Book Blurb
In this, Aristophanes' most popular play, sex—or lack of it—becomes a powerful agent of reconciliation. As war ravages the mighty city-states of ancient Greece, a band of women, led by Lysistrata of Athens, makes a pact—to deny their husbands all sexual favors until they lay aside their weapons. Dismayed and frustrated, the men retaliate—and a battle of the sexes begins.
Written with bawdy abandon and unparalleled wit, Lysistrata is at once a powerful indictment of the insanity of war, and a sexual comedy without peer in the history of theater. That it remains both popular and accessible to the contemporary reader proves that the issues and themes that make compelling art never grow outdated.
Translated by Douglass Parker and With a New Afterword by Judith Fletcher
Editorial Review(s)
"[Parker] has a range that can encompass the gravity of Aristophanes as well as the delirious and scabrous wit." —The New York Times
About the Author
Aristophanes was born, probably in Athens, c. 449 BC and died between 386 and 380 BC. Little is known about his life, but there is a portrait of him in Plato's Symposium. He was twice threatened with prosecution in the 420s for his outspoken attacks on the prominent politician Cleon, but in 405 he was publicly honored and crowned for promoting Athenian civic unity in The Frogs. Aristophanes had his first comedy produced when he was about twenty-one, and wrote forty plays in all. Some of Aristophanes' well-known works are The Birds, Lysistrata, The Wasps/The Poet and the Women/The Frogs.