Why lysistrata was banned

But with the bravery of some individuals like Lysistrata the role of women as being objects in society changed. The climax of the play Lysistrata occurs when the Spartan herald arrives to announce that the Spartans are pleading to sign a peace treaty and end the war. He explains that the sex strike organized by Lysistrata has had its desired effect of ending the conflict. War is war is war is war. Lysistrata was the first ever female hero of an Ancient Greek comedy.

Sex has been one prime theme in the play Lysistrata. The whole novel chiefly centers round the theme of sex. It has become one major weapon for the women to fight against the men to settle down the war between Athens and Sparta. The power of women of sex is positively used to set peace in the country. While modern theatre artists have claimed Lysistrata as a feminist icon, citing her strength and resilience, Aristophanes used the format of Old Comedy to create a play filled with humor at the expense of women, built upon the weak and dependent status of women in ancient Athens.

Lysistrata persuades the women of the warring cities to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace—a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes.

The women are dubious and reluctant at first, but the deal is sealed with a long and solemn oath around a wine bowl, and the women agree to abjure all sexual pleasures, including various specifically mentioned sexual positions. The play is essentially a dream about peace.

Many Greeks believed the war was bringing nothing but ruin to Greece, making it susceptible to Persian attack. When their husbands refuse to do so the women go on strike with comic and eventually peaceful results. Lysistrata is both acute political satire—the women of Greece are sick and tired of the ongoing Peloponnesian War—and filthy comedic mayhem—these women are so sick of the Peloponnesian War that they refuse to have sex with their hubbies.

Lysistrata is more than just dirty, dirty hilarious fun. The author of Lysistrata was Aristophanes. He was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they are used to define the genre.

Though we mostly meet him on the page, he wrote with live theatre and a live and demanding audience in mind. In Greece in , at the height of the Second World War, the Nazi occupying force banned performances of all Classical Greek plays, including those by Aristophanes.

Early publications of the play were no less mercurial. The first English-language version appeared in print in As a result, it omitted more than a third of the play entirely. Twenty years later, a copy of the play mailed from England to a Mr Harry A. The act banned the delivery of lewd, indecent, filthy and obscene materials sent through the post.

All this fuss over a handful of words written 2, years ago about a fictional tale of how the women of Athens and Sparta, frustrated by decades of war, swear an oath to go on a sex strike until a peace treaty is signed. As we read in a translation widely attributed to the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, so determined were the women of Greece in their fictional quest for peace that they soon entered into the most solemn of agreements.

Scholars also know the titles of perhaps thirty-two more, although several are disputed. If we add Babylonians which exists only in fragments to the list of known plays, fully six of the twelve focus on the folly of war. A coarse, unscrupulous populist, Cleon is described by the contemporary historian Thucydides as being the chief obstacle to peace during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War.

What penalty Cleon sought, and whether he was hoping to have Aristophanes fined or exiled, remains unclear, in part because the only report modern readers have about the exchange comes from Aristophanes himself. Even so, Cleon appears to have been unsuccessful in his attacks on the outspoken playwright. We know this because only a few years later, in Knights BCE , Aristophanes returned to his target, describing Cleon as nothing more than a dim-witted demagogue who is going to be defeated in the next election by an ordinary sausage maker.

As Gilbert Seldes wrote,. Banning books is an all too familiar pastime across the world. Libraries, schools, communities, and sometimes, governments ban books with "unfit language, scenes, context, and idiotic ideas" Sova 2. Aristophanes' Greek play Lysistrata is no different. While this work may be racy and lewd for some, the message of Lysistrata should still be available to read.

Lysistrata revolves around a plea for peace amongst the Athenian, Spartan, Boeotian, and Corinthian women. Their husbands are fighting in the Peloponnesian War, which lasted over twenty years. In hopes to end the war, the women in the community take over the Athenian treasury the Acropolis and placed an embargo upon the city's wealth, and more cruelly, upon all physical interaction with the men.

The main character Lysistrata, a woman of Athens, calls a meeting of women from all the Greek city-states, at which she convinces them to swear an oath to withhold sexual favors from their husbands until they sign a treaty to end the war. This stop on sex presents not only a problem for men, but also for their posterity: the women will not reproduce heirs to continue on family names and to defend their homeland.

After the older men of Athens try, and fail, to recapture the Acropolis, Lysistrata humiliates and lectures them on the frustrations that women have with war.