Lysistrata

Lysistrata is a comedy by Aristophanes in which the women of Greece end the Peloponnesian War by refusing to sleep with their husbands, while the older women of Athens seize the Acropolis, which holds the city’s war funds. According to the ancient hypothesis (the introduction transmitted with the play), it was produced in the archonship of Callias, that is in 411 BC, during the last phase of the war, soon after the Athenian disaster in Sicily. The heroine, Lysistrata (“She who disbands armies”), calls women from Athens, Sparta, Boeotia and Corinth together and has them swear an oath on a cup of wine. Two half-choruses, one of old men and one of old women, fight over the gates of the citadel. A magistrate sent to fetch money for the fleet is turned away, and an Athenian husband, Cinesias, is left aching when his wife Myrrhine teases him and walks off. In the end envoys from Sparta and Athens come to the citadel, ready to settle at any price, and Lysistrata presents them with a personified Reconciliation, and the war is brought to an end with a feast and songs by both sides. The play is open about sex and full of obscene jokes, but its serious point is plain: the women say that the men have run the war badly, and that the city should be managed as a household and a loom are managed.

Date and Historical Background

The ancient hypothesis to the play records that it was produced in the archonship of Callias, the year after Cleocritus, that is 411 BC, and that Aristophanes put it on through Callistratus. What the play says about itself agrees with this. The surviving text refers to the revolt of Miletus from Athens (line 108), which took place in 412 BC, to a board of probouloi, the special magistrates appointed after the Sicilian defeat (the magistrate of the play is one, line 421; compare Thucydides 8.1.3), and to Pisander, the politician who would lead the oligarchic movement of 411 BC (line 490). All of this puts the play after the autumn of 413 BC and during the Ionian phase of the war. The hypothesis does not say at which festival the play was performed, the Lenaea in winter or the City Dionysia in spring, nor what prize it won, and the text does not decide the question.

The war that the play looks at had lasted some twenty years. Athens had lost its great expedition to Sicily, its allies were leaving it, and the Spartans were being funded by Persia. The chorus of old men fear a revival of the tyranny of Hippias (lines 618–635) and swear to wear their swords in myrtle, like Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The magistrate recalls how, when the Athenians were debating the Sicilian expedition years before, a woman on a rooftop wailed for Adonis while the speaker Demostratus called for troops from Zacynthus (lines 387–398). The comedy is a daring one within this setting. On the stage, women make peace on behalf of men who are tired of the war, and the Greek states are described again and again as one family quarrelling.

The Spartan characters speak in a Doric dialect, with forms such as ναὶ τὼ σιώ (“by the two gods”), and the Spartan and Boeotian women are sketched by their bodies and their local products (lines 78–92). The text as we have it closes with a Spartan song to Athena of the Bronze House (lines 1296–1320).

Characters and Setting

Characters

• Lysistrata, an Athenian wife who organizes the strike
• Calonice, an Athenian wife, Lysistrata’s neighbor and friend
• Myrrhine, an Athenian wife, married to Cinesias
• Lampito, a Spartan wife, strong and healthy
• A Boeotian woman and a Corinthian woman, who speak little
• The Magistrate (proboulos), an Athenian official, with Scythian archers
• Women A, B and C, Athenian wives who try to slip away from the Acropolis
• Cinesias, Myrrhine’s husband, and their small son, with the slave Manes
• A Spartan herald
• Spartan and Athenian envoys
• Reconciliation, a silent female figure
• Chorus of old men and chorus of old women, who join in the finale

Setting

The scene is in front of the Acropolis of Athens, with its gate (the Propylaea) as the main door of the action.

Summary of Lysistrata

Prologue

The play opens (lines 1–5) with Lysistrata waiting for the women she has summoned. She complains that if she had called them to a festival of Dionysus or Pan, they would have crowded in with their drums, but for this meeting no one has come. When Calonice arrives, she tells her friend that her heart is on fire and that she is angry on behalf of all women, because men think them tricky and sly (lines 9–12). Calonice excuses the others: the household makes it hard for a woman to leave, since one has to see to the husband, wake the servant, put the child to bed and give it its bath and its meal (lines 16–19). Lysistrata says that the matter is important, “big” and “thick” (lines 23–24), and that the safety of all of Greece lies in the women (lines 29–30). If women from Boeotia and the Peloponnese come together with the Athenians, she says, they will save Greece (lines 39–41).

Calonice is skeptical about what women can do, sitting in their saffron gowns and make-up. Lysistrata answers that those very clothes are what will save the city: their saffron dresses, perfume and see-through tunics will keep men from taking up spears and shields against each other (lines 46–53). The women arrive late. Myrrhine says that she had trouble finding her girdle in the dark (line 72). Lampito from Sparta enters, to compliments on her figure and her fitness; she says she does exercise and can kick her heels up to her bottom (lines 78–82). A woman from Boeotia and one from Corinth appear too (lines 85–92). Lysistrata asks the women whether they do not miss the fathers of their children, and each shows how long her husband has been away on service: Calonice’s five months in Thrace, Myrrhine’s seven months at Pylos (lines 102–104). Lysistrata adds that since the Milesians betrayed Athens there has not even been a lover to be found (lines 107–110).

Then she gives them her plan. The women must abstain from sex with their husbands (line 124). The reaction is immediate: they turn away and mutter, and Calonice and Myrrhine both refuse (lines 129–130). Calonice says she would walk through fire instead (lines 133–134). Lysistrata despairs of her own sex, which, she says, is why tragedies are written about women (lines 137–139). Only Lampito, when Lysistrata appeals to her, agrees, although she admits how hard it will be for women to lie alone without a man (lines 142–144). The others then come round. Lysistrata argues that if women stay at home painted and in thin Amorgian dresses, with their bodies groomed, and refuse their husbands, peace will come quickly (lines 149–154). If the men use force, the women will be a dead weight and make it painful for them (lines 160–166).

Lampito then asks how anyone will persuade the crowd of Athenian men, and says that nothing will work while the triremes and the silver in the goddess’s temple remain in their hands (lines 170–174). Lysistrata answers that the Athenian women will see to their own men, and that the second part of the plan is already arranged. The oldest women have been told to take the Acropolis that day, under the cover of offering a sacrifice (lines 175–179). For the oath, Lysistrata first proposes slaughtering sheep over a shield, as the warriors do in a play of Aeschylus, but Calonice objects that an oath about peace should not be sworn on a shield; Calonice then suggests cutting up a white horse, and Lysistrata asks where they would find one (lines 185–194). Lysistrata replaces both with a large black cup placed on its back and a jar of Thasian wine, over which the women will swear never to add water (lines 195–197). The women swear after her, line by line: that no lover or husband will approach them with an erection; that they will stay at home unmated, dressed in saffron and made up to excite their husbands; that they will never submit willingly, and if forced they will be passive, will not raise their legs to the ceiling and will not crouch like a lioness on a cheese-grater (lines 212–232). If they break the oath, their cup will be filled with water. They drink. A shout from the Acropolis tells them that the old women have taken it (lines 240–242), and Lampito leaves for Sparta, with hostages kept behind. The others go in to bar the gates.

Parodos (Entrance Song)

The chorus of old men enters, each carrying a log of olive wood and a pot of fire (lines 254–318). They complain at the weight and the smoke. They are marching up the slope to burn the women out; they plan to pile the logs in a circle and light a single pyre for all the women inside, starting with Lycon’s wife (lines 266–270). One recalls how he forced the Spartan king Cleomenes to leave the Acropolis in his time, hungry and dirty (lines 273–280). They blow on the embers and curse the smoke in their eyes.

The old women then come on, carrying water jars up from the spring (lines 319–349). They have seen the smoke and fear that their friends are on fire, and they call on Athena for help. The two choruses meet and trade insults and threats (lines 350–381). An old man threatens to knock out the teeth of a woman, and the women reply in kind. At the end the women empty their jars over the old men, one of them saying that she is watering him so that he will grow (line 384), and the men are left cold and shivering.

Agon

A magistrate, a proboulos, then arrives with a squad of Scythian archers (line 387 onward). He complains about the women’s luxury and their noisy rites, and recalls the Adonis festival and Demostratus on the Sicilian expedition (lines 387–398). The old men tell him how the women have drenched them. He agrees: when men themselves spoil their wives, this is what comes of it. He gives examples of husbands who send for a goldsmith or a shoemaker to see to a wife’s jewelry or sandals (lines 407–419). He himself has come, as a commissioner, to take silver from the treasury to buy oars, and has found the gates shut (lines 421–423). He orders crowbars to be used on the doors.

Lysistrata comes out on her own, saying that bars are not needed, only sense and brains (lines 430–432). He orders an archer to arrest her, but three women in turn threaten the archers, who are afraid and back away (lines 433–449). He orders the Scythians to charge, and Lysistrata calls on her allies from inside, the women who sell grain, eggs, garlic, bread and vegetables in the market, who beat the Scythians off (lines 450–462). The magistrate is left complaining that his archers have been beaten.

He then agrees to question her. She explains that the women have closed the Acropolis so that the money will not be used for war, and she accuses Pisander and the others who hold office of stirring up trouble in order to steal (lines 486–492). The women will manage the funds themselves, as they manage the household (lines 493–495). He says that war is a man’s business, and she tells him that the women will save the men whether they like it or not (lines 497–501). She explains how the women, kept silent in the past, had to suffer in silence while the men voted for bad measures, and how they would ask their husbands at home what had been decided about peace and be told to be quiet (lines 507–520). When they heard it said in the streets that there was no man left in the country, they decided to save Greece themselves (lines 523–525).

When he objects to being lectured by a woman in a veil, she gives him her veil and a wool basket. He should wrap his head, sit quietly and card wool and chew beans, while war will be women’s business (lines 530–538). She then explains how the women could end the war, using the example of a tangled skein of yarn. They would pull one thread this way and another that way, with envoys going back and forth, and so untangle it (lines 567–570). In the same way the city should be treated like a fleece: wash out the dirt, beat out the thistles and the intriguers who stick together in offices, card the citizens, metics, foreigners and debtors into a basket of goodwill, spin it into a great ball, and weave a cloak for the people from it (lines 574–586). The magistrate is outraged that women with no part in the war should talk like this, and she answers that they bear more than twice its burden, in the sons they send to fight, and then in the empty bed (lines 588–592). Men grow old, he says, as women do. She answers that there is a difference: a returning soldier, even a gray-haired one, can soon marry a young girl, but a woman has only a short season, and after that she sits and consults oracles and no one will marry her (lines 594–597). She then treats him as a corpse: she tells him to go and buy a coffin, prepares a honey cake for the dead and puts a funeral garland on his head, and says that Charon is calling him to the boat (lines 599–607). He leaves to complain to the other probouloi, and she says that she will send the third-day offerings for the dead at dawn (lines 608–613).

Parabasis

The two half-choruses then take over the stage. In this section (lines 614–705), which has the place and some of the features of a parabasis but is mostly a continuation of their quarrel, the old men take off their cloaks and call on one another to fight. They declare that they smell the tyranny of Hippias and that the Spartans have plotted with the women, and they swear to carry swords in myrtle branches like the tyrant-killers (lines 614–635). The old women reply by setting down their jars and recalling their service to the city and to Athena: at seven they carried the sacred objects, at ten they ground the grain for the goddess, and then they served as bears at Brauron and carried the basket in the procession wearing a string of figs (lines 638–647). They say that they contribute sons to the city, while the men have spent the so-called “grandfather’s contribution” from the Persian wars and paid nothing back (lines 651–655). The men worry that the women will build ships, fight at sea like Artemisia, and ride like the Amazons painted by Micon (lines 672–679). The women threaten the men and mention their Spartan and Theban friends, Lampito and Ismenia, who will protect them (lines 696–705). The text of this part makes the quarrel between the two sexes plain, and it does not say how much time has passed between the end of the agon and what follows.

Episodes

When Lysistrata comes out again, she is dejected (lines 706–709). She tells the women of the chorus that the women of the Acropolis are longing for their husbands (line 715), and that they keep running away. She caught one slipping out through a hole by the shrine of Pan, another sliding down a rope on a pulley, one trying to desert, and another about to fly to Orsilochus’ house on a sparrow, whom she pulled back by the hair (lines 720–725). The women come out one after another with excuses. One has Milesian wool at home that moths are eating (lines 729–730), another her flax from Amorgos, which she has left at home unstripped (lines 735–736). A third claims to be about to give birth, but Lysistrata finds that under her robe she has the sacred helmet of Athena, in which she says she means to give birth, like a pigeon (lines 742–755). Another cannot sleep for the owls (lines 760–761). Lysistrata begs them to hold out a little longer. She reads them an oracle, which says that when the swallows gather in one place and avoid the hoopoes, and abstain from sex, evils will end and Zeus will turn things upside down. But if they separate and fly out of the sacred temple, no bird will be thought more shameless (lines 770–776). The women are persuaded and go back in.

The choruses sing and speak alternately. The old men tell the story of Melanion, who fled marriage and lived in the mountains hunting hares, and say that they hate women just as much (lines 781–796). The old women reply with the story of Timon, the hermit who cursed mankind and yet loved women (lines 805–820). The old man tries to kiss an old woman, and she mocks him.

Cinesias then appears, in a state of excitement and distress (lines 829–846). Myrrhine recognizes her husband, and Lysistrata tells her to roast him, to deceive and tease him and to grant everything except what the oath forbids; Myrrhine agrees (lines 837–844). Cinesias says that nothing in his life pleases him since she left, that the house seems empty, and that he cannot even enjoy his food (lines 865–869). Myrrhine appears above, refusing at first to come down. When she hears that he has brought their baby son, who has not been washed or fed for six days, she comes down (lines 880–884). She tells Cinesias that she will not return until the war is ended and peace is made, and he says that he will do it if it seems right (lines 900–902). Then, though she will not break her oath, she lets him hope. She sends the baby away with a slave (lines 907–909), and when Cinesias proposes Pan’s sanctuary she raises the question of ritual purity, and then of her oath, which he tells her to put on his own head (lines 910–915). She fetches a little bed, a mat, a pillow, a blanket and perfume, one after another, and each time delays. She makes him agree to vote for a treaty, and he says only that he will think about it (line 951); she then goes in and leaves him (lines 952–953). Cinesias is left alone, deprived and distressed, and the old men sing in sympathy (lines 954–979).

A Spartan herald now arrives, looking for the Athenian council, and meets Cinesias (lines 980–984). Cinesias asks if he is carrying a spear under his arm, and the herald answers that it is a Spartan message-staff, a skytale (lines 985–992). The herald says that Sparta and its allies are in the same state and that Lampito began the women’s revolt, with the other women of Sparta following (lines 995–1001). He says that the Spartans are suffering, and that the women will not let them rest until all agree to make peace with the rest of Greece (lines 1002–1006). Cinesias says that the women have plainly all sworn together and tells the herald to have Sparta send envoys with full powers while he will go and tell the Athenian Council to appoint its own (lines 1007–1012). The two choruses then reconcile. The old men say that no wild beast or fire is more untamable than a woman, but the women answer that the men could have them as faithful friends. The old woman removes a speck from the old man’s eye and kisses him, and the two choruses join in a song promising to do no harm to any citizen, and offering money and a feast (lines 1014–1071).

Exodos (Exit Song)

The envoys from Sparta come in, followed by the Athenians, all of them in obvious discomfort and holding their cloaks in front of them (lines 1072–1099). They ask for Lysistrata, who comes out and is hailed by the chorus as the bravest of women (lines 1086–1111). She calls for Reconciliation (line 1114) and tells her to bring the Spartans first, gently and without arrogance, and then the Athenians, and to take hold of them by whatever they offer (lines 1115–1121). She reproaches both sides together. They sprinkle the altars from the same bowl at Olympia, Thermopylae and Delphi, and yet they destroy Greek men and cities while barbarian armies are at hand (lines 1128–1134). To the Spartans she recalls how Pericleidas once came to Athens as a suppliant, pale in his red cloak, asking for an army when Messene was attacking them after the earthquake, and how Cimon came with four thousand hoplites and saved Sparta (lines 1137–1144). To the Athenians she recalls how the Spartans helped to expel the tyrant Hippias and gave the Athenian people a cloak in place of a slave’s tunic (lines 1149–1156). The envoys, meanwhile, keep looking at Reconciliation’s body.

They begin to bargain over territory in terms that match the body they are looking at: the Spartans want Pylos, the Athenians want Echinus, the Malian Gulf and the “legs” of Megara (lines 1162–1170). Lysistrata says to leave it for later. She sends them in to dine and take their oaths, after which each man is to take his own wife home (lines 1182–1187). The chorus offers its goods to all, and a comic scene follows in which Athenian gatekeepers try to drive off the crowd. After the banquet, an Athenian says that they sing best when drunk and should always negotiate that way (lines 1225–1238). A Spartan sings of the sea fight at Artemisium and of Leonidas at Thermopylae (lines 1247–1261), and the Athenian chorus calls the Graces, Artemis, Apollo, Dionysus, Zeus and Hera to the dance, as witnesses of the gentle Peace (Hesychia) that Cypris has made (lines 1279–1294). The play ends with a Spartan song to Taygetus and Sparta, in which girls dance by the Eurotas, and a hymn to Athena of the Bronze House (lines 1296–1320).

A Brief Analysis

The play has three lines of action running side by side: the sex strike, the seizure of the Acropolis and its treasury, and the fight between the two half-choruses. In Lysistrata’s opening speeches and in the oath, these are presented as two methods, the one private and the other public, for stopping the war (lines 124 and 176). The third line is the quarrel of the choruses, which ends with the old men and women kissing and singing together, and so prepares the way for the end, when the envoys are reconciled. Aristophanes keeps all three in play and brings them to a conclusion in the final scenes, with the strike working on Cinesias and the herald, the treasury denying the magistrate his oars, and the choruses joining before the envoys appear.

The action turns on two themes, the relation of the sexes and the war. The women’s case is set out at length in the scene with the magistrate. They say that they have kept quiet through the war while men made bad decisions (lines 507–520), that they give sons to it and lose their own best years (lines 588–597), and that the money should not be spent for the profit of those who hold office (lines 486–492). Their remedy comes from their work: the tangled yarn of line 567 and the fleece of lines 574–586 are images of the city’s politics put in the language of the loom. When Lysistrata later says, “I am a woman, but I have sense” (line 1124), she speaks plainly for this view. The speeches also have a political character that goes beyond sex. The magistrate is a proboulos, and so one of the officials created after the defeat in Sicily, and the women’s criticism of how the war has been managed is a criticism of Athens at the time of writing.

The comedy depends on the physical joke. Most of the male characters wear the stage phallus, and the humor of the Cinesias scene (lines 829–979), the herald’s message-staff (lines 985–992) and the envoys’ hidden condition (lines 1072–1099) all rests on it. Names are also used for jokes: Reconciliation (Diallage) is a woman whose body is divided up like a map (lines 1162–1170). Aristophanes treats the women both ways. They are the stock women of comedy, who are fond of sex, wine and complaining, as the early scenes show (lines 129–135 and 720–780), but they are also the ones who can see what the men cannot.

The name Lysistrata means “she who disbands armies”. Lysistrata herself says that if the plan succeeds, the women will one day be called “Lysimachai”, that is, “those who end battles” (line 554).

In the end the play is not simply an argument for pacifism. Lysistrata’s complaint is that Greeks are killing each other when “barbarians” are at hand (line 1133), and the end-point is the restoration of the old friendship between Athens and Sparta, with the memory of Cimon and the Spartans of the sixth century. The household order is also restored at the end, with each man taking his own wife home (lines 1186–1187). The play is therefore both an anti-war comedy and an appeal for Greek unity, and also a comedy that returns to its normal order at the end. In Aristophanes’ career it stands among the plays on the theme of peace, with The Acharnians and Peace, and among those that make women the leaders of the action, with Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen.

Sources

The Greek text of Lysistrata is available at the Perseus Digital Library. Line numbers in this article follow that text, and the quoted phrases are translated from the Greek. The date and producer come from the ancient hypothesis printed with the play. Thucydides (book 6 and 8.1.3) is the contemporary account of the Sicilian expedition and the appointment of the probouloi, and Herodotus and Thucydides are the ancient sources for the events recalled in Lysistrata’s speech to the envoys. The festival and the result of the competition are not recorded.

See Also: Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria, Assemblywomen, Peace, The Acharnians, Wealth