Lysistrata Analysis

Aristophanes' Lysistrata takes place in the Ancient Greek city of Athens. Actually, that's not quite right: for him, it wasn't the ancient Greek city of Athens; he was writing about his contemporar...

Narrator? What narrator? Lysistrata is a play and it doesn't have a narrator at all. Instead of hearing what characters do, we actually see them do it. We don't get a God's-eye view of what the cha...

First of all, Aristophanes' Lysistrata is a drama. We're not talking about drama in the sense that made-for-TV movies on serious topics like WWII or forensic science are dramas—Lysistrata is defi...

There's no room for darkness in Lysistrata. This is pure, filthy comedy through and through. Even though it deals with weighty subject matter like war, it's only touches upon Real Talk subjects thr...

Wait—an Ancient Greek drama that's colloquial? Is that even possible? Didn't people back then just walk around muttering "thee" and "thou" (or the Ancient Greek equivalent) into their long fuzzy...

The play Lysistrata is named after its main character and hero: Lysistrata. Fairly straightforward stuff, right? Pshaw. Maybe in the real world, but this ain't the real world—this is Lit World, s...

The play ends with a crazy drunken party in celebration of the peace treaty that has just been signed between Athens and Sparta. At the party, the former enemies realize that the members of the opp...

Alright, so this play takes place in Ancient Greece, which means you may have to learn a little bit of history, and you may not catch all the references to Ancient Greek politics. But, hey, that's...

After years of bitter war, Lysistratra calls the women of Greece to a meeting. Their plan: to hit their warrior husbands where it hurts the most. The exposition is twofold: it's both the war (if th...

From the very beginning, a haze of darkness hangs over the play. This darkness is the long war that has been raging on between Athens and Sparta, and that has recently taken a turn for the worse (f...

Even though this is a play—and plays are supposed to have Acts, right?—all of the action in Lysistrata happens in one big chunk. So these are what we at Shmoop think of as the "Acts" in Aristop...

In 2003, during the lead-up to the Iraq War, two New York-based actresses named Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower created The Lysistrata Project. This project involved readings and productions of Ari...

Be afraid, parents. Be very afraid.Not only does the plot revolve around sex, and not only is practically every other word some sort of smutty double-entendre, but also all of the male characters s...

Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes (187-189)Euripides (283, 368-369), Andromache (155-156)Homer, Iliad (520)Aesop, Fable 3 (695)King Cleomenes of Sparta's occupation of the Acropolis (273/4-280)The Ba...