Ignoring the crudeness of the play (and remember that Shakespeare himself was quite crude) and the naked men running around with giant erect peni (is that the plural of penis?) what this play seems to be about is the empowerment of women (which is probably why the feminists love it so much). Mind you the only woman in this play that seems to have the willpower to see it through to the end is Lysistrata herself, but then that is probably why she is the leader. In a way it says something about a characteristic of leadership, and that is to remain firm on your convictions because you are the one that people look up to, and you are the one who holds everything together.

The play was first produced in 411 bc, not necessarily Athen's darkest day (since the final defeat to the Spartans was still a few years away) but it was one of them. Basically the Athenians had sent their entire navy off on a little adventure to capture Sicily, and in doing so pretty much lost all of her ships and a bulk of her fighting men. Now Athens was basically defenceless, the Spartans were on her doorstep, and most of her allies had deserted her. It was not a question of victory at any cost any more, but it was a question of trying to bring the war to an end so that Athens would suffer an honourable defeat (not that she had been honourable to any of the cities that she had sacked). Mind you, just like the Athenians not pressing her advantage when she was on top, Sparta did not press the advantage here either.

The play takes the view that the women are as essential to the functioning of the city as are the men, and in fact Lysistrata pretty much says that it is the women who build the city and the men who then go about destroying it. The reference here is to the fact that the women give birth to the warriors and the men then pretty much send them out to get killed. In another sense there is also a reference to how the workers work hard to produce the money for the city and the politicians then go and waste it. I guess this is a reference to the failed Sicilian expedition where most of Athen's fighting power was wiped out on a quest in which the success was dubious at best.

This is not a play where the women hold the men hostage (by going on a sex strike) until the surrender, this is not what was wanted. As mentioned above it was not a quick end to the war that was desired, that could have been arranged by waving the white flag, but an honourable defeat. This is why Lysistrata brings the Spartan and Theban women into the plan as well, because the idea was to not just starve the Athenian men of sex, but all of the men on both sides of the conflict, in the hope that this would bring them to the negotiating table.

There are a few interesting things that come out of this play, and one of them is the idea that the woman is obsessed with sex. There are a number of references in this play that suggest that this is the case, but then the fact that we have men running around with erect peni also indicates that men are just as obsessed with sex as are the women. However the other odd thing is the idea that a sex strike with the Athenians would work. I was under the impression that to the Athenians (in particular) that sex with women was simply to reproduce where as pleasurable sex was with another man. I guess this is why this play, to the Athenians, would have been so funny, because in reality such a sex strike, at least to the Athenians, would not have worked.

After reading Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Anabasis, I must agree with a number of people that Xenophon's account of the period of Hellenic history from the closing stages of the Peloponesian War to, well, some point in time in which he stopped writing, was rather disappointing and without any point whatsoever. The Anabasis is a gripping story of how a group of Greek soldiers get trapped thousands of miles behind enemy lines and have to make a long march back home. Herodotus is a work of a grand scale where we travel the eastern Mediterranean meeting the peoples of the region and learning their culture, culminating in the Persian Wars where the small collection of city states that was Greece pretty much kicked Persian butt.

As for this book, well, with the exception of the Anabasis, it is what can be expected of Xenophon, and that is a pretty scrappy piece of work with no real research and biased towards one particular city state: Sparta. For a while it was considered to be the quintessential account of the period from about 410 BC to around 370 BC, that is until we discovered a bunch of ancient documents in a garbage dump in the Egyptian village of Oxyrhincus.

Until that discovery, there were only two sources about this period: Xenophon, and Diodorus, and since Diodorus had written much later, Xenophon was the preferred text. However, amongst the many fragments unearthed at Oxyrhincus (which included a medical report that was used in a civil action to prove that the plaintiff's injuries were caused by the house falling down on him) was a history of this (which has been referred to as the Hellenica Oxyrhincus) which ended up supporting Diodorus' version (and I hope I have the name right because if I don't, I'll look like one first class idiot who claims to be an Ancient Greek historian, but then again I have already done that in Rome when I was standing before Trajan's Column proclaiming that it was built as a memorial to Trajan's conquest of Parthia, at which point a Romanian woman appeared beside me and began to argue with me about how it was to commemorate his invasion of Dachia – she turned out to be right – thanks Wikipedia). As for the Hellenica Oxyrhincus, I suspect that the language of the document put it back to around the time that Xenophon was writing, which is why it (and Diodorus) have become the preferred sources.

However, a couple of things I noted and that was that every time somebody won a victory, they would put up a trophy of their victory, but then that is not surprising because if you go to Rome you will see remnants of these trophies everywhere (such as the Arch of Constantine commemorating him becoming the sole emperor of Rome), the Arch of Titus (commemorating his victory over the Jews), the Arch of Septimus Servus (commemorating something, most likely how much of an awesome dude his was), and of course, Trajan's Column (yes, commemorating his victory in Dachia – grumble, grumble).

Another thing I picked up was that even if you win some big war it does not mean that you enter into a period of endless peace. Here we have the Spartan King Lysander defeating the Athenians and bringing the Peloponesian War to an end, and pretty much creating Spartan hegemony throughout the region. However, we then discover that despite this victory, there are more battles being fought around the fringes of Greece. A couple of times some generals attempted to march on the Persian King (one of them being the subject of the Anabasis) but it was not until Alexander popped up that anybody managed to succeed. Also, despite Sparta holding power over the Grecian world, it did not mean that nobody else was going to attempt to take a shot at the title, and in this particular instance it was Thebes. Here we hear, sort of (Xenophon doesn't say anything about it), about the sacred legion. This legion was a legion of made up entirely of homosexual lovers (women didn't fight in wars in those days). The idea was that if you make up a band of soldiers who were connected in this way then they would fight much better and be much more devastating on the battle field. In the end it didn't work (they were beaten at Corinth).

One final thing (even though I could relate the idea above to Britain's experience after the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of Germany, as well as the United State's experience after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of China, I won't) is that I have noted that there is reference to Dionysius of Syracuse in this book. The reason I mention that is because I have heard of him, and even read a book about him called [book:Tyrant] (it was one of those historical fictions that I generally do not like). The thing was that I did not actually know where this particular writer (who happens to be some professor of Ancient History) got his sources, and I suspect one of them was this book. However, the only connection between that book and this is that Xenophon mentions an invasion of Sicily by the Carthaginians and that Dionysius happened to be a tyrant in Syracuse.

I sort of wonder about the date that this play has been set because it seems that they have dated this play to the early part of the Peloponesian War indicating that it had only been raging for about five years up to this point, however some of the internal evidence in the play does seem to point to an earlier rather than a later setting for this play. What I can notice is some of the things that the play does not mention: namely Pericles and the plague that swept Athens in the early years of the war. However was it does indicate is the idea that it was the farmers that suffered the brunt of the war, particularly in the early years.

I won't go into too many details with the beginning of the war with the exception that it had a lot to do with an alliance system that had developed in Greece after the defeat of the Persians. In a way this is quite reflective of the alliance system that had developed on the eve of World War I. Europe had effectively split into two camps, one headed by Britain and the other headed by Germany. Here we have a similar situation in that there was one group, the Delian league, headed up by Athens, and then a second, sort of non-aligned league, headed up by Sparta. In a sense it involved treaties that indicated that if one member of the alliance is attacked, then all of the members are attacked.

What we need to remember about the war is that it was Greek against Greek. Mind you there was still a lot of snobbery among the Greek states, and the Athenians were hardly the enlightened despots that we seem to think they are. Instead they are one of two superpowers, and if you allied with them you were expected to follow their rules. This was no pact of mutual co-operation and amity, but rather it was pretty much signing your sovereignty over to the superpower, and if you did things that the superpower did not like then you would be punished. In many ways nothing has changed in the last 2500 years, with the exception of the names. Some suggest that elections in the United States have no effect upon us in Australia, but the truth is that not only does it affect us, but it affects the rest of the world as well.

The war itself lasted about thirty years, and during much of that time it was a stalemate. Sparta was a land power and Athens was a sea power, and while Sparta pretty much dominated the Greek mainland, siege equipment was non-existent, and the Athenians were able to barricade themselves behind the Long Walls, and thumb their noses at the Spartans on the outside. However the people who were affected were the farmers whose livelihood existed outside of the walls of Athens. When the Spartans invaded Attica, they laid waste to the countryside and forced all of the farmers to take shelter in the city. Over time this led to overcrowding and in turn disease, which pretty much decimated the population (and as mentioned there is no mention of the disease in this play).

Understandably this play is about a farmer who has suffered more due to the war than have many of the city people, who seem to have the loudest voices in the assembly. The farmers have basically lost out, and since many of them were poor to begin with, only being able to survive on what they were able to grow as well as the excess that they are were to sell, while many of the city dwellers were able to sit back and relax and live off of their investments. Nothing has really changed in the nature of war, with the lower classes being the ones who fight the war while the upper classes are the ones who dictate the progress of the war from their mansions. However, this farmer decides that he has had enough, so he goes out and makes his own peace with the Spartans. Obviously he is fed up with all of this politicking because he knows that in the end he gets nothing out of it.

It is also interesting to see how nothing has really changed in relation to crudeness in the plays. We see base jokes here, we see base jokes in Shakespeare, and we see base jokes coming out of many of the movies that we watch these days. The interesting thing that I do note here, and in some of Aristophanes plays, is the issue of heterosexuality. I will probably say a bit more when I get to the Lysistrata, but it is interesting that many of us who know about the Ancient Athenian culture being orientated towards homosexual coupling see many heterosexual jokes in these plays, and in fact see mostly heterosexual jokes. In fact, it seems, that the Athenians did appreciate and enjoy heterosexual sex, though I also get the impression (and if you read between the lines with regards to the Megarian you will be horrified) that women are little more than pleasure machines with no voice whatsoever.

I really liked this book, but then I generally really like books that deal with ancient history and are a retelling of events that were beyond our lifetimes, such as this one. This book, though incomplete (namely because the author died before he could finish it) tells of a war between the rival Greek city states of Athens and Sparta. I could (and would like to) write a thesis on this book, but I will stick to my main theme, and that is the invasion of Sicily. As I read it, I thought as to whether there was a similar event in our time that reflects what happened then. Namely, in the middle of a war, the Athenians send a bulk of their forces halfway across the Mediterranean to capture an island that really had little to do with the war they were fighting and lost. Though they lasted another ten years, it was this event that brought about the downfall of their empire. Remember, Athens was a democracy, so it was not as if a single ruler made up his mind to do this, but rather one party, though the use of elegant speeches and promises of glory managed to bring the people of Athens around to their way of thinking and to vote in favour of this war.

It does remind me very much of a similar war in this century.