By most accounts Aristophanes was the greatest comic writer of his day. On his shoulders alone rests an entire age of comedy. By the time Aristophanes began to write his comedies, the people of Athens were increasingly demoralized by the ongoing conflicts of the Peloponnesian War. That is why in most of his plays there are tones of apprehension and grief.
             Lysistrata was written twenty-one years into the Peloponnesian War. Although the play is light-hearted, it was written out of the writer's grief over the thousand of men who died in the terrible defeat that the Athenians suffered in Syracuse.
             The play begins in a public square in Athens. There Lysistrata awaits the other women to explain to them the details of her plan to bring peace in Greece. At the time Athens was at war with Sparta and other cities. Most of the men where at war, a lot of them died, and the rest would come back only to relax for a few days enjoy the pleasure of their wives and go back to war. To Lysistrata that was unacceptable, so she gathered the women from Athens, Sparta and the rest of the cities that were at war and made them take an oath that they will not sleep with their husbands until peace was made and the war would be finally over. The other women were against it at the beginning, but soon they realized that a sex strike was the only thing that they could use to convince their husbands to make peace. At the same time that the meeting was going on the elderly women of Athens took over Acropolis. Acropolis then became their fortress, all the women gathered inside and would not come out until peace was made. They were constantly threaded by the men to stop their strike but with no results. Some women did break but Lysistrata was always there to convince them that this had to be done. Her plan worked and Aristophanes used the example of Myrrhine and her husband Cinesias to show us how the women "tortured" the men and made them get toge...