Lysistrata
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- General readers interested in ancient Greek drama and the origins of Western comedy
- Readers concerned with gender issues and anti-war themes who want a classic point of reference
- Students in English or classics courses who need to read a primary text in translation
- Book-club members looking for a short play with ample room for discussion
Not a good fit for
- Readers who want a Chinese translation and are not comfortable reading English
- Readers completely unfamiliar with ancient Greek history who do not wish to fill in the background
- Readers expecting serious tragedy or modern psychological realism
Reading tips
- Read a plot summary first, then the text, to grasp more quickly the rhythm of the chorus and scene changes.
- While reading, note the differences in language between the women's chorus and the male characters, and record how comic bodily jokes carry political satire.
- Read alongside a basic timeline of the Peloponnesian War to understand the play's urgent call for peace.
- For a book club, choose two or three scenes for close reading and discuss whether the premise of "using gender against war" still holds today.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book in Chinese or English?
Can I read it without any background in ancient Greek drama?
How is this edition different from a print translation?
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About the author
Aristophanes (c. 446 BCE–c. 385 BCE) was a comic poet of ancient Athens and the foremost representative of Old Comedy. Public sources on his life are limited, and later readers have come to know his work chiefly through his plays. Tradition holds that he wrote about forty comedies, of which eleven survive, including The Clouds, The Acharnians, The Birds and Lysistrata; the library holds seventeen of his works. His plays often take Athenian political and social life as their subject, using exaggerated plots and fantastic invention to mount sharp satire, and their witty, imaginative language had a profound influence on the later development of European comedy.
