's rights movement to give free rein to his fancy, and to delight
the public with obscene jokes on the vices and weaknesses of women and
with clever caricatures of their leaders. Yet the attentive reader can
get glimpses here and there into the more serious aspects of the
question, and can recognize behind some of the distorted, caricatured
figures types which are not in themselves comic.

The other two plays of Aristophanes in which women figure prominently
are the _Lysistrata_ and the _Ecclesiazusae_. In each of these the
company of women is directed by a leader who in talents and
aggressiveness is far superior to her fellows. These two have not the
many small weaknesses of the other dames; they have the collective
interest of their sex at heart; and they know how to form a plan and
how to carry it through. The other women, in spite of their
thoughtlessness and weakness of character, are dominated by the strong
personalities of their self-appointed leaders. Hence, by a study of the
controlling spirit of each play, in spite of the caricature in the
poet's delineation, we may be able to form some conception of the
currents of thought of the day as they affected women.

Lysistrata is the wife of an Athenian magistrate, and has been strongly
affected by the ill success of the Peloponnesian War. She has meditated
long over the experiences of the female sex in general during the last
decade of the war. During the first ten years, the Grecian women had
borne in silence and without forming any opinions, in the narrow
confines of the home, the mistakes of their husbands; but gradually they
had observed how politics, in the hands of the men, was going from bad
to worse, and how want was increasing year by year. They began to ask
questions, to find fault in a mild way, though only with the result that
the men sent them back to their domestic duties with the brusque answer:
"War shall be a care to men." That which finally roused the women to
action was the realization that the men, in the face of events, had
unanimously recognized their own helplessness. Lysistrata therefore, in
Aristophanes's play, counsels the women to break their chains, seize the
reins of government, and bring the dreadful war to an end. She tells the
assembled women that they have carried a double burden in the war. As
mothers, they have borne sons whom they have been compelled to send
forth to death; while as wives, they have been deprived of their
husband