Aristophanes wrote the Utopian comedy "Lysistrata" in 411 B.C. and the play deals with a humorous, yet serious theme. The time of the play is the fifth century B.C. in Athens, at the time of the Second Peloponnesian War, and Lysistrata is an Athenian woman who is fed up with the men always gone and fighting with each other. She proposed a radical scheme: that the women refuse to have sex with their husbands until they stop their violent foolishness:
"We can force our husbands to negotiate Peace, Ladies, by exercising steadfast Self-Control-- By Total Abstinence . . ." (360). This is of course a hard idea for all of the women to adopt, and through the course of the play there are numerous examples of the women finding excuses to go against their own plan. By simulating pregnancy, claiming fear of snakes and owls at the Acropolis, and just plain desertion, the women try to get off the hook.
In this play Aristophanes takes a very serious look at the relationship between the sexes. Lysistrata is a great heroine because she sees the futility of war and knows how to stop it. She has self-control, and she urges her women allies to fight their natural urges long enough to get the men to sign a peace accord.
Many questions come up in dealing with "Lysistrata," and it is to the play's credit that it provokes such contemporary debate so many centuries after it was first written.
The first question to be asked is: Is "Lysistrata" a play about women's rights? On one level it definitely is. Lysistrata resents the fact that it is the men who always call the shots: they assume they can go off to war and essentially play at their manly games, and their wives will always be there for them when they return. Lysistrata is lobbying for equality between the sexes, and she knows what many of the characters in the play don't know: that women are the stronger sex. They have more natural "power," even if they are not the generals an...