The men of Athens, entangled in their folly and paranoia, disagree. Lysistrata herself identifies the cause of the war to be nothing more than political corruption, greed, and ambition. These events form the crucial historical backdrop of Lysistrata-indeed, the inciting action of the play, spearheaded by the titular heroine, is a resolution on the part of the women of Athens and Sparta to withhold sex from their men until they bring about a peaceful end to the Peloponnesian War. Moreover, as part of that conflict, Athens had also recently suffered a fatal disaster during the Sicilian Expedition (415-413 BC), a failed military intervention in which some two hundred ships and five thousand Athenian soldiers were destroyed in one fell swoop. For two decades or so, Athens had been engaged in bloody, costly warfare against the Peloponnesian League (led by the Greek city-state of Sparta), in what is now known as the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Aristophanes’ great comedy Lysistrata was first performed in the Greek city-state of Classical Athens in 411 BC, when Athenian supremacy in Greece was collapsing.
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