Lysistrata
Comedy by Aristophanes
German by Erich Fried
Lysistrata is waiting in a square in Athens. She calls the women together because they are suffering from the war, which has now been going on for twenty years and flares up again and again. Lysistrata's suggestion: »Let's go on a love strike to force the men to make peace.«
The plan is adopted. Women from all the Greek cities set off, travelling on foot, taking ships, leaving their children and their spindles and looms behind and defying the orders and pleas of their husbands. They swear an oath to refuse their husbands, to awaken their desires without submitting to them.
Aristophanes' »Lysistrata« was first performed in the spring of 411 BC during the Great Dionysia in Athens. The Attic Empire had endured twenty years of heavy Peloponnesian warfare and was drifting towards the catastrophe that was to split the world in two and bring nothing to the victors and the vanquished but general exhaustion, the disruption of all forms of life and society and the downfall of the »old, great, classical world«.
In this situation, Aristophanes, who in his comedies had always spoken against the madness of war and in favour of peace, »since there is nothing to be hoped for from men, thought he should take refuge - if not in life then at least in art - in the more natural insight of women and mothers«, according to Wolfgang Schadewaldt, one of the translators of »Lysistrata«.
And so Aristophanes evokes the figure of a great, intelligent, determined woman »who suffers more deeply than others from her circumstances and from this suffering becomes a conspirator against war and in favour of peace.«
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