War and Peace Theme Analysis

Aristophanes’ great comedy Lysistrata was first performed in the Greek city-state of Classical Athens in 411 BC, when Athenian supremacy in Greece was collapsing. For two decades or so, Athens had been engaged in bloody, costly warfare against the Peloponnesian League (led by the Greek city-state of Sparta), in what is now known as the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Moreover, as part of that conflict, Athens had also recently suffered a fatal disaster during the Sicilian Expedition (415-413 BC), a failed military intervention in which some two hundred ships and five thousand Athenian soldiers were destroyed in one fell swoop.

These events form the crucial historical backdrop of Lysistrata—indeed, the inciting action of the play, spearheaded by the titular heroine, is a resolution on the part of the women of Athens and Sparta to withhold sex from their men until they bring about a peaceful end to the Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata herself identifies the cause of the war to be nothing more than political corruption, greed, and ambition. The men of Athens, entangled in their folly and paranoia, disagree. “The War Effort needs [the Treasury’s] money!” a Commissioner of Public Safety insists—to which Lysistrata wittily retorts, “Who needs the War Effort?” After all, the Peloponnesian War brought with it not public safety but rather pain and suffering for Athens, from military disaster abroad to ruptures in the fabric of daily life at home, over which Lysistrata and her fellow women grieve: dead sons, a lack of marriageable men, and women growing out of their “prime” without the chance to marry.

So it is that Lysistrata and the women of both Athens and Sparta are willing to go to great extremes in suing for peace. This is not to say that Lysistrata is an anti-war play, however, as many readers like to think it is. Rather, the play takes a stand against war when it is waged for bad reasons, against “staggering incompetence” when it comes to the handling of affairs of state, and against specifically Greek-on-Greek warfare. Both the Athenians and Spartans were Greek, after all, and allies in the Greco-Persian Wars that ended only some twenty years before the Peloponnesian War began. (It should be added here, however, that Aristophanes, always playing for laughs, nonetheless does little to improve the Athenian perception of the Spartans in his play, as he represents them as unsophisticated, half-witted bumpkins who speak a degenerate dialect of Greek.) By the conclusion of the play, the women’s sex strike so hotly bothers their men that the Greeks do in fact make peace: “Dance to the gods’ glory, and thank them for the happy ending,” Lysistrata calls out in her final speech. Historical Athens, though, did not make such a happy ending for itself: driven to it by besiegement, starvation, and disease, the Athenians surrendered to the Spartans in 404 BC, and their supremacy in Greece was forever broken.