Abstinent Power
"We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves" (Dalai Lama) No one knows this to be more true than Lysistrata. She devises a plan to end the Peloponnesian war by using the simplest tool she has, her body. She gathers all the women and urges them to refuse sex to their husbands until a peace treaty has been signed. At the same time, she implores the older woman to simultaneously seize the Akropolis later that day. After intense discussion, the younger women agree to refrain from sex, unless forced into it by violence, and sacrifice a bottle of wine to the Gods in celebration of their oath. Immediately the plan starts to take effect. Lysistrata finds Kinesias, the husband of Myrrhine, approaching the Akropolis that the older women have overtaken. He has a full erection and is desperate for his wife.
The women use this to their advantage to force the men to sign a treaty of peace.
Soon enough, all of them men end up in Kinesias's position, and become desparate. Delegations from both sides then meet to discuss peace. Lysistrata comes out of the Akropololis with her naked handmaid, Peace. She begins to lecture the distracted men on the need for reconcillation. "Have yo no memory left of how, in the days when ye wore the tunic of slaves, the Laconians came, spear in hand, and slew a host of Thessalians and partisans of Hippias the Tyrant? They, and they only, fought on your side on that eventful day; they delivered you from your depotism, and thanks to them our Nation could change the short tunic of the slave for the long cloak of the free man" (Aristophanes 50). This is the very problem of the play.