When Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, Athens had been fighting the Spartans, on and off, for almost twenty years. The high hopes of the Sicilian expedition had given way to near desperation in Athens. At the play’s opening, an Athenian woman, Lysistrata, devises a two-part plan to end the war: first, the women of Greece will refuse to sleep with their husbands until peace is concluded, and, second, the older women of Athens will seize the treasury of the Delian League (moved from Delos to the Acropolis in 454 BCE). Although the Spartan representative, Lampito, is marked as “other” by her dialect, by joining Lysistrata’s plan, she is absorbed into a larger sisterhood of femininity that transcends national boundaries. In fact, all distinctions in the play (except that between master and slave) work toward unification. The chorus, for example, is initially divided into equal semi-choruses of old men and old women. After staging elemental battles between fire and water, male and female, they eventually reconcile and merge into a single group.
During the confrontation between Lysistrata and the Commissioner, the feminine domestic sphere expands to become the polis. As females handle domestic economy, they will handle the state treasury; as females work imperfections out of a fleece, they will deal with problematic groups in the civic population:
Imagine Athens is a fresh-shorn fleece.
First, what you do is dunk it in a bath and wash out all
the sheep poop; then you lay it on a bed and take a stick
and beat out all the nasties, then you pick the thistles out.
Next, you take those that have clumped together and become
as thick as felt (to snag up all the civic offices)
and comb them out and pluck their heads off. Then you go and card
the raw cleaned wool into the Basket of Reciprocal
Agreeableness, mixing everyone in there together—
resident aliens and other foreigners you like
and those who owe the state back taxes—mix them in there good. (604–614)
Lysistrata thus describes the polis as an oikos. During the course of the play, the former, the sphere of male action, is systematically collapsed into the latter, traditionally the purview of females.
We see the effects of the sex strike on both females and males. In scenes set several days after the opening one, Lysistrata has to prevent numerous females from running home to be with their husbands, and Harden (my translation of Cinesias, “the Arouser”) arrives with an erection to claim his wife Myrrhine. He is left unsatisfied and, approached by Spartan messengers in a similar aroused state, encourages them to send ambassadors and strike a peace. The nude, voluptuous figure of Reconciliation appears, representing the lands of the Greek-speaking world, and once her parts are equitably divided up, male is reconciled with female, Spartan with Athenian. The play ends with festive songs and dances, in which the Spartan Ambassador’s foreignness is appreciated.
I have rendered the spoken and sung dialect of the Spartans in Lysistrata as a country twang specific to no region. I use, in addition to lexical choices, the following markers:
•-g dropped from gerunds and present active participles: runnin’ for running
•-n dropped with an indefinite article before a noun beginning with a vowel: a’ honest for an honest
•a’ for of
•’roun’ for around
•contraction to’t for to it
•occasional dropped linking verbs: you gropin’ for you are groping
•gonna for going to
•outta for out of
•fella for fellow
•git for get
•ain’t for isn’t
•y’all for the second-person plural pronoun
•ma for the possessive adjective my
•’cause for because and jus’ for just
•nekked for naked
•Mount Tayeegety for Mount Taygetus