2400
years ago, Aristophanes wrote the world's first anti-war comedy, The Acharnians.
He wrote several more over his forty year career, including Peace and Lysistrata.
Aristophanes was born about 50 years after the height of Athens' greatest period,
and many of his time were concerned about the decline of their democracy. They
felt their leaders were corrupt and they were growing tired of the continual state
of war. Aristophanes' satirical writing reflects these political and social concerns.
In Acharnians, a farmer who is tired of the endless fighting decides not
to wait for the governments to make peace with the Spartans and tries to make
his own private peace with the enemy. Four years later, the war with Sparta had
entered its tenth year, and Aristophanes' play, Peace, has the hero travel
to Olympus, the home of the gods, to discover that all of the gods have left,
except the god of war. The goddesses of Peace has been imprisoned and the hero
leads the many peoples of Greece to rescue her and return her to triumph over
the god of war. Ten years later, the war was still going on, and Aristophanes
play, Lysistrata takes another humorous anti-war angle. The women of Athens,
sick of their sons being killed in the war, announce to their husbands that they
won't sleep with them anymore until they make peace with the Spartans. None of
the works of other comedy writers of his time remain, but eleven of the nearly
50 plays Aristophanes wrote have survived to inspire future generations. Two and
a half millennia later, on March 3, 2003, more than 1000 performances of Aristophanes'
play Lysistrata took place all around the world to protest the war on Iraq.
