The males throughout the play are starved of sex and the fire graphically expresses the unsatisfied lust which the women have caused and which will ultimately lead to the end of the war.
At the same time, it is the job of the women to resist male passion; and this finds its physical expression in the quenching water which they carry. The contrast reaches its climax when the women douse the men with their water, putting out the fire, a gesture which cements the women's victory in this first encounter and at the same time reflects the success of the female resistance to male desire.
One of the most inspired features of the staging is the use of the stage building, which formed the standing backdrop to Athenian plays. The stage building is a very versatile resource, which plays a variety of roles, often a palace in tragedy, the rustic hut in Euripides' Electra , a private house or street in comedy, the Pnyx where the Assembly met in Acharnians.
In this play Aristophanes makes it represent the Propylaea, the monumental gateway to the Acropolis and one of the enduring symbols of Athenian strength. Lysistrata's grand plan has two strands. The younger women are to stage the sex strike at home, simultaneously provoking and resisting their husbands, while the older women seize the Acropolis to gain control of the treasure housed there, which can fund and so prolong the war.
Despite the fact that this is the plan which Lysistrata announces at the start of the play, Aristophanes makes a subtle switch. He puts his older women not in the Acropolis but in front of it as one half of the chorus occupying the orchestra and has the younger women on the Acropolis. The private sex strike at home is sidelined. This is in part because it would be both difficult and repetitive to stage a series of private acts of sexual temptation and resistance.
But the option he has chosen also gives him the opportunity for visually and thematically more impressive clashes between the women and the collective power both of the male sex of civic authority. And he still gets to stage one typical scene later on when Myrrhine leaves the Acropolis ostensibly to satisfy but actually to tease her husband.
But by astute use of the stage building he is able to pull together his two plot strands, the seizure of the Acropolis and the sex strike. Behind the orchestra and facing the audience is a closed gateway held by the women which the men are desperately trying to penetrate. The stage set thus becomes a visual metaphor for the sex strike at the heart of the action. Aristophanes is very fond of this kind of visual metaphor.
Part of this is just the comic poet's inventive and witty love of the concrete. Abstract ideas are turned into objects, people, actions, sometimes with paradoxical, occasionally bizarre, effects. But this process can also be used to simplify the comic world and make the impossible possible. This true of my last instance of effective staging. Peace in the real world comes about by negotiation, a combination of hard bargaining and command of detail.
This is fascinating for the diplomat and the historian. But it may not always make for lively comedy, certainly not in a comic theatre which likes grand figures and grand gestures, like this one. Negotiation also takes time. All of Aristophanes' peace plays offer neat solutions to this problem, all different. In Lysistrata peace is brought about by the figure of Reconciliation, a naked woman that is, a male actor in a costume representing a naked woman.
The Athenian and Spartan negotiators argue over her body, each part of which by the kind of punning Aristophanes loves corresponds to different parts of Greece. It's a metaphor for carving up the map which mimics territorial negotiations in a comically grotesque way. Actually, that's not quite right: for him, it wasn't the ancient Greek city of Athens; he was writing about his contemporary city. That Aristophanes sure had his finger on the pulse, man. He was the John Oliver of his time.
In fact, the play takes place in the same year that it was first performed: BCE. So what was going on in Athens in BCE? By far the most important event of the day was the long war between Athens and Sparta, otherwise known as the Peloponnesian War. The play appeared at a time when the war was going especially badly for Athens, ever since its massive fleet got massacred in Sicily two years earlier.
In such a situation, many people would have felt that the war was a complete disaster, and would have been ready to make peace. And he has been succeeding in that goal for more than 2, years, for the play is a masterly comedy that appeals to people of every time and place.
He also wanted to deliver a message to theater audiences of fifth-century Athens: that the war between Athens and Sparta was an exercise in stupidity--a senseless waste of people and resources. The climax occurs when the men sue for peace, the goddess of peace appears, and Lysistrata makes a speech. Although Aristophanes focuses his plays on specific people, ideas, and events of his time and place, his themes appeal to audiences of every age and ever country.
In other words, the plays have universal appeal. For example, in , as part of a worldwide protest against the impending U. Another play of Aristophanes, The Clouds , remains popular today because it exposes public figures who rely on specious reasoning to promote their agendas and gain followers. Stichomythia stik uh MITH e uh consists of brief, alternating lines of dialogue spoken in rapid-fire succession. It occurs frequently in Greek drama, especially when characters are arguing or expressing strong emotions.
Following is an example of stichomythia in Lysistrata. The leader of the men's chorus and the leader of the women's chorus are threatening each other. Is it to cremate yourself? What insolence! Study Questions and Essay Topics. Cummings Study Guide.
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