Aristophanes: Women in the Assembly

This is the first book-length introduction to Aristophanes’ play that is accessible to students and scholars without Greek. Ecclesiazusae has had diverse interpretations since its first performance and touches on many still-resonant themes such as gender and politics and the place of the theatre in society.

Fed up with the state of politics in Athens and their involvement in yet another war against Sparta, the women of the city don ridiculous disguises and vote themselves into power. The women then completely reorganize Athenian society, instituting communal ownership of property and abolishing marriage. What happens when a few citizens are slow to embrace the changes? Whose side was the audience on? The Athens that these women create has been depicted in both utopian and near-dystopian terms. But Moodie argues that Aristophanes does indeed depict a utopia where everyone’s needs can be met.

With new analysis of the pottery and figurines depicting Old Comedy, coupled with a thorough exploration of Aristophanes’ extremely metatheatrical plot and its relation to his earlier fantastic comedies, Moodie reveals how the comic poet promotes the ideas of his female reformers and blunts the complaints of their critics as he urges collective action for the good of the city. The book concludes with a chapter exploring the ways in which playwrights and directors throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have adapted Women in the Assembly in order to respond to current social and political issues, especially the changing role of women in the modern world.