"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...

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.
Of course, the central significance of Lysistrata as an attractive female figure of rebellion and dissent is clearly appealing to modern feminists, as the first words spoken by the Athenian Ambassador are, "can anyone direct me to Lysistrata, "rather than the leader of the city. "It's obvious we need to find her fast." But one must view the play in its ideological context, and most importantly, not delete the sections of the play that would have been relevant to the contemporary Greek audience, although of less interest to the modern reader, male or female. The housewife's chiding of the ambassadors is neither a feminist nor an anti-war statement, but a depicted symbol of a world upside down, of Greek against Greek, rather than how the world should be, with the city-states united against foreigners, and women at home.

Work Cited

Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Edited by Jeffrey Henderson. Peruses Tufts Classics Project. 12 Dec 2004 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0036;query=card%3D%2352;layout=;loc=1072