Lysistrata Literary Elements

Comedy

English, translated from Ancient Greek

The play is set in the year 411 BCE and it takes place before the gateway to the Acropolis of Athens.

There is no narrator, but there are two choruses that remark on the action of the play.

Ironic, comical, bawdy, ridiculous, satirical, political.

The protagonist is Lysistrata and the antagonists are the men of Greece.

The conflict of the play is the question of how to stop the war that is going on. Lysistrata determines that the best way to get the war to stop is for all of the women to deny sex to their husbands. The secondary conflict then becomes that the women must maintain their conviction not to have sex with their husbands.

The play reaches its climax when the men agree to do anything the women want and sign a peace treaty.

The fact that the women are resistant to Lysistrata's idea at first foreshadows their difficulty in sticking to their promise to abstain from sex.

The whole premise—that men would give up war just so they can have sex again—is a bit of an understatement, a way of turning foreign policy and matters of the military into a satire.

Allusions to the Peloponnesian War, Euripides, various cults, Greek gods.

There is a lot of sexually bawdy imagery in the play.

The men agree to Lysistrata's stipulations, but it is unclear whether they are doing so simply because they are lustful, or if they have also learned a lesson about war.

The choruses of women and men run parallel to the central conflict, which is a war between the genders.

Peace is personified by the naked statue at the end of the play.

There are two choruses in the play: the Chorus of Men and the Chorus of Women. The two groups are always bickering and the interaction between them adds another comic element to the play. The presence of two choruses is considered as being quite unusual for the time when the play was written.