Hello and welcome to this next episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about Lysistrata by Aristophanes, possibly the most famous

comedy in all of ancient Greece, and one of the 11 surviving comedies that we have from

the world of old ancient Greek comedy.

And incidentally, all 11 of those are Aristophanes' plays by sheer dumb luck in many ways.

Not that there wasn't other Greek writers creating comedy plays, but Aristophanes naturally becomes known as the most famous, the most celebrated,

and the most talented by sheer dint of being the only one that we can actually read. The Greek form of old comedy,

as we would interpret it, that is comedy that came from the 5th century, BC, the 400s,

is markedly different from the newer comedy that you have in the century after with a playwright such as

Menander. As you'll see as we go further into the plot of Lissistrata it's

entirely based around a very fantastical plot, right? It kind of feels hyperbolic,

everything's over the top and it feels beyond belief, actually.

There's something really fantastical about it. Whereas when you compare it to newer comedies

in ancient Greece, they are more realistic. Not as going to say that they're realism as

the form, which is of course anachronistic, but just the plots are more believable, and the dialogue reflects that as well.

So let's begin to talk a little bit about Aristophanes and comedy, because the word comedy, of course, as it is in English, derives

like so many of the other words that we have to describe acting and to describe theatre.

The words, theatre, drama, scene, episode, comedy, tragedy. All of these words are based on ancient Greek words and of course

comedy comes from Komodia, which was originally Revel's song. So it obviously was a part of

the very, very old ancient Greek tradition of Dithyrhams, as they were called, which was very much about song and

dance. And one of the things you notice as well with the old comedy, and this one in particular,

is that the chorus, as we discussed it last week in Agamemnon, is still a very, very prominent part of the play.

But another thing that differentiates comedy from tragedy, other than, of course,

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