despair about altering the course of events seems to have set hard. What he proposes is a conspiracy of women to
refuse sex with their men until the men agree to make peace. This has to be world-wide within the Greek world,
and the priestess of Athena, who seems to be based on someone real, has organized it. The characterization of
women from all over Greece is hilariously funny, and so are the details of the plot as it unfolds. It is one of the few
ancient comedies that entrances modern audiences. It is also the earliest in which one may suspect a touch of
compassion in the rather vigorous treatment handed out to people. When the old men are grovelling, there is one
case where one is almost sorry for the poor beast. Aristophanic comedy usually has a string or two strings of
episodes in which various characters get attacked or seen off; one is not usually sorry for them. Maybe Lysistrata is
close to the beginning of a new sense of laughing through tears, which made Menander possible and the old style
impossible. We need not necessarily see this as a change for the better.
If we do not, we can be pleased that most of Lysistrata is splendidly heartless. It is not Aristophanes' only women's
play, but the only one in which they are really heroes. The other two are the Thesmophoriazousae, from the same
year as Lysistrata, which is almost entirely based on jokes about Euripides, and Women in Parliament, an
extravaganza of 392 B.C., the year of an alliance between Athens and Sparta. Women take over the state in it and
announce communism. The plot is incoherent because it lacks political drive: Aristophanes does no more than toy
with his themes, and the political humour which once generated such alarming fantasies has sunk to a whimsical
level. The Lysistrata is stronger because it deals with impossibilities as if they were real; it belongs to a year in
which something was still possible, maybe everything.
The Frogs, in 405 B.C., is in one way the saddest play of Aristophanes that we still have, because the only thing it
puts right is the theatre. But there is no lack of brilliance in its verbal texture, and no weakness of construction. It
does raise problems, since unless there were two choruses, which would be unique in our experience, then either
the Frogs themselves or the choirs of the Blest never appear. The essential plot of the Frogs is the descent of
Dionysus, a god with many human weaknesses, to the underworld, mocked by the Frogs as he learns to row in
Charon's boat; he is searching for a great tragic poet, and chooses between Aeschylus and Euripides by a contest in
which they destroy one another's lines with parody and mockery. This process is for once extremely funny, and
(even more unusually) instructive, since it tells us something about the texture and technique of tragic verse. Still,
the tendency of mockery is to suppress extremes, and the view of poetry that Aristophanes takes is too safe to be
sound.
He does take his own calling as a poet most seriously, in a way unfamiliar in our times, but as a comic poet in the
theatre of Athens his responsibility is greater than that of modern writers. He says 'We must indeed say things that
are good, because to little children it is the schoolmaster who speaks, but to those past puberty it is poets'. From his
very first play, which was about modern versus old-fashioned education, at least down to the Frogs, which contains
strong moral views thinly disguised, Aristophanes writes as if the lines I have quoted here are important to him.
Aeschylus wins the contest in the under-world, Sophocles being too peaceable to take part. At the very end we
suddenly have these words:
The graceful thing
is not to sit
by Socrates and talk
and cast aside the Muse
and all the great matter
of the tragic art.He wants more poetry and fewer philosophers; particularly he wants more Aeschylus. Dare one say he was wrong?