Lysistrata - The Spartans

Perhaps one of the things that stuck out to me most when I was reading Lysistrata was the portrayal of the Spartans. Honestly, my first thought about the way Lampito and her fellow Spartans was Why are they talking like rednecks?  For example:

"I calklate so. Hit's fitness whut done it, fitness and dancin'." -Lampito, page 356.

Whoa, Lampito sounds like she's from backwoods Tennessee!

I tried to reason why our playwright Aristophanes would write the Spartans in such a way that they would seem rather stupid, while the Athenians used perfect grammar and articulation.

Ancient Greece was not the unified country we now know as Greece. Greece was not unified at all, but consisted of several different city-states, which functioned much like separate small countries. Each had its different culture, and as evidenced  from the ongoing wars talked about in the play, did not always get along. The cities of Athens and Sparta were two of these city-states.

Athens had a much more art-filled culture than Sparta. Named for the goddess of wisdom, Athena, Athens gave us such things as drama, the Parthenon, and most importantly democracy. Citizens of Athens were well learned and directly decided their laws  When you think ancient Greece, you probably think of Athens, which is still very much alive today.

Sparta, however, left no ruins for us to admire. The Spartans were extremely war like people, and they did not build their city to last. For the citizens of Sparta, duty to the state was much more important than expressing any individuality. The only real "citizens" of Sparta were the soldiers. Luxury was banned, and Spartans did not make or create anything to trade with (unless you counted warriors.)

Probably because these differences were so stark and apparent, Athens and Spartans were usually at odds with each other, though as Lysistrata tells us on page 446, they had occasionally allied together for their mutual benefit. Athenians thought of Spartans as barbaric, and it is important to note that Aristophanes was an Athenian. He couldn't help to think of Spartans as barbarians and a bit backwards, even if he was writing a play that preached a united and war-free Greece. He certainly did not have to worry about offending any Spartans with his play, because no Spartan would waste his time with such a silly thing as a play when there was fighting to be done.

Lysistrata- Political satire at its finest….

I think this play is interesting from a female perspective, because my initial reaction was that the play sounds sympathetic to women and feminism. In truth, if taken in the history and context at the time Lysistrata was written, it is the opposite of a feminist work. The idea that a woman would conspire to go against her husband or any man was absurd. In today’s terms, this play would be a comedy of epic proportions, because the events in the play are so ridiculous to Athens men, that they thought it was hilarious in 411 B.C. This reminds me of the movie Cats and Dogs, where the humans are portrayed as the sub-intelligent species, compared to the highly intelligent canines and felines. I also think it is important to remember that this play would have been performed by all males, so you can imagine men, pretending to be women, telling other men pretending to be women, how great their butt looks . . . very comical when you think about it.

The leading lady, Lysistrata, states at the very beginning that there are no more men left in Athens, because if there was a true man, the war would be ended. The underlying idea that a woman could end the war, because there were no real men, was a political jab to the ruling men of Athens by Aristophanes, the author of the comedy, who wrote this play during the Peloponnesian War being fought between Athens and Sparta. The idea presented in the play that if the money was cut off from the men, this might end the war, and that women could budget better than the Athens men--showed clear underlying frustrations that the money was being mishandled by the men at war, and even women could do better.

I believe this play is more political, rather than gender related. Aristophanes portrays most of the women as weak, inferior, senseless and preoccupied—these things would all be in keeping with a stereotypical female in 411 B.C. from a male’s point of view. Aristophanes was saying that even a female could do better than what our government is doing. Ironically, many times they can. Even though this writing was meant to be funny and absurd, I bet there were still women who were impacted by some of the ideas presented in this play. 

Something else I thought was very funny—Lampito , the Spartan girl, was portrayed as the ‘hillbilly’ of all the women. It was amusing to me that I had no trouble at all reading her dialect in the story.