Lysistrata

A few days later Lysistrata enters, distraught. The movement stands on the edge of a knife; she is having trouble keeping her fellow women in line. She catches several trying to escape the temple to have sex with their husbands. They variously claim that wool needs to be tended to, flax at home needs to be shucked, pregnancy demands a return home, a sacred “snake” has been spotted; all comic or sexually charged excuses (727-61). Lysistrata reads an oracular text prophesying that the women will win if they just hold firm, but Aristophanes implies its veracity is questionable at best. The gullible women buy it anyway (765-80).

The choruses of old men and women resume their bickering. The old men recount a myth about the young Melanion who, according to their version of the story, fled to the wilderness and lived a life free of women (783-95). The women respond with their own story about Timon, a fifth century BCE Athenian who famously hated men (805-20). Both sides threaten to flash each other throughout.

Lysistrata shares news of a frenzied man approaching with gifts for Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual desire. One of the women, Myrrhine (whom we first met at line 68), recognized him as her husband Cinesias.