Literature and history dot come. Oh, Hello and

welcome to literature and history.

Episode 36, War and Peace and Sex.

This episode is all about Aristophanes' play, Lissistrada, which probably premiered in the city

of Athens in 411, B, B.C. E.

Lissistrada might be the single most famous work of ancient Greek comedy.

It's a magnificent, hilarious, and in the end, heartwarming piece of theater that I guarantee will make

you laugh and smile. But it didn't arise out of nowhere. Lissistrada and Aristophanes

himself grew out of a long and rich tradition of political satire,

political satire enabled by Athens's unique democratic system.

In the hands of Aristophanes, maybe for the first time in history, theater was suddenly something

that could make and break political careers, deflate pomp and demagoguery, and change the course of a nation's history.

In this show, I'm going to begin by telling you the story of Aristophanes' play, Lisistrada. And then I'm going to tell you about

the historical climate that produced it. What was going on in Athens' history during the

turbulent winter of 411 B.E. what the play likely meant to its original audience

and how this Estrada fits in with Aristophanes' other and less famous surviving works.

Now, the title of this episode, episode 36, is war and peace and sex.

And that should serve as a warning to you. There is a lot of graphic nudity in this play.

There are explicit references to sex and male and female bodies and the entire story is focused on what we might call

a sexual emergency in Greece.

There are four letter words that I will not bleep out because they occur in the original text.

I usually try to avoid harsher language to try to make for as family-friendly as show as possible,

...