In Our Time - Lysistrata

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aristophanes' comedy in which the women of Athens and Sparta, led by Lysistrata, secure peace in the long-running war between them by staging a sex strike. To the men in the audience in 411BC, the idea that peace in the Peloponnesian War could be won so easily was ridiculous and the thought that their wives could have so much power over them was even more so. However Aristophanes' comedy also has the women seizing the treasure in the Acropolis that was meant to fund more fighting in an emergency, a fund the Athenians had recently had to draw on. They were in a perilous position and, much as they might laugh at Aristophanes' jokes, they knew there were real concerns about the actual cost of the war in terms of wealth and manpower. WithPaul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge Sarah Miles Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham UniversityAndJames Robson Professor of Classical Studies at the Open UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Lysistrata (Oxford University Press, 1987)Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women (Routledge, 2010)Aristophanes (ed. Jeffrey Henderson), Birds; Lysistrata; Women at the Thesmophoria (Loeb Classical Library series, Harvard University Press, 2014) Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata and Other Plays: The Acharnians; The Clouds; Lysistrata (Penguin, 2002)Aristophanes (ed. Alan H. Sommerstein), Lysistrata (Aris & Phillips, 1998)Paul Cartledge, Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd (Bristol Classical Press, 1999)Kenneth Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (University of California Press, 1972)Germaine Greer, Lysistrata: The Sex Strike: After Aristophanes (Aurora Metro Press, 2000)Tony Harrison, The Common Chorus: A Version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Faber & Faber, 1992)Douglas M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (Oxford University Press, 1995)S. Douglas Olson (ed.), Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson (De Gruyter, 2013), especially 'She (Don't) Gotta Have It: African-American reception of Lysistrata' by Kevin WetmoreJames Robson, Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Bloomsbury ancient comedy companions (Bloomsbury, 2023)James Robson, Aristophanes: An Introduction (Duckworth, 2009)Ralph M. Rosen and Helene P. Foley (eds.), Aristophanes and Politics. New Studies (Brill, 2020) Donald Sells, Parody, Politics and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy (Bloomsbury, 2018)David Stuttard (ed.), Looking at Lysistrata: Eight Essays and a New Version of Aristophanes' Provocative Comedy (Bristol Classical Press, 2010)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in 411 BC,

Athenians watched Aristophani's new comedy, Lysistrita, for their first and only time. It was unforgettable. He showed the women of Athens and Spartans, a so wanting peace in their long war with each other that they seize the treasure on Necropolis that would fund the fighting and they declare a sex strike and they win.

It was all fantastical enough to be palatable to the audience but it asked the challenging question, what are we fighting for? And if patriarchal Athenians didn't want to give ground to women, wasn't it time for the deaths of so many men to stop? With me to discuss Aristophanes-Laristair are Sarah Miles, Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University,

James Robson, Professor of Classical Studies at the Oman University, and Paul Cartlidge, A.G. Lamantis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge. Paul, Paul Cartlidge, who was Aristophanes, and what did he write? He was a poet. Poetis means a maker. He was an Athenian, probably quite upper class. He was the son of Philippos, which means lover of horses, which probably suggests he comes from a horsey background. and he was born somewhere around the middle of the 5th century BC, so we're in the 440s,

about a generation after, the major clash and conflict, which had involved many Greeks in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, when they were invaded by Persians, and a number of plays by Aristotovni's referred back to. And one of the reasons for that was as a result of that conflict, two great cities, Greeks it is emerged, one of which was Athens, and that was the Athens into which Aristophanes was born,

quite an extraordinary era, a bit like Florence, around about 1,500. So he felt that his genius ran not in the tragic vein, but in the comic vein, and he actually had a lot of fun doing para tragedy. So we know that he wrote something like, and had performed something like 40-plus plays, but of those 40-plus, only 11. survive. And the one we're looking at is number seven in terms of survival, the Lysistrata. We're not absolutely sure which of the two play festivals of 411 BC it was performed at, but he had a very long career after that. He died, we think, somewhere around 3.8.5,

and there are four more plays by him surviving after the Lysistrata. What was going on between Athens and Sparta at that time, and what had the Athenians endured? Athens, between 480 and 3.30, they were two years out of three actually fighting someone else, not just non-Greeks, but other Greeks. The most famous, the most disastrous of those conflicts was what we call the Peloponnesian War or the Athenoponnesian War. This broke out when Aristophanes was about 15, went on, on and off for 27 years, and it was after the resumption. This is slightly controversial. Some historians, ancient and modern, say it was just one war. Others say it was two wars separated by a period of peace.

But what we're dealing with unambiguously, a period of war, and Athens are doing exceptionally badly. They rather stupidly overreached themselves in 415, having made a kind of peace with Sparta and Aristophanes wrote a play piece to mark that juncture. Having done that, they then fell out again. again, and the Athenians got too big for their boots. And one of their adventures, it was not just a venture,

was to try to conquer not just one city in Scyt, but the whole of Sissli disaster. Thousands of Athenians died. And that's just two years before the licitia. So that would have been very much in the minds of ordinary Athenians, that their brothers, their uncles, their other male relatives, many of them dead. Thank you. Sarah Miles, we're talking about Aristophanes who writes in a comedy genre.

They write in comedy or tragedy. They don't mix them up. What might the audience have expected when they went along to this one? Well, as a comedy performance, it comes as part of a festival context. But this festival was not just turn up and celebrate occasion. It was one where we had competition. So Aristophanes was one of many comic poets, three, we think, in each year, competing against each other for the top prize to be seen as the best comedian of the year.

What was the prize? The prize, it's a good question. But it was, most importantly, popularity, fame and potentially the ability to put on more plays. And I say that because Aristophanes had his first play put on in 47, and his plays were put on through the decades throughout the Peloponnesian War and beyond in each.

And that's the joy of the 40 plays that we have and we know of and the 11 plays that we have, they cover 420s, 410s, 400s, 390, 380s. So we get a sense of the comedies that develop over time for Aristophanes. The other thing about the festival context that Aristophanes is competing in is there are also performances of tragedy, and you referred to that. So we have the great Tradians, Iskoulos, Sophocles, Euripides. During Aristophanes' lifetime, Sophocles and Euripides are the only tragedians

who are around Iskoulos has already died. So this is a festival context in which you're going to come and see tragedies that will rend your heart, fill you with emotion, bring you to what Aristotle called a point of catharsis, a kind of ritual purging with stories such as Oedipus, Tyrannus, the Bacchai, all kinds of horrifying and wonderful journeys into the depths of what it is to be human. And then after that you get the raucous comedy of Aristophanes. And that is such a different place to be because Aristophanes, all of his comedies are set in the contemporary world. They are part of Athenian life and

they are very much drawing on the world around it. You can see Aristophanic comedy as quite a parasite on society, on politics, on the people around it in order to create the comedy that the audience are there to see. Can you tell the listeners something about the setting of that play? By the setting you mean the environment that they're in, the theatre of Dionysus itself.

So we're on the south-east slopes of the Acropolis. So in the heart of Athens, at the heart of the democracy itself right under the Parthenon and the Temple of Athena, which of course will be pivotal for the play of Lysistrata itself. And in that Theatre of Dionysus, around 10,000, Daristofny's Frogs, a different play, says that there were about 10,000 people in the audience. So we're looking at a huge open-air outdoor performance, not as big as Glastonbury, although I think I looked up that in 1971 when David Bowie performed,

there were about 10,000 people present. So that's the kind of scale that you're looking at. And the thing is, you're sitting in an outdoor environment. There's no fourth wall between audience and actors. Every performance of comedy had a chorus of 24 Athenian citizens, and they would all have been male citizens who performed the dancing, the singing, the musical aspect of Aristophanic comedy. Was everybody in the play male?

Everyone in the play was male. Was everybody in the audience male? That is the biggest debate of question that we know. but what we can say for sure is there are definitely a male dominant audience. There are, for example, in Aristophani's birds, there is reference to the idea that you can nip home and have sex with someone you're not supposed to because everyone else will be in the theatre.

So that's taken as proof that women are at home, but also that doesn't have to mean that all women were at home. So it's a debated thing, but they're not going to be the dominant part of the audience. But they're going to be fairly strong in the play itself. So Aristophanes Lysistrata has an all-female set of protagonists. Lysistrata and the other women who call the sex strike, and they sort of fill the stage from the beginning.

And then we meet a chorus that is half female and half male, which represents our conflict in the play. Thank you. James, James Robson, could you outline the plot in more detail than I did? Sure. You've alluded to some of the major parts of the plot already. So this is famous for being the play about the sex strike. As Sarah said, it takes place in contemporary Athens, and so the contemporary Athens to the Athenian audience in 411 BCE,

and it takes place against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War as well. So at the beginning of the play, Lysistrita calls women together from all over Greece, and she has this burning proposition to put to them, which we eventually discover is this proposition of a sex strike. Following the women's reluctance agreement to the sex strike, we actually discover there's a second strand to her plot, and the next chunk of the play is this. So it's the older women's seize you

an occupation of the Acropolis. The men turn up, as Sarah says, half of the chorus are old men, the other half are old women. The men turn up to try and oust the women from the Acropolis. They're unsuccessful. And this gives Leicester to the opportunity

to explain why they've seized the Acropolis and why they want to put an end to the war. She lands some pretty good punches during her exposition, but essentially she doesn't win the Battle of Hearts and Minds. With residential punches? She talks about the poignancy, some of the difficulties that women face being left behind.

She talks about some really quite dark things like the death of women's sons, who have been sent out as hot plights, who have been sent out as soldiers. She talks about the disruption to the Eocos, to the household as well that men's absence brings. How it seems to be she goes out one day and summons all the women of Athens and any other around to join her and they do. Is there any sense in the text or after the text that this might be in a bit of a difficult command?

Oh, absolutely. The whole plot is completely logically impossible from beginning to end. I think if Aristophanes has a particular genius in Leicistrita is that he moves the focus from scene to scene to from thought to thought so rapidly that you don't see all of the plot flaws. but of course they're at their myriad.

And the idea that she could get messages to women across Greece, the idea that it all conveniently arrive in the right order at the same time. The idea, I mean, the whole idea behind the sex strike as well is that men are deprived of having sex with their wives and therefore they get these permanent swollen erections after six days. But right at the beginning of the play, we've already heard that the men have been absent from their home sometimes for months on end.

and also the men seem not to have realised that masturbation is something which they could use to cure their swel and erections either. So that's just a hint of some of the important elements. And there's also female slaves and prostitutes and there's homosexuals. There's plenty of stuff about. Absolutely, yeah. And so prostitution isn't really alluded to. Athens had a very active prostitution industry in the classical era,

but of course they're not really mentioned. There is this figure of reconciliation who is brought on towards the end of the play. who seems to be a prostitute figure, but prostitutes aren't mentioned, same-sex sex-sex isn't mentioned as an outlet. And so in order for the sex-strike plot to be effective, you have to regard the only type of sex that you can have is sex within marriage.

And it's emphasised by the fact that the men who play men walk around with an enormous leather phallus dangling in front of them. And at some time with wood in it, so it's erect in front of them. Yeah, this is a bit of comic genius on our Aristophanes part as well. So part of the traditional garb of a comic actor, you'd have padding, body padding, so a big stomach, you'd have a padded chest, you'd have a padded rump as well, but you'd traditionally have this dangling leather phallus. Now Aristophanes has this genius idea of turning

them up the other way. And we don't know that an Athenian audience has ever seen this before. So it's this really amazing comic idea when Kinesius is the first man who comes on about halfway through the play with this giant erection. And then we get other male characters joining him as well. Paul. We don't know, do we, whether it won the prize or not. We'll say. No, no.

I was coming to you, Paul. Can you tell listeners what you know about the success or not of the sex strike? In terms of the play? In terms of the play, yes. Well, at the end, it's crucial. But what I think, now this is a bit of a historical take. And this is a very interesting suggestion I've read, which is that why did Aristophanes choose to write a woman play?

Well, one of the reasons. maybe what James said. Lots of women were really distressed. They were widowed and their sons had just been killed. But women on top, women in charge is a revolution. It's a complete the world turned upside down. So why would Aristophanes think that a cure for the ghastly situation that Athens is in that would be funny is a case of women occupying the Acropolis? Now, The sacred acropolis, which is good all the treasury is. Yeah, now there are two reasons in my humble opinion. One is that is where the war chest of the Athenian state physically was held in the Parthenon.

Now, we might think the Parthamon, oh, it's a temple, it must therefore be religious, can't have anything to do with Mammon. O contrary, the Athenians saw no disjunction. And secondly, the priestess, the highest priestess of the entire Athenian. Athenian state. She was actually the priestess of Athena of the city, not of Athena the Virgin, but there was no separate altar between those two. So in effect, the worship of Athena of the city and the worship of the Athena, the Virgin, sort of melded together. At any rate, her name happened to be, it didn't just happen to be, of course, Lysimaki. And that I think is a pun. Aristotle is

very keen on puns, Paranomazia. And this one literally puns on the name of the chief priestess of the Athenian state, who might have been sitting right in the middle and by next to the orchestra. We're not absolutely sure. So anyway, the point of this is, even if the husbands are so horny that they finally wish to make peace, if they still have access to the silver on the acrobillus, in the Parthenon, they can still carry on fighting in principle. So the Athenian women, they as it were double down with the Spartan women,

with a Beocean woman and a Corinthian woman, and they say, no, you won't lay your hands, you can't afford to fight. And the twofold plot, which, as James says, is not consequential in a logical sense. Nevertheless, is belt and braces. I want to come in on that, because you mentioned, like, Simaki, the name of this priestess, and of course our main character is Lysistrata. And Lysimache in Greek means someone who dissolves battle. And Lysistrata is a name that means someone who dissolves the armies.

And what's so interesting, Aristophanes loves to play around with names and puns. And at the very opening of Lysistrata, when she comes on stage, Lysistrita speaks to herself, wondering, you know, how am I going to get these women together? where are they, they're late, so she's sort of grumpy about that. And then she says, oh, I see my Athenian colleague, my Athenian fellow citizen coming. And her name is Kalonike. And Kalonike means beauty in victory, or beauty and victory. So the first opening moment where these characters meet on stage, we have one saying,

ah, greetings, Kalonike, beautiful victory. And the other one says, hi there, dissolver of armies. So it's like the opening, before we've got to the fifth line of the play, We've already had the whole thing set up. These are two characters who are here to make peace. And that's kind of a really neat way that Aristophees encapsulates the kind of themes that are coming before we've even got there. He sounds a very skillful playwright, doesn't he?

Yes. A great man with words, but also the physicality and the visual side of the comedy is much his kind of prerogative. So if I come back to that idea of sitting in the Theatre of Dionysus looking down on this, this movement of choruses. So through the first part of the play, you start with one woman on stage Lysistrata, then Kalonike appears,

and then Marene, we've got the Corinthian and the Boreseon and Spartan Lampito. They all come on stage, and then we have this sort of gathering of women, so suddenly the stage is populated by women. And then as we move on in the play, you have this split chorus of women and men, and notably also old women and men, I think not enough is made of the fact

that our chorus of comedy is older women and older men. It's not just men and women. And if you're sitting in the Theatre of Dionysus, you're watching this chorus, who throughout the first half of the play are at loggerheads, are physically fighting each other, and then by the end of the play, they come to resolution and come together.

So Aristophani's skills there are that you've watched that battle and then that coming together, which by the time we get to the end of the play with reconciliation, the chorus is won again. Thank you. James, James Robson. There are a lot of jokes, a lot of borediness. It's about as bad as it gets, really. I mean, they obviously took it for granted

that they were going to be swearing, there was going to be this, it's going to be that, going to be, other. Absolutely. So obscenity is a really central part of the old comic tradition, so old comedy is the genre in which Aristophanes is writing. I think if you went to see an old comic play and you didn't hear obscene language,

so direct references to the sexual and scatological realm, you'd be pretty disappointed. As a whole, I would say that Athenians, are relatively prudish, in fact. So where you find obscenity used is normally in rituals connected with Demeter or with Dionysus, as is the case with theatre. So this is a sort of sacred festival space where you're allowed to put aside the normal conventions of everyday life. I think within that, though, it's not just the case that Aristophanes is entertaining, or throwing lots of obscenities at us. It is used for comic effect to be sure. But he also

also does some really interesting and subtle things with obscenity in the play. So he's the master of this. For example, when Leicistrater proposes the sex strike, we've had a lot of indication in the prologue that something sexy is going to be proposed, but we don't know exactly what it was, what it's going to be. And she says, what you need to abstain from women is top chaos. So she uses this direct reference to the male member here. And so this has a shock value for us in the audience, because we haven't heard an obscenity yet, but it also has a shock value for the women. And of course, Topéos, Cock is the last thing that the women do want to abstain from

because women stereotypically in comedy are sex-mad, as well as mad on booze. There are other ways in which he uses obscenity to. There's a really subtle piece of characterization, which I really love. So when the old women are facing off the magistrate at the Acropolis, the magistrate brings one of his arches in and asks them to seize licestrata. and one of the women steps forward and says, if you lay so much as a finger on her, you're going to crap all over the place,

and she uses this obscenity, Epihezzor. Now, one of the unwritten rules of comedy is that women do not use obscenities in front of men. So this really beautifully shows how the women are being transgressive at this point in time. The other advantage, I think, of holding off from using too much obscenity is then Aristophanes is able to use it in the latter half of the play to really devastating effect as well.

So in the latter half of the play, this is how the men express, their sexual frustration. So we're under no doubt whatsoever as to what Kinesius wants to do to his wife and where she would like him to be. Also, when the Spartan ambassador and the Athenia ambassador at the end of the play, are both ogling this character of reconciliation, this beautiful young woman. Licisitor is giving them a lecture about how they should all live as one happy family and be at peace. And the only things that they interject are comments about reconciliation's body and very direct comments at that.

So again, this is a beautiful way that he shows the men's sexual frustration. At the end of the play, when peace is made and everyone's happy, all the obscenity melts away as well. So obscenity is very much in that world of hostility and war. Let's talk about money, Paul. Cicero said that money is a sinews of war.

And so they go for the sinews, and they get the money, this massive, massive treasure. So it wasn't just a sex strike. It was a we grabbed the money that belongs to that. Can you develop that? Yeah, let me be a little more specific. Right at the beginning of the war and think this is 20 years ago,

which is a lifetime for many people, a generation. The Athenian Assembly, having decided to go to war to resist as they saw it, the Spartan attack on them. The Spartans, of course, said the Athenians were starting it, so both of them claimed to be not responsible for the outbreak of the war. The Athenian Assembly set aside a huge sum, of money, 1,000 talents of silver, which is the equivalent of the entire revenue of the

Athenian state from both internal and external sources. And that was not to be touched until and unless the Athenians were absolutely on their uppers, that they would wanting to continue to fight, be unable to fight unless they released this 1,000 talents. Well now, who looked after that physically 1,000 talents? It was in the Parthenon. But the priestess, who actually was responsible for it, to the Athenian state, was this, we've had Lysimachi, who, by the way, was priestess, high priestness, for 64 years, a later source tells us.

So there's a very direct relationship between the decision of the Athenians in 412, which is the year before the Nicusius performed. So when Aristotle is thinking about writing it, the decision to release, to touch that iron reserve, which was then turned both into silver coinage to pay sailors and other soldiers, but also to strike a very, very rare gold coinage. I mean, everything is, as it were, up the spout. It's all going wrong in 412, 411,

when this play is put on. And then not very long after this play, there is a genuine coup, I mean, an anti-democratic coup, a really nasty one. And so Aristotovny's may or may not have had his finger on the pulse. You know, he might have sensed in the wind. And certainly there were extreme right-wingers

who'd been dying for the Athenian democracy to be ended, because they saw it as inimical to them. But there is one very specific relevance of all that. which I'm coming to, which is among the emergency measures as well as allowing themselves to touch the Iron Reserve, they appointed a special council, which is a very, very oligarchic thing to do, not a democratic thing to do, 10 men, including the poet Sophocles. We only know the names of two of them. And one character in the licister, as my comrades well know, is a representative of that body. He's called the Probolos, sometimes translated magistrate,

but literally it's a four deliberator, a pre-counsela, very Spartan. So Athens is in turmoil anyway, the real Athens, when this play is conceived and then put on. Sarah, was he taking a risk, Isohnies, by making fun of all this, putting a parallel fictional world beside what was going on, as Paul has been describing? It's a really interesting question, and particularly because Aristophanes loved to name check people.

He would satirize and name politicians who might be sitting in the audience. He'd have a go at Tridians, actors, you name it, poets, anybody who was around. And yet Lysistrata, and indeed we have two plays of Aristophanes from 4-Eleven, Lysistrata and the other one is called Thesma foriazussi, but I'll call it Thesmo for its shortness. It takes half a page. Exactly. Lysistrata and Thesmo are two of the plays that have the least number.

of named individuals who are satirised. What is that, do you think? And that potentially relates to what Paul was saying, that Athens is in a right mess internally. They are on the verge of having an internal revolution, which is what happens in the months following the performances of Lysistrata and Thesmo. So within 4-11, Athens will implode.

Temporarily, the democracy is overthrown. This probulus that Paul referred to will, in a sense, take charge. And then Athens writes itself again quite quickly, and goes back to democracy. So it's so interesting that when we look at Lysistrata, there's a lack of these named individuals. There's no huge attacks on Aristophanes' contemporary figures, particularly political ones.

So Cleon, who by this time was deceased, but Cleon was the nemesis of Aristophanes. Back to his earliest plays, Cleon was a demagogue, someone who spoke for the people, in that sense, or so he claimed. And Aristophanes loved to rip anything he could out of Cleon and tear him to shreds. He cast him as a slave, a pathologon,

slave in a play called Knights, where he's slave to the people. Demos, who is his master, quite literally. In Aristophanes, his wasps, Cleon is presented as a downright dog who is on trial and is prosecuting another dog for stealing Sicilian cheese. So he can really go for people by name. He can extensively satirise them. 4-11, none of it. And yet, the general themes, that idea of, hey, Athens, let's come to a point of peace,

is a massive thing to be doing. because we're at 411, 11, we're 20 years they're about into the Peloponnesian War, if you think of it, as starting in 431. Maybe some Athenas have had enough, and yet others will want to continue to make sure that Athens and democracy are not jeopardised in some way,

which might happen with Sparta. Can I come to you, James, James Robson, to sort of develop that? It seems to be Astonis is working on two levels. He's quite conservative and is very subversive. Absolutely, so as Sarah has been outlining, old comedy has subversion at its very heart, and that's writ large in the plays that we have of Aristophanes

from the 420s from his early career. And I think we have subversiveness going on in this play as well. As Sarah has outlined, what's avoided are direct attacks on politicians. We get a few name-checked in passing. Rather that we get criticisms of the democracy as a whole or of the kind of political decision-making that goes on, and licisterature is particularly keen on criticising the kind of decision-making that goes on in the assembly. Where I think the play could be said to be subversive is in very much in the tradition of old comedy too,

which is that you seize a theme which perhaps a social issue, which the audience might feel a little uncomfortable about. And I think gender is potentially one of those issues at this moment in time. So we've had this disastrous war going on for 20 years, but we've also had the society. Sicilian expedition and then complete and utter disaster in 413. Yeah, so the Athenians lost thousands upon thousands of men in Sicily. So that must have skewed the demography in Athens considerably, especially when you take into account that men are away from their homes as well. We know from later sources that women at this point may have been doing jobs and tasks that they wouldn't have done beforehand. So middle class women actually having to go out and work, for example,

presumably women were effectively in charge of households, perhaps in the way that they hadn't been before as well. And presumably, too, there were women in the city who really had nothing more to lose at this point of their lost husbands and sons in the war. So I think what is happening is that women are being seen in public more. They've got more of a public voice. Perhaps even some of them have made themselves quite difficult. And so Aristophanes in this play is really sticking the needle in a bit and saying, what if this got even worse? What if women actually took over. And so I think he's winding his audience up to a certain extent there. But the counterbalance to that is that the vision that the women are working towards is extraordinarily conservative.

So at the end of the play, the idea of bringing your husband home is that he can once again take charge of the household. You will be there as a provider of care for him and his children. You will do the domestic chores and those were revoked a lot during your play, this idea of weaving, for example, which is a constant theme throughout the play. And you'll also have that sexual relationship with your husband as well. So the vision that ultimately the play projects is very much back to the past, back to the traditional ways of doing things. Paul, which of Aristophanes targets hit home most tellingly?

In the lives of history in general, because it's full of all sorts of barbs. Well, peace is the one. He wrote three surviving peace plays. He wrote three women plays, and the licesters one where the two come together. So depending on whether you think, as James has suggested, he was conservative, then he might have been anxious about the possibility of women being a little too forward and actually demanding some sort of say in ways that they were typically forbidden to have unless they happen to be the chief priestess of the Athenian state.

or there is another priestess hood, which was a more democratic one. The Athena of the city priestesshood is an aristocratic one, so it's by heredity, by birth, whereas the other one in favour of victory, Athenae of victory, the priestesses were chosen by lot, and one of them happens to be called Mirini, which is the name given as Sarah started off by saying to one of the other two women characters, Athenian women characters in licitre. So I think some people have on the one hand detected a certain feminism in Aristophanes, meaning a sort of suggestion.

Look, Leicester's pretty competent. Yes, OK, the women, other than that, they're stereotypically sex-mad and drunkards. But if there were more women like Leicester, would we be able to continue to say all Athenian women are stupid and drunken and sex-mad and so on? And then what other targets? Well, in a way, democracy, because there is a very strong, it's typically an oligarchic standpoint, though already some people were putting it forward back in the 420s. You know, the democracy, it's not a bad idea,

that is, in terms of equality and freedom, but boy, does it make mistakes? And when it makes mistakes, they're dreadful mistakes. Whereas you can see... Such as? Well, for example, going to Sicily is the most obvious one. So he's targeting those Athenian, ordinary Athenians, who think the war is a good thing as such,

and that it's fairly easily winnable. Now it isn't. And it's going to mean all sorts of changes are bound to come about if you're a little too rash. Thank you. Sarah, can you pick out a point? Well, we get a clear idea of Aristophani's skills as a playwright. Well, I mentioned to his use of the names at the beginning of the play,

and he is very much a wordsmith. One thing that he does supremely well is invent words. We know that if you think of Aristophanes play birds. The word cloud cuckoo land, cloud cluckooville, that we still use in English, comes from Aristophani's play, which is the city that was created in the clouds in Aristophani's birds. In Lysistrata, he has a lovely,

go at creating whole lines that are single words. So when the probulus, the magistrate, is there and he's trying to arrest Lysistrata, and we've got physical violence in action going on on stage, Lysistrata calls out, cries out to her comrades. She calls them, what is it?

Oh, Xumakoi, Gunaykes, oh, my ally women. And then Lysistrata addresses them, and they're these long compound words that fill whole lines. And one of them goes, of Sperma-garayor lechitholacano al-Polydes, which means seed of the agura,

soup cellar, vegetable-cellar women. And that's one of the sort of noble calling upon someone title. It has the rhythm that's something quite solemn. And then she follows up with another one, then she says, Oh, scorado pandocutriata polides. So all of those are one-line words.

And that one means, oh, garlicky, landlady, bread cellar women. So at that moment of crisis and battle, She calls on these characters, these long ways and these names. And they're completely made up. They're just comic titles. And they may not make us laugh, but they would appeal to the Athenians

because there's that sense that this is like a battle that's about to begin. And I suppose one thing that's not been mentioned is there's one very important battle between men and women mythically that took place in Athens, and that is between the Amazons and the Athenians. Yeah, I'd want to add to that two things, really. One is the visual humour, which I just think has so much potential in life sister-tour. It's really interesting seeing modern productions of the play because you realize just how much room there is for visual humour.

And so the battle of the old men with the old women at the beginning, for example, and the men mishandle their logs and their smoke, for example. They get smoke in their eyes. They get doused with water, which is we then reminded of twice more in the text as well. So clearly this was meant to be a comic highlight of the play. We've already talked about the comic fallacies as well. And men later on in the play are holding their cloaks away from their miss. ridrifts because they don't want to show that they have these swollen erections, for example.

So there's lots of great visual humour there. And the other point I was going to make was about duber entendres. So yes, we do get these direct references to the scathological and sexual realm, these obscenities throughout the play. But we also get really rich dubrientres. There are sort of too many to mention in a way. But towards the end of the play, for example, the chorus are making fun of the Spartan delegate saying,

oh, things have really hardened badly in Sparta. the Spartan says, oh yes, my comrades are looking for a thrust-up country. And so there are myriad jokes like that in the play as well. So just great, great duber entendres and great filthy jokes. And just to come in on that, the duenandres are also visual. So in that sense, when you have the women holding the Acropolis and keeping the gates shut and the men are attacking with their logs, I mean, that's a very phallic image in itself, and they're trying to break down the Acropolis door to get in and the women will not let them in.

So the visual metaphors, the kind of sexual play, is all the way there while you're watching the play happening. And it's only at the end when we get sort of resolution and reconciliation that sexually as well men and women come together again. So it's played out as a visual joke as well as the verbal one that James refers to. We're near the end now with Paul. The action towards the end moves towards a peaceful settlement. Could you tell, after what's been going on,

this might be a surprise of some of the audience. Could you tell people how? how it did move towards a peaceful settlement and what that peaceful settlement entail. Well, just to say that it's not necessarily peaceful between men and women in Athens or anywhere else in Greece, but it is between Sparta and its allies

and Athens and its allies. This is the key. Well, they had made a truce before just about when Aristophanes was born, actually, 445. So it's not unexampled. They made a second one in 421, which is only 10 years before. So the very fact of making a real thing,

piece isn't odd in itself. It's how this particular piece is brought about through sexual incontinence and through occupying the Acropolis, which is, of course, very exceptional. But the point of the ending, I think, is, and the Cesaristophony is possibly at his best in some way, is that it's very lyrical and it is religious and it's hymnal. And so it ends on prayers, to many, many gods, not just Athena, because ironically, in a way, the chief god of the Spartans was also an Athena of the city, so the two of them have the same Athena as their chief god. And the concluding verses are indeed a hymn to mainly the Spartan, as opposed to the Athenian goddess. And there's reference to the Eurotas, the banks of the Eurotus, which flowed.

through ancient Sparta and the whole thing ends as all his, I think I'm okay in saying all his peace plays end with happy, joyous, religious ritual resolution. Sarah,

what are the, if you were to perform this today put it on today, what are the challenges? They are many, I think James referred earlier to that level of obscenity that I know many people who've put on plays have talked about having to turn it down. So we go to some of the earliest recorded versions of Lysistrata, so back to the early 20th century performance of the play

was used as part of the push to get women the vote, and it had to be heavily cut down in terms of the sexual content and the sort of graphic humour just to make it palatable. But that continues through in sort of many contemporary productions. So yeah, turning down the graphic humour. And indeed, of course, we mentioned earlier that all the parts were played by men originally. So both the men and the women in the play, in Aristophani's play, would have been male-only performers. And that isn't the way most plays go now. And it changes the dynamic completely in terms of when you're thinking of contemporary debates around gender, feminism, etc. So we have productions done by many playwrights in the UK. So Peter Hall did a production in Germain Greer, Warota version, Blake Morrison.

So we have all these different productions that are having to grapple with those kinds of themes. But in that sense, then, I think that's the joy and the... the power of Aristophanes is the fact of possibilities and that things get changed and twisted and adapted away from Aristophanes so that it doesn't have to be a majority of jokes about penises. It can open up to other things. And once those words are being spoken by female actors and performers as well, there's a new power to it.

James, what do you think the status of the play is today? Well, I think as Sarah has been saying, it's actually quite a challenging play to stage. If you look at the performances throughout the 20th century, there's a real peak in the 60s and 70s around the time of the Vietnam War in particular. It was a popular play then in the 90s and 2000s as well. I think when those obscenities were more palatable to us and also people wanting to talk about gender.

But there's a whole history in the 20th century's English-speaking world of the play being used to push the boundaries of acceptability, about dialogue, about sex, about protest, about pacifism, about feminism too. I think it's a awkward play today in many ways, however. It's noticeable that I certainly haven't seen any productions in the last few years. And so I think perhaps post Me Too, I think post the way that we regard gender now, not as a binary opposition, but something is more complex. The play ends up being a lot more complicated because the idea that women stay at home

and the men go out and fight and that it's women pitched against men in that way is challenging and also the way in which the play conceptualises war as well, I think, doesn't quite chime with the way that modern conflicts are fought. I think it's an amazing play to use for students. And I do think it has the status of a classic. I would say that Leicistrate has probably been staged not just more than any other aristophanic play in the English-speaking world, but probably more than all of them, all the rest of them put together. So I do think it's an absolute giant of the comic canon. And we have relatively few of them. those giants compared with, say, tragedy. Last word, Paul. There is an element in the original,

which is very serious, and that's part of the humour, I think, that this title character, she is an Athenian woman, she's not anything grand, but on the other hand, she's smart and she uses words brilliantly, and that would have given the audience pause, I think. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thanks to Paul Cartlitz, Sarah Miles, and James Robson, and to our studio engineer, Steve Greenwood. week, it's Napoleon's 100 days. He's escaped from Elba, march to Paris and defeat at Waterloo. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. There's usual question, Paul. What didn't you get time to say you'd like to have said? Well, it's only very, very few because my mates on either side of me are

so incredibly much better informed than I am. And they've also got amazing recall. I was most impressed by that. And without a note in front of them, that's very important. But one thing, towards the end, Sarah rightly brought up the Amazon myth, which of course has a very specific Athenian dimension. There are many other versions of Amazon myth. But if you had gone up onto the Acropolis, as one does only for religious purposes, to take part in, for example, the great Panathinae every four years, in honor of Athenae of the city, then you would see. You would see,

the Parthenon, along one range of the Parthenon, are what are called metapes or metopes. And they depict the battle indeed of the Athenians and the Amazons. And the Amazons, they're not just women. It's not only men against women or entirely mortal against these funny sort of mortals, but it's also eastern west. And so Amazon's come from somewhere in the Black Sea, and they're thought by and large to be, as it were, Oriental. That's putting it strongly, but the Persian Empire extended right as far as the Black Sea and up to the Aegean. So the Amazons, their home on the Thermadon River,

is within the Persian Empire. So it was a way of saying, we Greeks, we are seen in smashed, you Persians. Now that was in the 440s, 430s. In 411, the Spartans have been negotiating with the Persian. and they've won. They've persuaded the Persians to come in on their side. That actually tipped the balance. That is what ultimately won the Spartans, the war. The Athenians continued to fight, and they won victories. They refused to make peace twice.

Very interestingly, immediately after we've got these peace plays, the Athenians in real life, they're offered peace by Sparta. And the Athenians say no, because they don't like the conditions of peace that they're being offered. And so eventually, Sparta, with Persian, money, totally defeat the Athenians, so that it's a total victory, and the Spartans are able to impose on the Athenians whatever terms they wish. And they include imposing a very nasty oligarchy,

30 tyrants, they came to be called, which is the same number as the Spartans' main pro-Balutic council of the Garusia, which is, by the way, joked at in the licisterate, Gerochia, and the Spartans are supposed to speak a very guttural sort of Greek. And so Aristotephanes is brilliant at mimicking, not just the words, but also the accents. Tara, what's your conclusion? I have two things to mind.

One of them is something I would have said about Aristophanes in general, that he loves the subverses, he loves transgressing boundaries. And some of my research works around fragments, so the little lost bits of Aristophanes because he wrote many plays that we don't have. And there's a fragment, a line, we just have a line, we don't know the play, we don't know the title, but we know Aristophanes wrote it.

And the line goes, Hutos, titapore et adranes di Melly. And that line basically means it's so much something honey to do what is forbidden. And I always think of that as encapsulating Aristophanes in a nutshell, that it's honey. So honey, it's sweet.

It's the really beautiful thing that you want to be able to do is to overstep the boundary. to say, to do what is forbidden. So I always have that in mind, especially with Lysistrata, for all that it can be seen as conservative in some ways in that connection to pushing for peace, perhaps pro-o- oligarchic, potentially.

But yet at the other side, there is something that really pushes the other way. And I always think that that's the bit that would be appealing to the audience, because of course what we have to remember is the audience is going to be made up of Athenians who might be on either side. They might be pro-peace, they might be pro-war. And if you want to win a prize in a competition, how are you going to appeal to the whole of the...

the audience well. Play to those things that speak to people, that idea of it's fun, isn't it? Sometimes to overstep the boundary. And of course, also the core message of Lysistrata, which is, let's all just come together and have sex and everything else will sort itself out. And that idea of appealing on that level of the lowest sort of, you know, urges and human sort of feelings to bring people together. And that's what Aristophanes manages to do.

James, what about you? Yeah, similarly, I was going to stress the peace theme as well. and I think Sarah put it really neatly there. So the play is easily read as a play which is advocating piece, but I wonder whether that's a bit of a lazy reading. I mean, the piece that is agreed in the play is an utter fantasy. I mean, the terms that the two sides come to, they're very advantageous to the Athenians.

The Spartans are there, really keen to make peace, despite the fact that in the actual war at the time, they held the upper hand. and the Athenians are really clinging on. So it's a complete and utter fantasy. But combined with that, we have the way that Sparta is portrayed in the play that we haven't really spoken about,

and I thought might be Paul's schick here. It's so fascinating because the Spartans are essentially treated really positively in the play. At the end, we've talked about the ending of the play, and we get Spartan song and Spartan dance. We get this hymn in praise of Sparta and all the key elements of Sparta mentioned, the mountain, Mount Tigettus, the river erotus that Paul was talking about, Helen of Sparta, of course, who became Helen of Troy, but, you know, Sparta is famous for its beautiful women. We have Lampato at the beginning, the Spartan woman who's physically fit, pretty alluring as well, and she's actually praised by the other women for being beautiful. And then we have this bizarre, just off the scale bizarre, rewriting of Greek history by Lysistritor as well. When the two sides are together and they're agreeing peace terms, she says, don't you remember,

all of those times when we cooperated with each other in the past, when Athens and Sparta did amazing things together, weren't they good? And one of the examples she mentions, for example, is the series of events following the earthquake in Sparta in 464 BCE, when the surf population of Sparta rose up, and the Athenians, a couple of years later, we think probably 462 BCE, were dispatched under the leadership of a general called Kynmon. Now he turned up,

The Athenian troops were accused of being, was suspected of being too well disposed towards these serfs. Who are Greeks. And then the Athenians are sent home under Kaiman. And the Athenians are so disgusted at what happened as they sent him into exile. So the idea of using this, an example of cooperation between the two city-states is ludicrous. And we have other examples of that too. So it's very odd that we have this positive image given of Sparta. we talked about the Spartan dialect,

which is actually portrayed very accurately. There are no opportunities taken to really to make fun of the way that they talk. It's just quite an accurate portrayal of Spartan dialect. And so what's going on there? How can you do that in times of war to an audience? And yes, it's all very well as you see it as fantasy, and so it doesn't really have any purchase in the real world. But given how careful Aristophanes has been to avoid name-checking anyone in the city

as we said earlier, why risk portraying Sparta in that light? And I don't have an answer to that question. I think it's a really fascinating puzzle that the play leaves us with. Yeah, a friend of mine wrote an article called Lacomica. And he looked at absolutely every extant reference in Aristophanes to anything Spartan. Laconic is an adjective from Spartan. And concluded that he was very soft on Sparta in terms of humour.

But then we could add he was also very soft on rich people as such. And he's much nastier to, as one of you said, the politicians who were populist, they appealed to the masses, that is the poor. Most Athenians were poor. And so Aristotovni doesn't like politicians whose careers depend on them appealing to the poor masses,

which is what? It's one definition of democracy. It is the rule of the masses over the elite. And there we go Aristophanes loves to overstep and test and push. So that questioning of democracy, is it right? Have we got it right? We've been in more 20 years. The play opens up all those questions.

And as you say, he lets the Spartans off the hook in terms of dialect. They're not mock for that. However, the Boetians, I won't start on that because it's the end. But Boetian dialect is mocked again and again in comedy and Aristophanic comedy. So you can go for people by accent. But he doesn't, or dialect, I should say. Would you say here's Aristophani's conclusion was about democracy? Is he something he admires or something he wants?

I would not sit on the fence, but I imagine you wouldn't like the answer. I'd say he's always opening up the debate and he'll be presenting the different sides because it's how you get a conversation going with this. It's a democracy. These men who sit on the side of the hill, as I say predominantly men in the theatre of Dionysus, are the ones who potentially will go to the ecclesia

and hear the motions being put forward by the Bulae and the Probulos, or the pro-bolo, I should say, and they will make decisions. So in all the sort of distorted comic, ogly-fied extreme world of comedy, you're getting these messages put across, which then come out of the theatre, step out of the festival back to reality, but then they're going to go sit in another outdoor environment

and listen and talk on these motions. So putting all those ideas there, I think, is something that Aristophanes has always got in mind as an ability. He is part of the democratic machinery in the end. He's able to put his plays on because Athens functions as it does. So there's all that complexity. He does write at least a couple of plays actually about democracy and about key features of it.

For example, the jury courts in the wasps or the system of having leaders who are populists such as Cleon in the Knights. And then one play, which I don't think we've mentioned, have we, it's called literally Women Celebrating or Holding and Ecclesia, which means an assembly meeting, which of course is a contradiction. It's absolutely impossible.

And this is, we think, about 20 years after licisterative, so 392, 391, that sort of thing. Well, there, everything goes absolutely haywire. They first of all pack the assembly, so that's illicit, if not illegal. Then having gained control of the organs of government, they transform the Athenian state into a communalist or communist utopia, i.e. dystopia, and the big focus, is on sexual availability.

I find it a quite unpleasantly nasty play, and one wonders whether it was actually thought to be that funny, or why the people who copied Aristophani's plays thought it was worth copying it, because the reason we've got the 11th is that they were the ones that kept on being copied, whether or not performed, so that it becomes part of the tradition of Greek comic theatre, which the Romans inherit, and then part of it.

so on to the Renaissance and so on. And I think Leicesterter is the second least copied play. We have eight manuscripts of Leicesterter only compared to 150 of wealth, which people don't tend to be mad about. People don't talk about it now much, no, indeed. Norikla is he's so good. That was a rewritten wealth as well. I mean, interestingly, he'd written another play and then he rewrites.

And one thing that the clouds that we have is actually a rewritten version that was never performed. Here's our producer, Simon. Simon wants your copy. Tea, be lovely. Yeah, I'll have a tea, please, thanks. Three teas? No, not for me.

Thanks, no, no. Thank you very much. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production. I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes,

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