Women and War: Language, Sex, and Power in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

bompacrazy.com

Didaskalia, 2011

The author details his approach, as director, to bringing Lysistrata's "Reconciliation scene" to a contemporary audience by having Lysistrata herself metatheatrically step into the role of Reconciliation.

A scholiast's note on Lysistrata mentions that there was an alternative title to the play: Adôniazousai. A close reading of the play with this title in mind reveals that Lysistrata and her allies metaphorically hold an Adonis festival atop the Acropolis. The Adonia, a festival that is typically regarded as " marginal " and " private " by modern scholars, thus becomes symbolically central and public as the sex-strike held by the women halts the Peloponnesian war. The public space of the Acropolis becomes, notionally, a private rooftop, and Adonia-like activity proliferates; boars, myrrh, Aphrodite, " gardens of Adonis, " and lamentation all play important roles. The notion that the women of Lysistrata hold an unexpected Adonis festival on the Acropolis, at the very heart of the Athenian polis, provides a more nuanced reading of the play and forces us to rethink the place of the Adonia at Athens as well as, more generally, the distinction between public and private festivals.

Scholarship on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata has become almost unanimously aligned in various degrees of support of a proposal made by D. M. Lewis in 1955 that we should identify Aristophanes’ character, Lysistrata, with Lysimache, the priestess of Athena Polias when the play was produced in 411 BCE. Lewis also argues that Aristophanes’ Myrrhine should be identified with the priestess of Athena Nike of that same name during that year, but this proposal has turned out to be more controversial. The argument of this paper is intended to show that the identifications or even associations between Aristophanes’ characters and the two acropolis priestesses are much more problematic than scholars have recognized.

A student production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata (University of Warwick, 2015) provides the springboard for a reconsideration of the politics of the play, seen through Judith Butler's work on the performativity of gender (Gender Trouble) and of the political consequences of precarity (Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly).

This essay provides a reassessment of the increasingly popular view that the young wives of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are represented as hetaeras. It begins by examining a parallel debate in contemporary Attic red-figure vase paintings of women at home to show that displays of female sexuality are not incompatible with marriageable maidens and wives. Aristophanes similarly situates his female characters within a domestic context as the site of sexual and social legitimacy. A detailed analysis of clothing, footwear and grooming practices deployed in the sex strike demonstrates that they represent the standard accoutrements of housewives rather than of hetaeras. Their domesticated eroticism, while enabling the male spectators a voyeuristic glimpse of other men’s wives, reinforces their procreative function as mothers and producers of future Athenian citizens. The importance of sexual desire within marriage for the production of legitimate offspring is dramatically reinforced by the onstage presence of the boy child in the thwarted sexual encounter of Myrrhine and Cinesias. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata fits with a pattern of heightened interest in women and domestic ideology at the end of the fifth century BCE. The popularity of these domestic images may reflect a growing concern for the threat posed by prolonged warfare to the stability and continuity of both household and polis.

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 2002

in W. Sowa&Schaffner S. (eds), “Greek and Latin from an Indo-European Perspective 3 (GLIEP 3). Proceedings of the Conference held at the Comenius University Bratislava, Kuly 8th-10th 2010”, Supplement of IJDL, pp. 81-100, 2012

The paper analyses the use of personal pronouns (PPs) in three Aristophanes's comedies (Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Ecclesiazusae). The analysis shows that male characters use more 1st person singular pronouns and a more report speaking communicative style (see Tannen 1994), whereas female characters use more 1st person plural pronouns with an inclusive value, 2nd person singular pronouns and a more rapport speaking communicative style (Tannen 1994). This finding confirm the claim of a gender-distribution of PPs in speech, already shown for other modern languages (e.g. English, in Hirschmann 1994).