Lysistrata

First performed in classical Athens c. 411 B.C., Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is the original battle of the sexes. One woman, Lysistrata, summons the women of all Greece to a meeting at her home near the Acropolis in Athens, exhorting them to withhold sexual contact from all men in order that they negotiate a treaty. Double entendres abound as men of Greece attempt to keep Lysistrata and her prurient gang from putting an end to the Peloponnesian war. Notably risqué, this comic drama sheds light on gender relations in ancient Athens.Nominally a democracy, Athens does not recognize slaves and women as citizens. The original play was neither feminist nor unreservedly pacifist. Even when they seemed to demonstrate empathy with the female condition, dramatic poets in classical Athens still reinforced sexual stereotyping of women as irrational creatures in need of protection from themselves and from others. Thus Lysistrata accepted the men's conduct of the war out of female respect for male a..