Lysistrata is a play by Aristophanes, a Greek playwright of the fifth century BC. The work is set in the late fifth century, during the Peloponnesian Wars, which were fought among the Greek city-states, including Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and others. The plot of the play, and the comedic hook for the audience receiving the play, is that the women of Greece, at the behest of the heroine, Lysistrata, withhold sexual relations from their husbands until their cities make peace and the war ends. Lysistrata, though a comedy, is a also a social commentary on women in ancient Greek society.
Lysistrata, the main character and namesake of the play, is a disgruntled and crafty wife living in Athens, who, like many women in Greece during the Peloponnesian War, had to do without her husband while the hostilities continued. She devises and presents a plan to end the war not only to the women of Athens, but also to women from other city-states in Greece. The plan? To withhold sexual intercourse from their husbands until the war was over. There is quite a bit of resistance to the plan offered by both the women and the old men of Athens, as well as the magistrates when the Acropolis is occupied by the protesting women. Due to this play being a comedy rather than a more realistic medium, little real action is taken by the government against the women, but eventually the men begin to notice the lack of attention from their wives. Eventually, envoys from opposing Greek cities come to Athens to make peace, because, due to Lysistrata’s meeting early in the play, the wives of the other Greek cities are withholding themselves from their husbands as well. As with any good comedy, the ending is joyful: a peace treaty is signed and wives and husbands are happily reunited.
Having understood a the plot of the play, it's worth considering the more typical roles of women in ancient Greece. Greek women, in short, were separated from many aspects of society, particularly the realm of politics and economics beyond the scale of the household. One of the main responsibilities of the married Greek woman was to take care of the household in economic terms, to a degree, in the sense of working with textiles and agricultural management. It should also be noted that husbands, unlike wives, were generally not confined to the marital relationship for sexual gratification. Prostitutes and female slaves were a common way for Greek men to satisfy their needs outside the marriage bed. The non-reciprocal nature of this behavior for both sexes may explain the hesitancy of the women in giving up their relations with their spouses.
While this is an entertaining play even for the modern reader, there is much to be gleaned from the indirect references and assumptions made in the text of the play. Lysistrata gives a particularly interesting view of gender roles in Ancient Greece: how and to what degree women controlled the family and the household, as well as the degree of political influence possible for a woman to achieve. It is obvious that what the women accomplish in this play wouldn't happen outside of the world of fiction, but it fictionalizes tensions that certainly existed in reality.
It is worth noting that in this play a woman never challenges her husband openly, though challenges to the municipal authority are made on various occasions. Perhaps a woman openly challenging her husband in such a way would be rare, if not unthinkable. Several references are made, particularly by the chorus of old men, to beating the vehemently anti-war females and it seems likely that this was, unfortunately, a common enough treatment of one's wife.
One reader of this play points out that comedy expresses and relieves “mild, underlying paranoia” about the roles of men and women in Greek society. Even for the modern reader, Lysistrata has many funny moments, though some of the jokes here have certainly been lost on us. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining, instructive, and relevant read for our own world of contending and contentious roles for men and women.
