Twenty years into the Peloponnesian War, a long and destructive conflict between the city-states of Athens and Sparta, its heroine is sick of domestic affairs falling by the wayside. Lysistrata is one of the more accessible of Aristophanes’ works for the modern reader. This made their humor cutting-edge in their day, but sometimes difficult to contextualize now. Even when they starred mythological gods and heroes, they were concerned with topics that were relevant to a contemporary audience. Its plays usually took place in the present and lambasted social and political figures and situations. Greek tragedy largely limited its subject matter to myths, but Old Comedy reflected the contemporary sphere. They are our only surviving examples of what later commentators would call “Old Comedy,” a sub-genre of Greek comedy (followed by Middle and New). Of around forty plays Aristophanes wrote, we have eleven in complete form.
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