PEACE

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.