Lysistrata Make Love, Not War

Lysistrata

Make Love, not War -- Unless it is war against Barbarians! Sparta vs. Athens in Aristophanes" "Lysistrata"

On its surface, Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" seems to be a comedic send-up of the value and emphasis the male Greek populations of Sparta and Athens placed on war, in contrast to the women of both city-states. And structurally, and particularly in its first scenes, where the women of the play collude, debate and decide to withhold sexual favors until peace is restored, this does seem to be the case. The greater importance this Greek dramatist gives to the women of Greece, in contrast to the histories of war of Thucydides and Herodotus, highlights the particularly harsh effects of war upon women. Unlike men, women cannot fight and can only watch their beloved husbands and sons fight one another until they die. This also underlines the negative aspects of war and conflict -- even for the valorous, death is the result, even if glorious leaders like Pericles eulogize them in great funeral orations. However, in the final speech of the play's title heroine it becomes clear that the playwright's point-of-view is far more commensurate with Herodotus and Thucydides. The tone of the piece and the prominence given to sexuality and women in the play, as opposed to the histories, is still evident, in Lysistrata's final words. However like Herodotus, the playwright Aristophanes ultimately stresses the conflict of free Greeks vs. barbarians, and the need for Greeks not to stop fighting to love women, but to love one another so they can unite against barbarians such as the Persians depicted in Herodotus.

This is the theme Thucydides strikes in his History of the Peloponnesian War, that it is not war that is a tragedy -- it is Greek against Greek, the tragedy of civil war that is to be mourned and despised. If "Lysistrata" is often misread as a purely anti-war text, it might be because of the heroine's final, extended speech, where she forces the Athenian and Spartan ambassadors to shake hands, and essentially 'kiss and make up." She says, "Now, men of Sparta, stand here on my left, and you stand on my right." The humor comes from a housewife chiding the ambassadors like a clucking mother, overseeing naughty, quarreling children. This is how the Greeks have been fighting, the author suggests -- like siblings engaged in a fight. The woman defends her femininity and her feminine interference in the male dealings of war: "Both parties listen. / I'm female, yes, but still I've got a brain. / I'm not so badly off for judgment, either. / My father and some other elders, too, / have given me a first-rate education. / in no uncertain terms I must reproach you, both sides, and rightly. Don't you share a cup/at common altars, for common gods, like brothers, / at the Olympic games, Thermophylai and Delphi? / I needn't list the many, many others." (1112)

Lysistrata makes reference to the familiar games as evidence of Greek commonality and communication. But the reader or listener should remember, when Lysistrata continues her speech -- no foreigners or slaves were allowed to participate in these games. "The world is full of foreigners you could fight, / but it's

Greek men and cities you destroy!" she cries, to inspire the Spartans and Athenians to fight the barbarians at the gate, not one another. (1112) Lysistrata also reminds both Athenians and Spartans how both sides have helped one another -- the Athenians from a slave rebellion, and the Athenians saved the Spartans although democrats were oppressed by the Persian tyranny until the Spartans helped them.

Thus, the play "Lysistrata" is not about the evils of war in general but the specific evils of Greeks fighting Greeks in civil wars, when they should be united against common enemies like the tyrannical Persians, as depicted by Herodotus when Spartans and Greeks fought against the tyrant Darius. This is blatantly stated in the words of the Spartan Ambassador, at the end of the play: "Holy Memory, reveal/the glories of yore:/how

Spartans and Athenians/won the Persian war./

Athens met them on/the sea,/and

Sparta held the land,/although the Persian forces were/more numerous than sand./All the gods that helped us then." (1247)

Unlike in the histories of Thucydides, the distinctions between the different Greek forms of governance, of military rule vs. democracy, are underplayed in "Lysistrata." The play text's thus not only lacks the sorrowful, elegiac tone of Thucydides "History of the Peloponnesian Wars," but also a sense of Athenian moral and political superiority.

The absurd pairing of male against female in a kind of a sexual war that hurts both groups becomes an analogy to the fighting of Greeks. This is seen in the debate between the two choruses, as opposed to the usual singular one, of men and women. When the men's Leader states: "No animal exists more stubborn than a woman. / Not even fire, nor any panther, is quite as shameless," and the women's leader counters: "You seem to understand this, but still you keep on fighting. / it's possible, bad man, to have our lasting friendship." (1014) These words could, the playwright suggests, just as easily apply to the two Greeks fighting.