In the Library
Lysistrata
Aristophanes, 411 BCE
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 55 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by The Athenian Society (1912)
- Original
- Original grc
- Chapters
- Chapters 9
- Length
- Length 13k words
£1.99
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No wild beast is there, no flame of fire, more fierce and untameable than woman; the panther is less savage and shameless.
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About the book
Twenty years into a war that has buried a generation, the women of Athens and Sparta decide to end it themselves, with the only leverage left to people who cannot vote or fight: they will refuse their husbands the marriage bed until the killing stops. They swear the oath over a shared bowl of wine, seize the treasury on the Acropolis, and wait. What follows is the frankest comedy of desire ever staged, husbands hobbling about in visible agony, a truce finally haggled out over the body of a naked girl who stands in for the map of Greece. But Aristophanes wrote it while Athens was bleeding itself white in a war it would go on to lose, and the laughter carries a wound: the suspicion that the people who pay for the slaughter are the only ones with any reason to stop it. Bawdy, furious, and tender about the ordinary life that war devours, it hands the whole catastrophe of empire to the people history never thought to ask.