{"id":1839,"date":"2023-01-17T09:50:01","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T09:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=1839"},"modified":"2023-01-17T09:54:14","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T09:54:14","slug":"aristophanes-lysistrata-new-book-by-james-robson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=1839","title":{"rendered":"Aristophanes: Lysistrata – new book by James Robson"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nThis month sees the publication of Aristophanes: Lysistrata<\/em> by James Robson, Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University.\u00a0<\/strong>Lysistrata<\/em> is a comedy from Classical Athens about a fictional sex strike staged by the women of Greece which brings about the end of a bitter war.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this post, James recalls his first encounter with the play and contemplates the play\u2019s enduring appeal. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Photograph<\/strong>My first encounter with Aristophanes\u2019 Lysistrata<\/em> was as a first-year undergraduate as part of a Greek and Roman Drama module, and I can safely say it was love at first sight.\u00a0 We studied tragedy for the first semester, and as exciting and profound as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides\u2019 plays were for me at the time, I found myself impatiently waiting for Christmas to be over when all the secrets of Greek comedy would finally be revealed to me.\u00a0The twinkle in my lecturer\u2019s eye whenever he said the name \u2018Aristophanes\u2019 was intriguing enough, but it was the rumours I heard from fellow students about Aristophanes\u2019 anarchic, sassy, quick-fire plays with their countless willy, bum and fart jokes that threatened to send me over the edge.\u00a0 Greek Comedy sounded mind-blowing and my mind could hardly wait to be blown.<\/p>\n

\"BookReality hit hard, however, when we finally got to the plays themselves.\u00a0 Greek comedies were like nothing I had ever encountered before, it\u2019s true, but that actually made them tough to read.\u00a0 Plots didn\u2019t always progress logically, and Aristophanes\u2019 stylistic switches and linguistic exuberance could often be difficult to make sense of.\u00a0 Most disappointingly of all \u2013 the fantastic willy gags aside \u2013 the jokes were often challenging to appreciate, designed as they were for a particular audience, in a particular time and place, and therefore referencing people, events, conventions and objects that were often unfamiliar to me.\u00a0 I desperately wanted to \u2018get\u2019 Greek Comedy, but was struggling to find an Aristophanic play to fall in love with.\u00a0 That is, until I found Lysistrata<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So, what is it that made my heart beat faster when I first read this play?\u00a0 You could say that I\u2019ve been working on that question ever since, and that writing this book has finally allowed me to figure out the answer.<\/p>\n

To help me explain, it\u2019s worth outlining the context in which Lysistrata<\/em> was written.\u00a0 It was first staged in 411 BCE during what was perhaps classical Athens\u2019 darkest hour.\u00a0 The city had recently lost thousands of men in the disastrous Sicilian Expedition and was now at serious risk of losing the Peloponnesian War which it had been fighting against Sparta for 20 years. With Lysistrata<\/em>, Aristophanes presents his audience with a wonderful fantasy of how peace could be attained by the women of Greece staging a sex strike and thereby forcing the men to reconcile their differences and bring the fighting to an end.\u00a0 In his play, Aristophanes freely acknowledges the rough time Athens was having (as mentioned above, comedy as a genre is deeply concerned with the here and now of life in the city of Athens, so this stark reality could hardly be avoided).\u00a0 But importantly, the plot enables him to explore the effects of war from a viewpoint that his predominantly male audience might rarely have considered, namely that of the city\u2019s womenfolk.\u00a0 This makes the play fresh, innovative and arguably more contemporary-feeling for a modern audience inclined to see a non-traditional viewpoint as refreshing.\u00a0 Indeed, Lysistrata<\/em> was very possibly the first Greek comedy to feature an ordinary, citizen woman as its central character.\u00a0 At this stage in his career Aristophanes was clearly a mature and accomplished playwright who felt confident with experimentation.<\/p>\n

The challenging historical backdrop to the play helps us to understand other features of the play that made it more accessible to me as an undergraduate.\u00a0 The intense turmoil in Athens in 411 BCE led to a toxic political situation, which later that year would result in a bloody coup.\u00a0 Wisely, then, Aristophanes dials down the kind of contemporary political jokes and the topical allusions which modern readers struggle with, and instead we get a whole bunch of first-rate willy gags that have stood the test of time.\u00a0 As I just mentioned, too, he also experiments with the genre of comedy: Lysistrata\u2019s characters are more psychologically convincing than the more changeable creations of his earlier plays, their language is more uniform, and the plot \u2013 as fantastic and silly as it is at times \u2013 nevertheless has its own logical flow.\u00a0 In short, the play\u2019s universal themes \u2013 sex, war, gender, protest \u2013 its characters, its language and its humour are simply all more comprehensible to a non-specialist than those of other comedies by Aristophanes.\u00a0 And this, I think, is what helped not just the undergraduate version of me fall in love with Lysistrata<\/em>, but why the play has been so influential in modern times, too. As I outline in the book, Lysistrata<\/em> has been widely read and performed in English-speaking countries over the last 150 years \u2013 perhaps more widely than all the rest of Aristophanes\u2019 plays put together \u2013 and has even inspired feature films (Spike Lee\u2019s 2015 Chi-raq<\/em> is a recent example).\u00a0 In short, Lysistrata<\/em> has proven to be a deeply seductive play \u2013 not just for me, but for many others, too.\u00a0 And writing this book has not only allowed me to explore the nature of its allure, but also to share its seductive secrets with others.<\/p>\n

Aristophanes: Lysistrata<\/strong><\/a> by James Robson is published by Bloomsbury.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more about James\u2019 teaching and research at the Open University <\/strong>here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month sees the publication of Aristophanes: Lysistrata by James Robson, Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University.\u00a0Lysistrata is a comedy from Classical Athens about a fictional sex strike staged by the women of Greece which brings about the end of a bitter war. In this post, James recalls his first encounter with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,135],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1839"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1847,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions\/1847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}