Lysistrata

About the book

Lysistrata persuades women to withhold sexual relations while another group secures the public treasury, turning domestic and financial power against the continuation of war. The plan faces resistance from officials, angry men, and participants whose resolve is not equally durable. Aristophanes develops the conflict through physical comedy, argument, choruses, and a deliberate reversal of assumptions about who may speak on public affairs. The women's practical claims expose the cost of policies from which they have been formally excluded. At the same time, the play's bawdy exaggerations remain rooted in the conventions and limitations of its ancient comic world. Its energy comes from making an apparently impossible political intervention theatrically concrete, so that peace becomes a matter of bodies, households, resources, and the difficulty of sustaining collective action.

• War and peace
• Gender and authority
• Collective action

Why read it

For a forceful comic experiment that brings the domestic costs of war into the centre of public argument.

Comedy · English translation