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The Women on the Acropolis: A Note on the Structure of the Lysistrata

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

A. O. Hulton
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Extract

Aristophanes' Lysistrata opens with Lysistrata herself waiting in front of the entrance to the Acropolis for the women whom she has summoned. Calonice arrives from the city, and later others from Anagyrus (Attica), Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth. Lysistrata expounds to them her plan: wives are to refuse intercourse with their husbands until peace is made. She has also, she says, arranged for the Acropolis to be attacked. Later again, after the women have been won over and sworn an oath of loyalty, a noise is heard (240): it is the Acropolis being captured. This forms the climax, so to speak, of the Prologue. Lampito, the Spartan, returns home, and from now on it is the Acropolis that constitutes the place of interest in the play and the women's occupation of it the central theme. But what is the relation of this plan (Plan B) to the other (Plan A)? And what does Plan B really involve? These questions are never satisfactorily resolved.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , April 1972 , pp. 32 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1972

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References

page 32 note 1 The contrast between the treatments of Plan A and of Plan B in the Prologue is also noticeable—the former built up carefully and at length, and in a tone of high seriousness (albeit mock-heroic: cf. esp. the swearing-in ceremony, 203 ff.), the latter introduced almost as an afterthought and in a considerably briefer, more casual, and more light-hearted way.

page 33 note 1 Some reference to Plan A might have been expected particularly at 525 f., which presumably looks back to the meeting in the Prologue.

page 34 note 1 For the ‘proboulos’ of the MSS. some editors read ‘Cinesias’ in the whole dialogue 980 ff. If the magistrate, he must regard Lysistrata's lengthy sermon as having been a smoke-screen; if Cinesias, he oddly wakes up to something he must have known about earlier (903, 914 f.). In either case the solemn expression of 1008 serves finally to dismiss Plan B and to bring Plan A back to the fore.

page 34 note 2 The women named at 270, 322 f. are probably of the elder group (the women's Chorus is also elderly: general, 637; the leader Stratyllis, 364, 378, 635). For the impression here mentioned note the succession of four escapers (720 ff.; they are merely examples, 726 f.), a further three (727ff.), two complainants (758 ff.); the generalization of ‘the husbands’ (719, 763), suggesting the absence of more than a few wives; the oracle (770 ff.), applicable rather to a wholesale withdrawal. There is also the retrospective effect of the oath-taking, where Lysistrata and her few friends in effect embodied the younger Athenian wives (cf. too the phraseology of 525 f., pointing to a formal and general gathering: ‘it was decreed by the wives assembled together’); the same illusion is maintained in the final ‘restoration of the wives’ (1186 f., 1273 ff.).

page 34 note 3 The plan would surely have to embrace the majority of young Athenian wives (cf. Lampito at Sparta, 998 ff.). And that no actual secession, partial or universal, was at first intended seems implicit in the conditions further elaborated at 150 ff., and in the very similar circumstances inherent in the terms of the oath (esp. 217 ff.).

page 35 note 1 The agon (476–607) contains much matter that would have been at home in the common ‘address by the Chorus-leader’. Perhaps the enlargement of theme here is meant to compensate for the absence of the formal parabasis. Moreover, the virtual transference of scene to a different sphere—from the domestic to the civic—makes such an enlargement the more appropriate.

page 35 note 2 e.g. Rogers, B. B., The Lysistrata of Aristophanes (London, 1911), xliiff.Google Scholar; Mahaffy, T. P., A History of Classical Greek Literature (London, 1883), vol. i. 453 f.Google Scholar; van ‘Leeuwen, J., Aristophanis Lysistrata (Leiden, 1903), viif.Google Scholar; Murray, G., Aristophanes (Oxford, 1933); 166 fGoogle Scholar. More recently, Lesky, A., A History of Greek Literature (London, 1966), 441Google Scholar; with discrepancy acknowledged in other directions, Whitman, C. H., Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar