Lysistrata

Lysistrata, produced in 411 BC during a grim stretch of the Peloponnesian War, imagines its title character organizing women from both warring sides, Athens and Sparta, in a sex strike to force their husbands to negotiate peace, backed by the older women's seizure of the treasury on the Acropolis funding the war. The comedy plays the resulting standoff, increasingly desperate, visibly aroused husbands against wives holding firm, for broad physical humor, but beneath the bawdiness runs a serious argument about who bears the cost of war and who ought to have a say in ending it, voiced most directly when Lysistrata compares statecraft to the patient, practical work of carding and weaving wool. The play ends with reconciliation and a shared feast between the two warring cities, a comic wish-fulfillment Aristophanes's actual Athens would not achieve for another seven years.