Born between 457 and 444 BC, Aristophanes died around 385 BC: little else is known about his life. A member of the minor nobility, Aristophanes was impeached by the Athenian senate after he criticized foreign policy. He wrote about forty plays, eleven of which survive. In his comedies, Aristophanes challenged the Realpolitik of the day with utopian solutions.
During Aristophanes’ life, the most pressing issue in Athenian foreign policy was the conflict with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). The conflict began over land disputes and Athenian imperialism, but was also based on the ideological rivalry between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta. The war lasted twenty-seven years and ruined Athens through years of sieges, the annihilation of her navy, and humiliating losses in battle. Pericles, the great Athenian leader of the mid-5th century, died in a plague, which also killed more than a quarter of the city’s population. The futile war weighed heavily on Aristophanes’s mind as he was writing Lysistrata.
Aristophanes is the only author of Old Comedy whose works have survived, and most of what we know about the genre is extrapolated from his work. Having evolved from the fertility rites and satyr plays of previous centuries, Old Comedy flourished in Athens in the fifth century BC. Politically charged and vocal in its defense of freedom, it combined obscene jokes with political satire. Aristophanes’ attack on Socrates in his 423 BC play, The Birds, for example, was apparently so wounding that it contributed to the philosopher’s execution.
Writers of Old Comedy had resource to a number of devices no longer employed today. Most important was the parabasis, an interlude in which the playwright spoke directly to the audience through the chorus and could express his own opinions. Aristophanes liked to use this spot to attack politicians, or harangue the audience for not having given his play first prize in the competition the previous year.
Perhaps the most celebrated aspect of Old Comedy, however, was its appropriation of Dionysian rituals: the members of the chorus traditionally wore huge prosthetic leather phalluses.
Colombia .. Turkish, Sirt .. rl Amsterdam .. The International Women's Day movement, Global Women's Strike, March 8 ey work practices .. Iceland, 1979 .. Poland, 1992, England's Marylebone Cricket Club, 1990, some for 9 years (sandwiches) .. Sharanahua, S. Am., 300,000yrs ago .. creationists, beware ..
.. excerpt .. The tale that he unfolds is, predictably, one of revolution - the fundamental revolution, centred on reproduction and sexuality. It is not, he assures us, true to say that human nature is such that revolution is impossible to accomplish - on the contrary, our humanity, our cultures, our relational networks come into being through and in a revolution initiated by women 300,000 years ago, and through the counter-revolution subsequently mounted by men. Thus it was that our humanity was forged by women, whose fundamental needs for food and for help in raising children form the foundations upon which culture was to be erected.
Let us follow one of his key illustrations : the Sharanahua is a South American people among whom one may regularly see a group of young women, arrayed in their finest garments and very visibly painted, form a line, dance together, and challenge the young men. Each of the women chooses a man whom she orders to go off into the forest and hunt for her. Off go the men ; when they return, the women are waiting for them. Unhappy is the wretch who comes back empty-handed ; he will do his best to creep into the village unperceived, and to hide in his hut. The lucky hunter, however, lays his prey down at the entry to the village, where the women are waiting, and goes off to prepare himself for the festivities. He knows that he will that very night enjoy the favours of the woman by whom he was chosen.
Knight tells us that this scenario is a distant echo of the birth of all human culture. Women need men - not as mere genitors, but as providers of goods and services. To persuade males to play a role so rare among primates, women have recourse to a 'sex-strike'. Knight sums this up in the formula : No meat, no sex. To underpin his theory, he follows two paths ; first he carries out a rewrite of Lévi-Strauss, and second he tries to show how the very specific physiology of the human female can be explained by the 'sex-strike'.
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