But for some minor scuffling for control of the Acropolis between the women and the men of Athens who are too old to be fighting the Spartans, very little action takes place. She gathers representative women from all the city-states engaged in the war and persuades them to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers until peace is concluded. Seeing no likely prospect of an end to the war, Lysistrata, an Athenian woman, takes matters into her own hands and proposes desperate measures. Last summer I was assigned, for a yearly symposium I attend at Notre Dame, the reading of Lysistrata, authored by the Greek playwright Aristophanes and first performed in 411 BCE.As the play begins, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BC) has been going on interminably, with nearly all the young men away from home or otherwise engaged in the conflict. Translation of comedy is always a challenge, particularly when the jokes are 25 centuries old.
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