Mark Adamo

The Nude Goddess is not your mother’s Lysistrata. It’s not even the one by Aristophanes.

This iconic comedy, unveiled in 411 B.C.E., eyes the women of Athens and Sparta, disgusted by an endless, pointless war, who barricade themselves in the Athenian treasury and swear a sanction on sex until their men make peace. It’s a delicious premise. It is not a plot. Our heroine concocts this strategy: she bullies her team into agreeing; the plan works; end of play. Nor are these complex characters. Lysistrata, Kleonike, Myrrhine: these are less persons than personae, masks of text through which their play-wright declaims an impassioned political broadside.

Twelve years into a failed imperialist incursion, Aristophanes felt no need to weigh a pro-war case, to squint at his women’s motives, to paint his men as anything but blowhards and buffoons. Historically understandable; but his certitudes flatten his play. I love Lysistrata‘s strut and wit and nerve, its utopian yearnings, its magical locale — an Acropolis where, by dream-logic, a handful of couples can reconcile the love of the battlefield with the battlefield of love. But there’s a reason Lysistrata most often materializes nowadays either as the carrot of sex with which we lure students to the classics, or as the megaphone of protest through which we assail the war du jour. The reason is that you cannot say anything sophisticated about war while ignoring the psychology of warriors.