Aristophanes play Lysistrata tells the story of a young woman who makes a difference in her community by convincing the other women to stand together to stop the Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata decides that if she can get the women together and have them all withhold sex until the men stop fighting, the war will end. To accomplish this, she first must get all the women of Athens to agree and then must convince the women of Sparta.
As an extra measure, the women take the Acropolis where the State Treasury is kept and hold it, as well as their own personal citadels, against the men until peace is declared. Although the play is intended to be a comedy, it seems Aristophanes intended to portray women in a stronger light than they were typically given credit for. This could be traced through his description of Lysistrata as a female leader, the way the women were successful in bringing about love rather than war and in the way that Aristophanes used the theme of weaving as a metaphor for the important job of women in society.
Lysistrata refuses to accept her role as a ‘mere’ woman, particularly as the war continues to drag on and the people at home are suffering from the lack of young men and attention to other important aspects of life. Throughout the play, Lysistrata continues to insist that women are just as smart and wise as men and therefore equally as capable of making necessary political decisions. Even the means by which she acquired her knowledge is similar to the way in which men gained their knowledge in this time period. “I am but a woman; but I have good common sense; Nature has endowed me with discriminating judgment, which I have yet further developed, thanks to the wise teachings of my father and the elders of the city.”
Like all the men and boys in her society, Lysistrata learned her knowledge in the most traditional way, by learning from the words of older men. To me, there is no difference between her form of education and what I know of Greek education for boys and her arguments, particularly as she lists them out against the men near the end of the play, are logical, coherent and irrefutable.
The women also show a great deal of strength as a combined force. Although several women are caught sneaking out of the Acropolis to return home, including one woman who hides a helmet under her clothing to pretend she is pregnant, the women as a whole manage to stand firm against the men who insist upon entering the temple. In attempting to control the politics of the situation, the women take on the role of the men and effectively put the men in their place.
The chorus of women makes their case to the citizens by first pointing out how women were important idealized elements of society through their childhood and coming to the reasonable conclusion that their advice is necessary. “I have useful counsel to give our city, which deserves it well at my hands for the brilliant distinctions it has lavished on my girlhood … So surely I am bound to give my best advice to Athens.
What matters that I was born a woman, if I can cure your misfortunes? I pay my share of tolls and taxes, by giving men to the State. But you, you miserable greybeards, you contribute nothing to the public charges; on the contrary, you have wasted the treasure of our forefathers, as it was called, the treasure amassed in the days of the Persian Wars.” In talking the old men down, they prove their own strength and they begin to adopt the same means of argument that the men typically employed within the senate.
For me, the best metaphor for the play is the concept of weaving. The whole idea that women are better at sorting out the complicated messes of society because of the practice they get in unraveling the tangled skeins of yarn in the process of weaving is fascinating. I love the way Lysistrata combines the two activities in a point by point comparison. “First we wash the yarn to separate the grease and filth; do the same with all bad citizens, sort them out and drive them forth with rods – they’re the refuse of the city.
Then for all such as come crowding up in search of employments and offices, we must card them thoroughly; then, to bring them all to the same standard, pitch them pell-mell into the same basket, resident aliens or no, allies, debtors to the State, all mixed up together. Then as for our Colonies, you must think of them as so many isolated hanks; find the ends of the separate threads, draw them to a centre here, wind them into one, make one great hank of the lot, out of which the public can weave itself a good, stout tunic.” The similarities between weaving and politics as described by Lysistrata are undeniable.
As I think about it, it seems that Aristophanes was suggesting that women had a particular strength that went well beyond what men usually gave them credit for, but also that the solution to the wars being experienced at the time he wrote the play were very simple. He does this first by indicating that the solution to the war would be something as simple as withholding sex from the men, the idea that is brought forward by Lysistrata.
His second proof is that the women are able to out-argue the men using logical progression and reasoned debate, not something they were considered strong in and therefore must be winning only based upon the strength of their proofs rather than their skill. Finally, he relates the solution to the war to be something as basic and prevalent as weaving, something that was done in every household throughout the Greek nations.
Works Cited
Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Jeffrey Henderson (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.