Lysistrata

Aristophanes' Lysistrata is one of the great surviving comedies of ancient Greek theatre, a bold political satire of war, sex, civic power, and domestic rebellion. First staged in Athens in 411 BCE, during the long strain of the Peloponnesian War, the play imagines a coalition of women from rival Greek city-states who withhold sexual relations from their husbands and seize the Acropolis in order to force an end to the conflict. The result is outrageous, theatrical, sharp, and still remarkably modern in its handling of public folly and private leverage. As a work of Old Comedy, Lysistrata combines farce, obscenity, political criticism, gender conflict, and civic argument with a clarity that has kept it alive on stage for more than two thousand years. Aristophanes turns a comic premise into a durable attack on militarism and political vanity, while giving its title character a commanding place among the memorable women of classical literature. For readers of Greek drama, ancient comedy, classical satire, women in literature, anti-war drama, and the history of theatre, Lysistrata remains both a comic landmark and a serious work of political imagination.