Transcript Women in Aristophanes

Women in Aristophanes
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
Women in Comedy

Women in Comedy are presented as lively, sexual, funloving, intelligent, cunning, sometimes devious, and
much more interesting and complex than the
caricatures which serious literature has created.

Thus, comedy probably preserves a more realistic image
of the Athenian woman

This image has often been dismissed as fantasy

The view that women could not have been the drunkand devious sex maniacs of comedy is a modern
perspective incapable of reconciling respectability with
vivacity, good humor and unashamed sexuality.
Women’s plays

Lysistate

(Women from all of Greece come together to make the men stop the war)

Thesmophoriazousai

(Women conspire to take revenge because Euripides has been presenting
them as bad in his plays)

Ecclesiazousai

(Women come together and take over the city with peaceful means)

Many plays are named after courtesans, and the plots of many plays have
women, courtesans and later on slaves.
Ecclesiazousai

Women set to take over the city, because they are
frustrated with the war effort of the men.

392: The Corinthian War:

Defeated Athens allied herself with the dissatisfied
allies of Sparta Corinth and Thebes against Sparta

An inconclusive conflict went on for a while, wearing
down the already exhausted Greek States

For Athens the war was tough to pay for without the
resources of the empire, and the whole city felt the
financial impact.
How the women plan to
take over the city

Not by force as in Lysistrata, but by disguising
themselves as men, going early in the assembly and
taking all the seats (the assembly could only sit 6500
people, out of 35000 eligible citizens). Thus they
would have majority and vote passing power over to
women.

During the process they need to change their faces,
with beards, body color (with tans), voice,
mannerisms and what they say.

This effort outlines perceived differences between
men and women
Women in Power

The trick succeeds and women gain control of government.

They fundamentally change Athens in some surprising ways:

First, instead of creating a reverse image of male
administration, they opt for a fair and egalitarian communist
society. Everyone works and contributes and everyone equally
shares in the wealth

The laws of the women are meant to remove inequalities in
society, and cure some of its ills

Women’s administration is a utopia, which to the average
Athenian would seem no less of a fantasy that a city of birds
built in mid air.