Lysistrata: Lines 254 – 705 Summary & Analysis

The decrepit Chorus of Old Men, led by their especially decrepit Male Koryphaios (leader of the chorus), enters shakily and slowly in two groups. They carry vinewood torches and pots containing fire, which is always in danger of going out. They’re intent on seizing back the Acropolis. As they shuffle on, they gripe about their wives (“she’s a National Disaster,” one named Swifty moans) and about the catastrophes brought on by matriarchy. The Koryphaios urges the wretchedly slow old men onward. They’ll try and burn the women who organized the rebellion, he proclaims. The men also recall how, some one hundred years ago, they ousted the Spartan Kleomenes, a historical figure who occupied the Acropolis in 508 BC.

As the Chorus of Old Men nears the Acropolis, the old men increasingly struggle to carry their torches and firepots uphill. To prevent the fire from going out, moreover, they blow into their pots, only to send forth clouds of smoke. The men cough and choke, and smoke gnaws their eyeballs. Nonetheless, they reach the Acropolis gate. Their first plan is to crash it down, and if that fails, they’ll ask to be admitted politely. Their last resort is to “burn the damned door down.” The men get into a horrible, confused tangle as they deposit their logs, but somehow manage. The Male Koryphaios then offers a prayer to Athena: “Grant us victory, male supremacy.”

While the Chorus of Old Men prepares the torches, the Chorus of Old Women, led by their Female Koryphaios, suddenly enters, wearing long cloaks and bearing pitchers of water filled earlier at the fountains in town. The women are old, but younger than the men, and they are quite spry. Noticing the smoke, the women dash over to put out the fire before its too late, praying as they do so for Athena’s protection from “Man’s inhumanity.”

The two Choruses at last come face to face with one another. The Chorus of Old Men is surprised by the “flood of reserves” the Chorus of Old Women has managed to muster. The Male Koryphaios asks for volunteers to pulverize the women—“just a few jabs” to silence the women’s backtalk—but no one comes forward. The Female Koryphaios then advances and offers her male counterpart a “free shot.” The two exchange threats, but after the female Koryphaios threatens to “leave no balls on the body for other bitches to gnaw,” the male Koryphaios hurriedly retreats.

The Chorus of Old Men and the Chorus of Old Women fire more threats and insults back and forth. The men threaten to barbecue the women; the women threaten to douse the men’s fire and to give them a bath. When the men at last ready their torches, the women empty their pitchers over them, soaking them. The women call it “gardening.” “Perhaps you’ll bloom,” the Female Koryphaios tells the men. The men, for their part, are “withered, frozen, shaking.” Shivering, the Chorus of Men retreat, utterly defeated.

A Commissioner of Public Safety enters from the left, reluctantly followed by a squad of police made up of four Scythian archers. He surveys the situation with disapproval. The Commissioner makes a speech claiming that overly emotional women were in large part responsible for creating an atmosphere in which demagogues could support a military expedition to Sicily. He then concludes that the “Gift of Woman” is nothing but “MORAL CHAOS!”

The Male Koryphaios urges the Commissioner to bring charges against the Chorus of Old Women, but the Commissioner says that the women are, counter-intuitively, in the right. Why? Because men taught women how to be lustful and rebellious. We shouldn’t have left our wives alone with goldsmiths and cobblers, the Commissioner argues, because the ensuing “hanky-panky [is what] what we have to thank for today’s / Utter Anarchy.” The Commissioner concludes that he needs to access the war treasury in the Acropolis, and orders his squad of police to pry the gate open with a crowbar.

Just then, the gate to the Acropolis bursts open, revealing Lysistrata. She is perfectly composed and is holding a large spindle, an instrument used to spin thread. She tells the Commissioner that he doesn’t need crowbars so much as brains. Outraged, the Commissioner sends a policeman to arrest Lysistrata, but she repels him with a vicious jab of her spindle. The Commissioner orders a second policeman to do the same, but Kleonike forces him to retreat by threatening to “stomp the shit right out of [him]” with a chamber pot. Myrrhine repels a third policeman by brandishing a blazing lamp, and Ismenia repels the fourth by brandishing “a huge pair of pincers.”

The Commissioner orders the policeman to regroup and charge as a unit, but a horde of women brandishing household goods pours from the Acropolis. Lysistrata urges these “ladies of hell” onward, these bargain hunters and “grocery grenadiers.” The policemen are swiftly routed. The dazed Commissioner mutters about his men’s incompetence, while Lysistrata celebrates the freedom and power of women. The Male Koryphaios suggests in turn that women aren’t capable of rational discourse. Dodging a blow from him, the Female Koryphaios points out that striking at one’s neighbor “is scarcely civilized” either, and she swings at him with a pitcher. He’s forced to hurriedly back away. The Chorus of Old Men goes into a worried dance.

The Commissioner asks Lysistrata why the women are blockading the Treasury. Lysistrata responds that money is the cause of the war and all internal disorder in Athens. She proposes that women budget the city’s money, just as they do already in their own households. The War Effort will wither, but “who needs the War Effort?” as Lysistrata says. She promises to save the men from themselves out of friendship, to which the Commissioner responds: “I DO NOT WANT TO BE SAVED, DAMMIT!”

Why do the women even care about War and Peace? asks the Commissioner. Lysistrata responds that the women have tolerated for long enough their husbands’ mismanagement of affairs of state and their “staggering incompetence,” and that they were told to shut up by their husbands for even referencing Peace. That is, until the men went too far and “fumbled the City away in the Senate.” The women knew then that Athens didn’t need a Man, but “Peace in Greece” itself, which only they could bring about. “We’ll straighten you and set you right,” promises Lysistrata.

The Commissioner is outraged by Lysistrata’s presumptuousness, but she shuts him up, winding her veil around his head. Kleonike and Myrrhine join in with comb and wool-basket as well, and soon enough the Commissioner is transformed into a woman. He should stay at home for a change, Lysistrata says, while the women end the war.

While the Commissioner struggles to remove his new outfit, Lysistrata tells the Chorus of Old Women to dance and sing. They celebrate their willpower and the excellence of women, from Beauty to Common Sense. The Female Koryphaios has words of encouragement for all, and Lysistrata anticipates that soon the men will crack under the pressure of Love, and Peace will be restored.

The Commissioner asks how the women intend to achieve their goal. Lysistrata responds that the women first intend to withdraw the Army of Occupation from downtown Athens. Kleonike adds that she saw a cavalry captain buy soup on horseback there and carry it in his helmet, and that another soldier was menacing a saleslady and stealing her figs. Lysistrata explains that Greece is “rather like yarn”—snarled yarn, to be exact, and she plans on smoothing it out by sending out “Special Commissions…to ravel these tense international kinks.” “Typically wooly female logic,” the Commissioner says dismissively.

Lysistrata retorts that if the Commissioner were logical at all, he’d adopt her plan. She extends her wool metaphor: as fleece needs to be scrubbed, beaten to rid it of vermin, combed of its lumps and knots and snarls, and expertly woven, so too does Athens need to be cleansed of filth, rid of incompetent parasites, and politically reunified if it is to properly fit the Athenian spirit.

All this, the Commissioner complains, coming from women who had nothing to do with the war! It’s Lysistrata’s turn to be outraged: the women gave up their sons to the war effort in Sicily, and they lived the best years of their lives sleeping alone. Many virgins grew out of their prime, she mourns, without the chance to marry. The men who come back old from war can marry “the veriest nymphet,” she goes on, but a woman who slips from her prime will have no husband.

The Commissioner seems genuinely persuaded by the women’s plight—but then only calls upon the Athenian men to fight all the more vigorously. Lysistrata bangs the Commissioner on the head with her spindle and winds him in thread; Kleonike empties her chamber pot over him; Myrrhine breaks her lamp on his head. To choose war, the women suggest, is to choose death. The Commissioner staggers off, and the women re-enter the Acropolis.

The Male Koryphaios rouses the men. They strip down to their short tunics and advance toward the audience: they smell radical disorder in the air, “an absolutist plot.” They think the Spartans must be masterminding the women’s rebellion “to commandeer the City’s cash.” The Male Koryphaios denounces tyranny, bashes the Female Koryphaios “in the jaw,” and runs cackling back to the Chorus of Old Men.

The members of the Chorus of Old Women then strip down to their short tunics, and they sing of their high pedigree as participants in Athenian religious life. The Female Koryphaios reminds the audience, “I hold stock in Athens—stock I paid for in sons.” The men, she says, are merely doddering bankrupts. She then runs over and hits the Male Koryphaios in the jaw with her slipper.

The members of the Chorus of Old Men have had it: they remove their tunics. The Male Koryphaios reasons that the men can’t attack the women on horseback, because “a woman is an easy rider with a natural seat,” and instead he attempts to snare his female counterpart around the neck to stick her in the stocks. The Female Koryphaios works herself loose, however, and chases him away. The women now remove their tunics, angry at the birdbrained men. The Female Koryphaios isn’t afraid: she’s got friends from Sparta and Thebes, like Lampito and Ismenia. The worst the men can do, she mocks, is pass some absurd law. She grabs her male counterpart by the ankle and throws him off balance. The Chorus of Old Men retires in confusion.