Abstract
Aristophanes’ “Peace” plays collectively show war to be that condition wherein the individual, the private needs and the body are subsumed and potentially consumed by the needs of the many, the public good or the body politic. Yet if to make war is to ask the citizen to sacrifice (potentially) the private body for this greater communal good, then to make peace is in Lysistrata a consummation obtained only when the body politic pays due attention to the body private and addresses the social and sexual needs brought on by war itself.
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Notes
See for instance Kenneth J. Reckford, Aristophanes’ Old and New Comedy, Vol. I (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987) p. 308. Professor Reckford laments the fact that “the modern sophisticated reader is too distracted by the sexual jokes and the stripteases” to feel the force of the play’s political and religious overtones (308). In respect to production as opposed to reading, he elsewhere recommends that in order to preserve the play’s wit and ridiculousness for the modern audience it might be played using loaves of French bread or elongated balloons for the phalli and with an all female cast “to bring out the basic fun and silliness with which sex is treated” (295).
Cedric Whitman, in Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964) p. 213, observes that Dicaeopolis in Acharnians speaks of his fury as eyes stung or “bitten” with soap and that the use of the verb “to bite” indicates a figure of speech meaning that “to be ‘bitten’ in the eye is to be enraged”.
Douglass Parker, Four Comedies by Aristophanes, with William Arrowsmith and Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1969), pp. 2–3.
The fantastic improbability of Lysistrata’s project, given the realities of fifth-century Greek society, has among others been observed by K. J. Dover, (cited above) pp. 159-160
Jeffrey Henderson, “‘Lysistrate’: the play and its themes”, in Yale Classical Studies, Vol. XXVI, Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 168, 180
Lois Spatz, Aristophanes (Boston: Twayne Pub., 1978), p. 94. Professor Henderson formulates the question well when he asks why Aristophanes should “go out of his way to flout dramatic logic”. He sees the illogic, as do most, as evidence of the comic playwright’s selecting from reality that which supports a defense of marriage and the family. The oikos is shown as being central to the polis; both are endangered by protracted war. But one could add that Aristophanes suggests as well that the oikos is as much besieged by infidelity as it is by the war. The playwright begs the question not only of the feasibility of Lysistrata’s project but of the likelihood of strong wives like Myrrhine (and ardent husbands like Kinesias) in fifth-century Athens.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Smith, D.L. (1994). War and The Body in Lysistrata: Marriage and The Family Under Siege. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Allegory Revisited. Analecta Husserliana, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0898-0_5
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