Lysistrata

In ancient plays, the prologue functioned as a device to warm up the audience, explain the situation in expository speech or dialogue, and set the plot in motion. To get the full impact of Lysistrata’s prologue, it is important to consider its performance in context. At the start of the play, the heroine Lysistrata appears alone at the Propylaea, the ceremonial gates to the Acropolis. This would have been a particularly striking moment as the play would have been performed at Athens’ Theater of Dionysus, within sight of the real-life Acropolis, the ancient citadel of Athens. Surely, seeing Lysistrata framed against it would have made a powerful first impression.

The Acropolis was the most sacred place in ancient Athens. Situated on a strategically important hill, it housed the city’s treasury as well as the Parthenon, the grandest temple of Athens’ patron god, Athena. Lysistrata, an unmarried whip-smart woman with both domestic sensibilities and a military mind, must have evoked Athena, the virgin goddess of strategy and household crafts. For Aristophanes’ audience her name itself may have recalled a famous contemporary priestess of Athena, Lysimache, who enjoyed unparalleled distinction, freedom, and power for a woman in Greek society.

Aristophanes is quick to further distinguish his Lysistrata from the typical housewife. Apparently untroubled by the need for sex, she is frustrated that other women are. In her plotting and masculine courage she resembles the gender-defiant femme fatales of tragedy—especially Euripides’ Medea and Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra—whose uncanny smarts spelled disaster for men.

In contrast, Lysistrata’s fellow women are relatively sex-crazed and weak-willed. In antiquity, women were believed to be more susceptible to the harmful effects of lust than men. In lines 1-4 Lysistrata jokes about this sexual weakness in connection with religion; she wonders if the others would have shown up more readily for those sorts of wild celebrations. Some important Greek religious festivals (like the Thesmophoria) excluded men completely, representing a rare arena in which men not only had no control over women, they were not even exactly sure what took place. As a result, such gatherings were the subject of much male speculation (and fetishization). In other words, Ancient Greek men wondered: in private, what do women get up to? In this woman-only meeting (a mock version of the Athenian democratic assembly), Aristophanes offers an answer: familiar girlfriends rib each other and good-naturedly sexualize each other’s attractive features (much as men would).

In this meeting we also meet our first Spartan character, Lampito. Like Lysistrata, she seems above the stereotypical female silliness. She is the first to see the logic of Lysistrata’s argument and suggests everyone else get on board. Aristophanes aims his jokes at her cultural identity as a Spartan, not at her qualities as a woman; it is clear that Lampito is strong and no-nonsense, like her Athenian counterpart Lysistrata.

Also crucial to Lysistrata’s plan are the old women who take the Acropolis and show similar levels of fortitude. In contrast, while the chorus of old men once fought in the war, Aristophanes points out that as jurors, they now mooch off the state (380, 23n59). As they impotently huff and puff up the hill with their phallic torches to “attack” the barred gates of the Acropolis (a symbol of female genitalia), the old women douse them their torches, literally and symbolically snuffing out their masculine prowess.

In the characters of Lysistrata, Lampito, and the old women, Aristophanes presents a tripartite vision of women united: young Athenians, old Athenians, and non-Athenian Greeks. Notably absent, however, are enslaved people, who do not figure into Lysistrata’s scheme at all, or prostitutes of either sex, all of whom would have been sexually available to men in ancient Athens.