I think that the commisioner is a stuck up traditional old fool. He gets really upset about how the women took over the Akropolis, and constantly leads attempts to try to get them out and get rid of them, and refuses to even try to look at things in a different light. He is also a scared hypocrite, sending soldiers out to capture the women and scorning and insulting them when they don’t, while he hides safely away from them. Also, he doesn’t even try to listen to lysistrata, dismissing her idea as womanly nonsense, judging that she doesn’t know anything that’s going on simply because she is a woman. His sexist frame gets a shock when the women dress him up as a woman, and sputters in aggravation saying how he was going to report the “monstrous maltreatment of a public official”, showing further how he has a very large ego and thinks that he is better than the rest. He even gets drunk when he realizes that things aren’t going his way, acting like a child and a stuck-up brat.
In the intro, the play was said to be not just about sex, but about love, and the bond between the husband and the wife. I don’t really know about this, I’m trying to see the love in the story, and yes, I get the obvious love between husband and wife, but at the same time I don’t actually see it as love - not as I’ve seen love in the past plays. I don’t see the love between lysistrata and her husband (how he treats her), I don’t see the love between myrrhine and kinesis (he’s saying those things just to get her to bed) and especially when Peace is brought in and holds the attention of all the men.
Now, the love I’m talking about is the husband-wife love. Other love I see a lot of, there is the love for their country and fellow man, the love for the safely of those they care about, and ect. But even though I know that the desire for their husbands to come home from the war stems from love, I don’t see it as the same love that I though should be there. But of course, I may simply have strange views on love, or what love is.
On page 24 I notice that when lysistrata asked for the other women’s support to end the war (before telling them that the way was to abstain from sex) Kleonike responds with
“you can count on me! If you need money, I’ll pawn the shift off my back ---Aside and drink up the cash before the sun goes down.”
I never really got this, Kleonike throughout the play seems to be a close friend of lysistrata and one of the main women holding the strike in place, yet here she is pledging her support, only to then seem to be very shady and not supportive at all. I mean, she says, I’ll do everything I can to give you money, but then use it all right away instead. I just want to know everyone’s thoughts on this, so hopefully I can understand it better.
I wanted to explore the relationship between the athenian husband and wife that led to the women taking power. From listening to Lysistrata tell about how she always asked her husband how the war was going and if they were getting closer to peace, and how he replied with “What’s that to you? Shut up!” and if they persued the matter she was threatened with a clout on the head (56), its fairly easy to see that the women were not treated with much respect or given much power. However, this slightly contradicts as the women were the head of the household in the sense that they took care of everything at home, from children to cooking to managing the budget. Also, then factoring in how easily the women were able to make them men bow to their wants, I wonder who held the true power in the relationship. The husband, who portrayed having complete control and power (through possible physical and mental abuse?), and seemingly to manipulate others to get their wants (kinesis using his son to get to myrrhine); or the wife, who actually manages the household and succumbs to the husbands wants, but is easily able to take power and control as soon as they want to?
One thing I have to keep reminding myself is that this play happens in 24-hours. Now, I always thing that it takes a much longer time than that, as I truely don’t think that the men would give in that easily. I also wonder over what time it really must have been. I mean, the play starts off with lysistrata having a meeting in the morning. Then during the part of the play where a lot of the women were trying to get out, Kleonike says “and those goddamned holy owls; all night long, tu-wit, tu-wit - they’re hooting me out into my grave!” (73) Finally, when the whole group is going to make peace, they stop at the commissioner’s house. He is drunk and carrying a torch - two things that signifiy that it is later towards evening. Now, I know I’m being very literal with all this, but I just wanted to try to figure out exactly what the time frame was, as I never was really explained. Also, by figuring this out, I can see that Lysistrata follows the morning to evening storyline. Meaning that it starts in the morning, a time of new beginings and starts (lysistrata bringing up her idea, all the women going against their roles) and it ends in the evening, signifying closure and and end (to the war).
Peace is an important motif in this play. Throughout the dialog (especially in the beginning and end), Peace is the goal that the women want, as well as the men (by the end). After reading how Peace was also a person, it got me thinking; whenever I write peace, I usually write it lower-case, however throughout the play it was always uppercase. Now, I don’t know if I’m just crazy and don’t know that peace should have an uppercase, but I was thinking that maybe it could be a little bit more. After re-reading the play with the knowledge that Peace was also a woman, quite a few of the lines in the beginning of Lysistrata could easily apply to peace as the concept, as Peace as in the woman. So it makes me wonder whether Lysistrata was planning to use Peace (the woman) in the first place. For example, on page 24, Lysistrata says “we can force our husbands to negotiate Peace…” where at first, I thought that the mesage was fairly obvious - she wants the athenian men to get together with the spartan men and stop fighting. But after reading this, and remembering how, in the end, the husbands really DID negotiate Peace (the woman) I wonder whether this was just another part of her plan.
In Lysistrata, we only see/hear two Spartans, and oly one of them is actually characterized. Lampito is the spartan woman that is to hold and lead the same idea to abstain from sex in Sparta, and though she holds an important role, she is only present in the beginning. The other spartan, who is only present at the end for peace negotiations, isn’t even given a name. Actually (after looking through the text), it says that a whole delegation of spartans come, but because Aristophanes only refers to the speaker as “Spartan” it’s hard to tell whether the one speaking is the same person or different people. The spartans also have a very distinct dialect or speech. In the Notes (115) it said that the spartans dialect was based off of an american mountain dialect - to me, at least, it sounds like the speech of a southern redneck or countryman.
I think Aristophanes uses these two things, the lack of distinction and characterization of the delegation of Spartans, as well as their spech to highlight the differences between the Athenians and the Spartans and to show how the Athenians thought of the spartans. The lack of distinction gives the feeling that each spartan had no real value or personal value, and they were just all grouped together as if they had no individual thoughts, as if they weren’t important enough to be separate. The spartan dialect also gives a feeling like the spartans weren’t smart and didn’t have good ideas or thought processes - which isn’t true as both Lampito and the delegation of spartans brought good ideas and new perspectives to the table.
