The reception of Aristophanes’

is a good example of the polarizing reactions that a literary work can provoke at different times, or even at the same time in different places. Comedy’s first “women-play” went from being one of the most obscure texts of the Aristophanic corpus during the Renaissance to one of antiquity’s most celebrated dramas in the late twentieth and early twenty–first centuries.Citing its alleged indecency, the Cretan scholar Marcus Musurus famously excluded

from his first edition of the Aristophanic corpus in 1498. The women’s suffrage movement in early twentieth–century Britain resurrected the play’s central character, Lysistrata, as a feminist heroine (Hall 2007: 86-8), while antifeminist Greek theater companies of the same…

2500 words

Citation: Sells, Donald. "Lysistrata". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 January 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13329, accessed 21 November 2024.]

• View recommended reading for this article