The reception of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is a good example of the polarizing reactions that a literary work can provoke at different times, or even at the same time in different places. Comedy’s first “women-play” went from being one of the most obscure texts of the Aristophanic corpus during the Renaissance to one of antiquity’s most celebrated dramas in the late twentieth and early twenty–first centuries.Citing its alleged indecency, the Cretan scholar Marcus Musurus famously excluded Lysistrata from his first edition of the Aristophanic corpus in 1498. The women’s suffrage movement in early twentieth–century Britain resurrected the play’s central character, Lysistrata, as a feminist heroine (Hall 2007: 86-8), while antifeminist Greek theater companies of the same period derided her as an ambitious antagonist of domestic harmony (Van Steen 2000: 80-91). The Lysistrata’s apparent feminist and anti-war...
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Citation: Sells, Donald. "Lysistrata". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 January 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13329, accessed 09 June 2026.]
