Lysistrata
Aristophanes(-411)
Extract
There is no beast so shameless as a woman.
The women of Athens and Sparta seize the Acropolis and refuse to sleep with their husbands until the men agree to end the Peloponnesian War, and the resulting comedy is both bawdier and more politically serious than its reputation suggests. Aristophanes staged this play in 411 BC, during one of the war's darkest phases, and the laughter carries real anguish beneath it, the exhaustion of a city that had been fighting for two decades. The humour is frankly sexual and magnificently undignified, full of frustrated men in visible states of discomfort. Yet Lysistrata herself is no joke. She organizes across enemy lines, argues with the eloquence of a statesman, and envisions a peace built on the memory of shared sacrifice rather than conquest.
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Ibsen gives one woman the power Aristophanes gives all the women of Greece: the refusal that stops the machine.
Sophocles' heroine defies the state with the same stubbornness, but the cost is death instead of abstinence.
Atwood shows what happens when women's bodies are controlled by the state instead of weaponised against it.