a Spartan boisterously joined in, singing of his homeland and river, and they sang of Sparta’s great residents, and of the mighty goddess Athena, who reigned atop the Acropolis. With peace thus established, and the couples reunited, and even the crotchety old members of the chorus paired off with one another, the whole assembly began a hymn to Athena, and made their way from the theater. And that’s the end. [music]

By This, and This Only, We Have Existed

So now you know the story of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. And imagine, for a moment, attending the first staging of that play. The first months of 411 BCE were not rock bottom for Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Two years before, their situation had looked much bleaker, and a few years later, it would look dire again. 411 BCE wasn’t rock bottom, but I imagine that after 21 years of war – war that was increasingly involving mass executions and mutilations – I imagine that after 21 years of war, any play that called for lasting peace would have received explosive applause. I think that if you were in Athens in 411 BCE and watched this play, and heard the harmonies of its closing songs, and watched the choreography of its dances – you would know on one hand that you’d just watched a bawdy comedy overflowing with sex and dirty jokes. You would know that – but you would also know that the play that you had just watched was a prayer. You’d know that Lysistrata was a prayer that that the core elements of humanity – those biological impulses that drive us to be together, could be harnessed to overpower a long, stupid conflict fought by two factions that had far more in common than they did differences.

It’s strange, maybe, to think that a play that’s so full of dildos, and nudity, and boners, and bulges, and crude language articulates such a profound statement about human experience. We have – most of us, anyway, a core magnetism that drives us to be together. This magnetism might manifest itself in ways that are socially awkward or inconvenient – those swellings in Aristophanes’ men, and those desires that lead Aristophanes’ women to try and defect from Lysistrata’s protest movement in order to spend some quality time with spouses. And although we can giggle at characters displaying such embarrassing degrees of lust – and although their sexual needs might be a bit more intense and acute than is strictly realistic, nonetheless the characters in Lysistrata remind us that beneath the varnish of civilization we are all humbled by the same biological forces – that in spite of our pretensions toward high ideals, civic loyalties, or sacred vows, sometimes, as Lysistrata says, “[W]e need a fuck” (169). It’s a crude statement, but it’s also the same idea that T.S. Eliot hammered home at the crescendo of “The Waste Land” 2,333 years after Lysistrata was first staged. The narrator of T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem says, “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender, / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed” (403-405).

By the end of Lysistrata, Spartans, Athenians, and all the citizens of Greece have been reduced to the common denominator of being similar biological organisms, and once this happens, they celebrate together. They drink with one another in the Acropolis, and wonder why they haven’t done so before, on diplomatic missions. They find that beneath allegiances to state and country, and in spite of old grudges, they are all a part of the same species, and they seek the same unions and pleasures.

I think Lysistrata is Aristophanes’ most well-known play today because out of all of his comedies, its message, and its satire, are the simplest. It’s not his only tract against the Peloponnesian War, but the universal quality of its message – that love and sex are far more natural to us than being trapped in a nightmare of far off military campaigns – the universal quality of this message makes Lysistrata more accessible than his other anti-war plays, like The Acharnians (425) or The Knights (424).

So you’ve heard the story of Lysistrata. And you know that this play articulates a simple, potent, and occasionally vulgar message about peace being better than war. What I want to do now is to talk about the history behind this play. A few anti-war plays survive by Aristophanes, and they were produced 425, 424, and 411 BCE. By looking at these plays in context, culminating with Lysistrata, we can understand exactly why the play we have just read is so clear, and emphatic in its political message. [music]

Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Cleon

The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431 until 404 BCE. This 27-year conflict between Athens, Sparta, and their respective allies grinded Greece into chaos. Among all of ancient history’s other wars, the Peloponnesian War doesn’t rank very high in geopolitical significance. On a global scale, the loss of lives wasn’t great, and the outcome – a narrow victory by Sparta which dissolved into renewed Athenian self-governance shortly thereafter – the outcome was little known beyond the eastern Mediterranean. What makes the Peloponnesian War so famous is a single person. He wasn’t a king, or a prince. He wasn’t a victorious admiral, who smashed an enemy fleet. He was a minor general, whose most famous military action was a failure in the winter of 424 BCE, in which he lost a city to enemy forces. He lost a city to enemy forces, he was subsequently exiled, and that was the end of his role in the war. After his exile, he went up to the north, to Thrace – the south of modern-day Bulgaria, and he stayed out of the fray. His name was Thucydides.

Thucydides has generally been understood as a cut above other ancient historians. He lived from about 460 to 400 BCE, and wrote history with an impartial clarity unusual for its time, depicting the Peloponnesian War as a complex web of causes and effects rather than a cosmic drama wrought by gods. Thucydides, probably a religious skeptic, takes divine providence out of the history of the Peloponnesian War, and he tells a story about people. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is filled with astute analyses of international relations, detailed records of military campaigns, and a sound understanding of how politics and money influence the course of a war.

Because of Thucydides, we know more about the Peloponnesian War – again a relatively small-scale conflict – than numerous other ancient wars that were many times larger and more significant. And one of the things we know from Thucydides – that Aristophanes would have known from living through the war – was how the war began. Now, the war’s beginning was generations long – it stretched all the way back to the end of the Greco-Persian wars at the end of the 480s. Athens and Sparta had never quite got along well, and really the growth of the Athenian Empire during the middle of the 400s, and Sparta’s increasing unease with Athens’ rising power – these were the early causes.

We’ve discussed the Peloponnesian War plenty in this podcast, mainly in Episodes 29 and 30 on Sophocles’ plays Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. These two plays were produced during the beginning and end of the Peloponnesian War, respectively, and in earlier programs, we explored some of the events that Athenians experienced at the end of their golden age – the plague that struck Athens in the early years of the war, the shaky peace of Nicias, that central failed expedition to Sicily, and the final Spartan victory and enthronement of the Thirty Tyrants. One thing we haven’t talked about, though, is the politics of the Peloponnesian War. This is a topic that Thucydides handles in great detail, and a topic in which Aristophanes was directly embroiled.

Aristophanes deprecates a lot of real people in his plays. We saw him satirize Socrates in our previous program on The Clouds. But more than Socrates, and more than any other individual, Aristophanes ridiculed a prominent Athenian politician named Cleon – one who assumed power after the death of Pericles in 429, and continued to dominate Athenian foreign policy for eight violent, destructive years. Cleon was a warmonger, and it’s pretty clear that Aristophanes hated him. And Thucydides, normally factual and unprejudiced in his history, is at his most biased in his discussion of Cleon. I want to talk about Cleon very briefly, because Cleon was the catalyst behind Aristophanes’ anti-war plays, and the story about the feud between Cleon and Aristophanes is an entertaining potboiler, all by itself. [music]

Cleon’s Martial Populism vs. Aristophanes Patrician Pacificism

The Athenian politician and general Cleon came to power during the early part of the Peloponnesian War. His politics were populist – he identified with the common Athenian, against the interests of the moneyed elite. And Cleon was ardently pro-war. Viciously prejudiced against Sparta, its allies, and anyone who stood against Athens, Cleon was one of the early architects of policies that we would today call war crimes – mass executions and mutilations – that increasingly characterized the Peloponnesian War. In 427, when the city of Mytilene rebelled in the eastern Aegean, Cleon sought to have its male citizens all executed, and after a debate, it was decided that only about a thousand residents of this city would meet the fate that Cleon wanted. For this mass execution, and other, similar events, Thucydides called Cleon “the most violent among the Athenian citizens.”³

Two years later, in 425 BCE, Cleon was the central obstacle to peace brokering that might otherwise have prevented the next two decades of bloodshed. Cleon’s appeal was to the lower classes, and like many of history’s populist warmongers, Cleon promised the average citizen that glorious benefits would abound after military victory that he himself could make happen. He was the son of a trader – probably a leather merchant, and he and his followers had little to lose if there was a radical restructuring of power relations throughout Greece. Cleon’s political opponents in Athens, by contrast, were aristocratic families who wanted the existing power structure to continue and peace to be made so that business could continue as usual. Against Sparta, and against the landed property holding class of Athens, Cleon fomented strong pro-war sentiments in the masses, and he campaigned for mass executions of those who double crossed his city.

To historians, Cleon has traditionally been labeled one of the historical villains of the Peloponnesian War – one of those who made things worse when they might have been better. After Cleon was killed up in the northern Aegean in 422 fighting his hawkish Spartan counterpart – just the next year – the Peace of Nicias was signed, which brought a much-needed respite in the war-torn Greek world. The death of Cleon in 422, while not the sole cause, was part of the reason why there was a successful, interstate effort to end the war.

During the mid to late 420s, Cleon was not only spearheading a war with Sparta. He was fighting a war with Aristophanes. The two were, in many ways, opposites. Cleon was an up-by-the bootstraps new money man, an aggressive champion of the common citizen, and a hardheaded warmonger, with a particular detestation of Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. Aristophanes was from an educated class, his family owning property abroad, and if evidence from his plays can be trusted, Aristophanes respected Sparta and he sought a peaceful restoration of prewar power relations. Cleon and Aristophanes were both obviously intelligent and influential, and for three different theater seasons, they attacked one another relentlessly.

Beyond Lysistrata: The Babylonians, The Acharnians, and The Knights

The feud between the playwright Aristophanes and the populist demagogue Cleon began in 426 BCE. When Aristophanes was about twenty-five, he staged a play called The Babylonians. It won first prize for comedy at the City Dionysia. This play hasn’t survived, but allegedly, the early work painted such an irreverent picture of the social hierarchy of Athens that Cleon condemned it as slander, and took legal action against the young comic playwright. There were citizens from out of town that spring for the City Dionysia, and Cleon probably objected on the grounds that foreigners might take away a negative impression of Athens as a result of Aristophanes’ social satire. Cleon probably figured that this was the end of Aristophanes – the pesky, entitled young jokester would go away and learn some respect for the institutions of his city, now that he’d been dragged to court and charged with slander.

Aristophanes didn’t go away. Instead, for the next two theatrical seasons, Aristophanes focused his considerable power of satire directly on Cleon and Cleon’s war efforts. In 425 BCE, Aristophanes produced a play called The Acharnians, named after a group of pro-war provincials who loathe Sparta and want to continue fighting at all costs. The main character of The Acharnians is a stand-in for Aristophanes himself, and he makes the case that the Peloponnesian War had begun for stupid reasons and that it was still taking place for the sake of profiteering and political agendas. At the play’s ending, the provincial Acharnians are won over, a warmongering general is humiliated, and against the hysterical anti-Spartan rhetoric that’s been deployed throughout the play, a respect and fair-minded tolerance of Spartans wins the day. Cleon, who likely owned a punching bag with Spartans printed all over it, must have been grinding his teeth.

Only, Aristophanes wasn’t done with him. The next year, in 424 BCE, the great comedic dramatist leveled another satire against Cleon. The previous year’s play, The Acharnians, disparaged Cleon’s value system. But in 424, Aristophanes went after Cleon himself. In The Knights, also translated as The Horsemen, Aristophanes has Cleon take a starring role. The play is about three slaves who serve a master called Demos, which means “people.” The other two slaves are also prominent Athenians, and are portrayed much more favorably, but as for the slave aligned with Cleon, he has insinuated himself into the favor of their collective master, Demos. Using his new power from Demos, or “the people,” Cleon has begun persecuting everyone. The allegory in this play – again, The Knights, produced in 424 – the allegory in this play is simple. Cleon has usurped power and he’s using it with heavy hands. As the play continues, Cleon is eventually pushed aside by a sausage vendor. The other two slaves have their positions restored, and Cleon is forced to sell sausages at the city gate, and peace treaties are signed. Throughout Aristophanes’ play The Knights, Cleon is a manipulative, devious, revolting slave who will do anything to lick the boots of his master, the people, not the least of which is to prevent peace from being established. And in the spring of 424 BCE, The Knights won first prize at the winter theater festival of Athens. As historian John Hale writes, “[I]t was a bitter moment for Cleon, sitting in the full glare of ten thousand citizens, when the herald announced that [The Knights] had won first prize.”⁴ That would have been something to see. A lot of literary feuds get worked out slowly. Dante disparages the Black Guelphs throughout the Divine Comedy, but he never returned to Florence. Dostoevsky wrote endlessly about his experiences as a Siberian prisoner, but Dostoevsky never got any comeuppance for his political persecution. But Aristophanes – Aristophanes, in the twenty-four months after being dragged to court, went after Cleon with literary warheads, and he was vindicated in front of the whole city. That’s a great story in and unto itself. [music]

Aristophanes’ Views During the Late War

Let’s return to the play Lysistrata. When we consider Aristophanes, and his plays The Acharnians and The Knights, we’re tempted to picture a fiery young pacifist who used his quill and papyrus to dog the political careers of his city’s jingoists and militants. We’re tempted to see an anti-war poet who fearlessly stood up against powerful military men and won over the hearts and imaginations of the common people. This isn’t quite right, though.

One of the reasons Aristophanes’ play The Knights won first prize in 424, with its crushing satire of Cleon, was that Cleon was a commoner, and that his demagoguery – his power to foment the masses, unsettled the security of the city’s aristocrats. In other words, Cleon may have been disliked by Athenians like Aristophanes and Thucydides because Cleon violently drove the city into war. But Cleon was also disliked because he was an uncontrollable rabble rouser – exactly the kind of populist leader who just might drag a pitchfork-wielding mob into your wealthy neighborhood and steal your silver. So when those ten thousand citizens sitting there at the assembly gave Aristophanes’ satire of Cleon a standing ovation, they were applauding for the anti-war sentiment. But they were also applauding because a dangerous, unpredictable self-styled man of the people who came from common stock and would do anything to advance his reputation – they were applauding because this man had been portrayed as exactly what he was, and many people there had personal reasons to dislike him that had nothing, whatsoever, to do with war and the wellbeing of the common citizen.

When Aristophanes was publicly sparring with Cleon, the Peloponnesian War was still young – just six or seven years had elapsed. And during these same years – 426 to 424, Aristophanes himself was also younger – he was a combative young dramatist in his mid-twenties, seeking to build a literary reputation and disassemble anything that stood in the way. But by the time he produced Lysistrata, Aristophanes was somewhere around forty. The war had been taking lives for over two decades. Ambitious demagogues like Cleon, and the violence that they demanded, had become ordinary.

And by the time Lysistrata premiered in 411, something more profound had changed throughout Greece. There was no longer a sense that a bit of fisticuffs between the dominant powers was taking place, as it had always taken place. There was no longer a sense that Sparta and Athens and Corinth and Thebes were skirmishing, as they had always done for as long as anyone could remember. When Aristophanes was twenty-five, maybe, this was the sense – that a war was going on, but that Ancient Greeks were stubborn and prideful, and they were going to fight with one another, and at the end of it the city-states would retain their sovereignty and commerce would continue as normal. This might have been the sense early on. But in the winter of 411, for Athens in particular, there could not have been any sense that this was just another friendly bout of Aegean pugilism. In the winter of 411, Aristophanes and his city knew that twenty-one years of war had put them into a state of existential crisis.

Two years before, back in 413 BCE, Athens had experienced its most consequential loss of the Peloponnesian War, when the majority of its navy was destroyed during what historians call the Sicilian Expedition. The Athenian navy – the thing that they absolutely relied on – was in shambles. Draining emergency funds allowed Athens to build a secondary, weaker fleet, and in the winter of 411 BCE, this fleet was anchored at the island of Samos, and had done passably for its first year of existence. Still, even with their new ships, the audience of Lysistrata lived with the vivid memory of a military defeat – a defeat that could have resulted in invasion and mass execution in their city.

But this wasn’t the worst part. As Greeks of Aristophanes’ generation fell deeper into the Peloponnesian War, something had awakened in western Anatolia. It was something that their grandfathers and great grandfathers had beaten, an old boogeyman that had great reason to hate Greece. This something was the Persian Empire. The Persian Empire began with overtures to the Peloponnesian League, having opened lines of communication with Sparta. As of 411 BCE, when Lysistrata premiered, Athens was hysterical at the thought of an alliance between Persia and Sparta. Sparta had almost annihilated Athens two years before. Against a Spartan-Persian alliance, Athens wouldn’t stand a chance, and everyone in the city knew it.

So the really potent thing to remember about the play Lysistrata is this. Aristophanes wrote a number of anti-war plays. The early ones were produced in the 420s, and although they are across the board funny, the anti-war sentiment of The Acharnians and The Knights is clouded with a personal agenda against Cleon and populist rabble rousing. Lysistrata, a later anti-war play, is different. Although it has a few political bones to pick, Lysistrataa presents a much purer and more emphatic pacifism than Aristophanes’ earlier works that deal with the Peloponnesian War. His earlier war plays were part smear campaigns and part self-promotion, but Lysistrata is much more unmistakably a statement about the imminent necessity of restoring peace to all the states of Greece. By the winter afternoon that Lysistrata was staged, there must have been a general sense that no one was going to win the Peloponnesian War – no one except for Persia. [music]

Wrapping Up Golden Age Athens

Well, at this point, we’ve had ten full episodes on some of the most famous plays of Greece. We’ve heard the story of Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra, and his son Orestes in the three plays of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. We’ve heard the story of Oedipus, and Jocasta, and their daughter Antigone in Sophocles’ three Theban plays. We’ve met Euripides’ magnetic Medea, and heard the dark religious allegory of his play The Bacchae. And now, we’ve heard some comedy, too, having explored Aristophanes’ intellectual satire in The Clouds, and the simple, undiluted pacifism of his play Lysistrata. There have been ten of them in all, and as we reach their conclusion, at the end of Golden Age Athens, you should feel proud that, out of all the stuff you could have listened to and squeezed into the spare moments of your life, you chose Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and Euripides, and Aristophanes. These four gentlemen have been read and appreciated for two and a half thousand years. Now, they’re a part of your life, too, and in some distant era of the future, ages from now, we’ll still be reading them.

In our next show, we’re going to stay in Athens, but we’re going to jump forward about a hundred years into the future. It will be the winter of 316 BCE. The Peloponnesian War has ended generations ago. The city’s bookshelves hold the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and company, but these men are ancestors, rather than contemporaries. Their politics, their lives, and their wars are now the things of past generations. Because as of 316, a person has come and gone through the ancient world, rearranging it as he saw fit. His life and deeds made the Peloponnesian War seem like a playground scuffle. He was born in what was before his time an obscure corner of the southern Balkans. He lived from 356 to 323, dying just a few weeks before his thirty-third birthday. Everyone knows his name. From the place where the Danube opens into the Black Sea, down to the southern Nile; from the old Egyptian highways in the Negev desert up to the Southern Caucasus; from the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates to the southern Caspian Sea; from the northern Indian Ocean all the way to the banks of the Indus River, his actions have affected the lives of millions of people. He was fearless, and lived hard, and expected to die young. Later generals – even hard-as-metal military men like Hannibal Barca and Scipio Africanus would agree that he was the greatest general ever to have lived. He slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, and believed himself to be a modern-day Achilles. And his name was Alexander of Macedon.

Alexander’s life rearranged much of the civilized world. Without Alexander’s eastward military aggression, the Achaemenid Persian Empire might have persisted and triumphed over Rome. Without the dissemination of Alexander’s culture throughout modern day Israel, and the spread of Egyptian and Aegean religion into Canaan, the New Testament, if it were written at all, would have taken a dramatically different form, and would certainly wouldn’t have been written in Greek.

On to New Comedy and Old Cantankerous

In the year 316 BCE, tucked deeply in the secure western part of Alexander’s empire, seven years after his death, the city of Athens continued on as it always had. In the chaotic checkerboard of mega-states that Alexander left behind him, Athens sat in a fairly tranquil place, and continued its City Dionysia and its winter theater festival, as well. Now, Aristophanic comedy – the comedy that we see in The Clouds and Lysistrata – this comedy is called Old Comedy by theater historians, as we learned last time. But there was a later style of comedy that literary scholars call New Comedy. Old Comedy focused on contemporary politics and pop culture, and Old Comedy satirized important figures, just as we’ve seen Aristophanes deprecate Socrates, and Cleon, and drive home the necessity of ending the Peloponnesian War. But New Comedy – this style that persisted after Alexander the Great – New Comedy more often focused on the lives of ordinary people – their struggles, their foibles, and their small triumphs.

We have almost no New Comedy today – it’s mainly just fragments and scraps. But we do have one play almost in its entirety. The single work of Greek New Comedy that survives is called Old Cantankerous. Its author was a prolific and extremely influential Athenian writer named Menander. In the next show, we’re going to look at one last work of Athenian theater – a coda to the giants we’ve been reading over the past ten shows. Menander’s Old Cantankerous is, in my opinion, the most important work of ancient Greek literature that most people have never heard of, because in its pages, we can find a link between the austere tragedies of classical Athens, and the quaint comedies of Shakespeare and Molière. In addition to teaching us a valuable lesson about literary history, Menander will also bring us into the world after Alexander, a world whose intellectual center was not Athens, but the Egyptian city of Alexandria – a world in which all the old city states and kingdoms had seen some restructuring, and anything could happen. Thanks for listening to Literature and History. Try a quiz on this program in the notes section of your podcast app and review what you’ve learned in this show. If you’re down for a comedy song, I’ve got one coming up. Otherwise, thanks so much for listening, and caring about classical literature, and I’ll see you next time.

Still here? Alright! Time for some more fun! Yeah, so, this time around, I got to thinking. Got to thinking about what some of those choral songs in the original version of Lysistrata must have sounded like – especially because those male chorus members and those female chorus members are going at it, back and forth and back and forth, and I thought I’d write a short choral song that sums up the feud and the happy ending of the play. So this one’s called “Lysistrata in Three Minutes,” and it’s a summation of the whole play Lysistrata. I hope it’s entertaining, and I’ll see you next time with an extremely important and understudied piece of literary history.



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