Lysistrata

Lysistrata (411 BCE) was written by the best-known Greek comic poet, the Athenian playwright Aristophanes. We know little of Aristophanes’ life outside of his work. His birth and death cannot be firmly dated, but he was believed to have been born around 460 BCE and died sometime in the mid-380s BCE. His active period, though, is more certain— around 425 to 388 BCE—making him a contemporary of other fifth-century Athenian luminaries like Socrates, Euripides, and Sophocles.

Of around forty plays Aristophanes wrote, we have eleven in complete form. They are our only surviving examples of what later commentators would call “Old Comedy,” a sub-genre of Greek comedy (followed by Middle and New). Greek tragedy largely limited its subject matter to myths, but Old Comedy reflected the contemporary sphere. Its plays usually took place in the present and lambasted social and political figures and situations. Even when they starred mythological gods and heroes, they were concerned with topics that were relevant to a contemporary audience. This made their humor cutting-edge in their day, but sometimes difficult to contextualize now.

Lysistrata is one of the more accessible of Aristophanes’ works for the modern reader. Twenty years into the Peloponnesian War, a long and destructive conflict between the city-states of Athens and Sparta, its heroine is sick of domestic affairs falling by the wayside.