174 Aristophanes
lusty desires of men and women, both young and
old, should not be taken as low-brow humor incor-
porated for mere shock value. The play’s bold sexual
references give it much of its power. Sexuality is the
source of much humor, but it is also the primary
mechanism for hope. Lysistrata proposes that the
lust for copulation is the only human desire that
outmatches the lust for blood, and that sexual grati-
fication withheld can transform the world.
The play explores in depth the exploitative
power sex holds over our species. Central to the
women’s oath is a manipulation strategy; Lysistrata
orders the women not merely to withhold sex but
to simultaneously encourage the desire for it. “I will
live at home in unsullied chastity... wearing my
saffron gown and my sexiest make-up... to inflame
my husband’s ardour... but I will never willingly
yield myself to him” (ll. 217–24). Aristophanes fore-
shadows a world in which women will not ignore
the men but deliberately use their charms to arouse
them (audiences are made to assume that this will
primarily be women like those of Sparta who have
not barricaded themselves in the Acropolis, which is
the second prong of the peace strategy). The play-
wright asks the spectator to imagine all Greek male
citizens reduced to drooling, frustrated beasts as the
Greek women tease them mercilessly but refuse to
“put out.”
This image of men reduced to docile sheep
by unrequited sexual desire is solidified in the
play’s final moments, when the military will of all
Greece has been broken by the strike. A Spartan
delegate, who has been reluctant to agree to the
reconciliation (probably a reference to historical
Spartan militancy) gives in when its representative
proves to be a beautiful naked woman named Rec-
onciliation. Given Sparta’s extreme warrior culture,
the exhibition of one of their men tamed by being
sex-starved implies that the rest of the Greek world
has degraded perhaps to the level of zombie slaves,
owing to their unsatisfied needs.
While most of the play’s sexual content centers
on humorous references and the global effects of
chastity, one particularly famous scene provides a
spectacle of sensuality that never fails to delight.
Myrrhinne’s husband, Cinesias, comes looking for
her, and what follows is a microcosm of the larger
conflict between the sexes, a struggle between lust
and politics, with Cinesias using all the components
of home and marriage against Myrrhine’s negotia-
tion and resolve. Cinesias enters with the energy of
a satyr (the half goat/half human attendants of Dio-
nysus), made all the bolder by his enormous, fully
erect phallus (a comic spin on the costume standard
of Greek comedy, the usually flaccid phallus). He
begs an audience with Myrrhine, using their infant
son as bait: “Surely you can’t harden your heart
against your baby! It’s five days now since he had a
bath or a suck” (l. 880). He then reminds her that
siding with the women is leaving their home unat-
tended, but that more significantly, it leaves them
both with “pain” resulting from secret rites of Aph-
rodite unperformed (l. 893). Cinesias makes a show
of capitulating to the women’s demands. Though
she will not agree to come home until the peace
agreement is fulfilled, Myrrhine does agree to “lie
down” with him in Pan’s Grotto.
The repeatedly averted sex act that plays out in
lines 915–957 would have similarly impacted audi-
ences in Athens of the year 411 as it does today,
continual building anticipation of a spectacle that
is consistently aborted. Public sex was illegal at
Athenian sanctuaries, as it is in most public places
in the present day. Thus, for them to perform it in
front of 14,000 spectators would have stretched the
comic energy to the point of near scandal. Audi-
ences are drawn into Cinesias’s frustration as Myr-
rhine first excuses herself to retrieve a bed and then,
in sequence, a mattress, a pillow, a blanket, and two
different bottles of perfume. When he accidentally
reveals that he does not intend to push for peace
as he promised, Myrrhine abandons her frustrated
husband.
The averted lovemaking stages Lysistrata’s chal-
lenge to the war and affirms the impact a sex strike
would have on the men of Greece. The mastery of
Aristophanes’ text is not that it is rife with dirty
jokes, though it is, nor that some of those jokes are
outright shocking, though he is a skilled author
of bawdy lines and images. Rather, it is that those
moments of lewdness amount to a hopeful sug-
gestion that war might not be the true constant
in human civilization. Sex might be even more
essential to our needs, though we may only realize