1. Byatt, A.S., Angels and Insects (London 1986), 228Google Scholar.

2. The most famous of these is Apollo’s argument that the mother only provides nourishment to the fetus at Aesch. Eum. 658–61. Tress, Daryl McGowan, ‘The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and its Feminist Critics’, in Ward, Julie K. (ed.), Feminism and Ancient Philosophy (New York 1996), 31–50, at 37f.Google Scholar, offers these lines as a ‘stunning example’ of the theory of preformationism or the idea that the father plants a homunculus in the mother’s body. Medical writers did recognise women’s contributions to the ‘genetic’ make-up of the fetus, and an ancient audience may have recognised Apollo’s chicanery; but versions of Apollo’s theory had been espoused by Anaxagoras and other physical philosophers. See Lloyd, G.E.R., Science, Folkore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1983), 86–94Google Scholar.

3. Morag Buchan devotes a chapter to ‘The Masculine Soul’ (Buchan, M., Women in Plato’s Political Theory [New York 1999], 10–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Elizabeth Spelman surveys the influence of a gendered mind/body distinction in Plato and Aristotle on European thought until the present (Spelman, E., ‘Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views’, Feminist Studies 8.1 [1982], 109–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Certainly Aristotle recognised women’s material contribution to conception as being unique and necessary, but as Kathleen C. Cook, ‘Sexual Inequality in Aristotle’s Theories of Reproduction’, in Ward (n.2 above), 51–67, at 54, points out, his own metaphysical theory evaluates the material as inferior.

4. Con Davis, R., ‘Aristotle, Gynecology, and the Body Sick with Desire’, in Lefkovitz, L.H. (ed.), Textual Bodies (Albany NY 1997), 35–57, at 49Google Scholar. See also duBois, Page, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago 1988), 154f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of writing as a sexual metaphor for which a woman’s body represents a text.

5. Butler, J., Bodies That Matter (New York 1993), 31Google Scholar; for an excellent discussion of the relationship between language and the body in Lacanian theory see Fink, B., The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton 1995Google Scholar).

6. The women’s oath falls neatly into what Austin would call an ‘explicit performative’, both because of the oath formula and the ‘accompaniments of the utterance’, i.e. the sacrifice. More precisely, however, Austin, in his final lecture, categorises vows as ‘commissives’ whose effect is to ‘commit a speaker to a certain course of action’ (Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words [Oxford 1955], 76 and 157Google Scholar). For a discussion of drama itself as the pre-eminent form of a speech act see Petrey, S., Speech Acts and Literary Theory (New York 1990), 86–110Google Scholar.

7. The relationship between women and language in classical Greek drama is usually problematic. Laura McClure observes the subversive effects of women speaking outside the bounds of masculine control in Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton 1999Google Scholar). My reading of Lysistrata’s rhetorical control differs from that of Lauren Taaffe, who attributes her assertive nature to the fact that the role would have been played by a male actor. Otherwise I am in agreement with her remarks regarding the metatheatric components of this play. See Taaffe, L.K., Aristophanes and Women (New York 1996), 60–65Google Scholar.

8. Lysistrata’s agon with the Proboulos and her political advice (567–86) function as a parabasis-speech, although the agon between the semichoruses (in which the female chorus offer advice) contains parabatic elements. See Henderson, J., Aristophanes: Lysistrata (Oxford 1987), 149.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar use his text throughout this article.

9. Dillon, M., ‘By Gods, Tongues, and Dogs: The Use of Oaths in Aristophanic Comedy’, G&R 42 (1995), 135–51, at 137Google Scholar; likewise Henderson (n.8 above, 90) describes the scene as ‘entirely farcical’.

10. Lysistrata is punctilious in her observation of protocol, and constructs an oath which covers the basic elements of the oath formula; for an outline of the components of the traditional oath see Plescia, J., The Oath and Perjury in Ancient Greece (Tallahassee 1970), 3Google Scholar.

11. On the structure of the Lysistrata see Hulton, A.O., ‘The Women on the Acropolis: A Note on the Structure of the Lysistrata’, G&R 19 (1972), 32–36Google Scholar; Vaio, J., ‘The Manipulation of Theme and Action in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata’, GRBS 14 (1973), 369–80Google Scholar. Although there are apparent incongruities in how the women swear to go home and tantalise their husbands, yet remain on the Acropolis, Vaio has successfully demonstrated that the play collapses the distinction between oikos and polis, so that the Acropolis in fact functions as an Athenian household once the women gain control.

12. The motif of the interrupted ritual and transgressive sacrifice is enhanced by a series of allusions to the myth of the Lemnian women and the associated ritual of the purophoros which is preceded by a nine day period of fireless sacrifices; thus, a distortion of regular sacrificial practices introduces the re-establishment of those rituals. See Martin, R.P., ‘Fire on the Mountain: Lysistrata and the Lemnian Women’, CA 6 (1987), 77–105Google Scholar; Bowie, A.M., Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge 1993), 178–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Loraux, N., The Children of Athena, tr. Levine, Caroline (Princeton 1993), 162Google Scholar.

14. Foley, H., ‘The “Female Intruder” Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae’, CP 5 (1982), 8–11Google Scholar; in addition to the widely accepted identification of Lysistrata with Lysimache, priestess of Athena Polias (see Lewis, D.M., ‘Notes on Attic Inscriptions (II), XXIII: Who Was Lysistrata?’, ABSA 1 [1955], 1–13Google Scholar), Foley notes that the contemporary priestess of Athena Nike was named Myrrhine while Lampito was the name of the mother of the Spartan king, and hence a priestess in public cults.

15. The Gerarai, fourteen priestesses who participated in the Anthesteria, took an oath administered by the wife of the Archon Basileus and preserved in Pseudo-Demosthenes in this form: (‘I keep holy and am pure and chaste [keeping] from others [who are] not pure and from intercourse with a man’, ps.-Dem. 59.73). It is significant that this oath of chastity is associated with wine sacrifices at the Anthesteria, just like the wives’ oath in Lysistrata. For discussion of the sacred marriage and the role of the gerarai see Robertson, N., ‘Athens’ Festival of the New Wine’, HSCP 95 (1993), 197–250, at 208–11Google Scholar; for testimonia and discussion of problems of interpretation see Hamilton, R., Choes and Anthesteria (Ann Arbor 1992), 50–58Google Scholar.

16. Taaffe (n.7 above), 50–52, remarks on gender identity and inversion in the Lysistrata.

17. Burkert, W., Homo Necans: An Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, tr. Bing, Peter (Berkeley 1983), 35Google Scholar.

18. von Staden, H., ‘The Discovery of the Body: Human Dissection and its Cultural Contexts in Ancient Greece’, The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 65 (1991), 223–41, at 230Google Scholar; Plescia (n.10 above, 12) discusses the connection between the sacrifice and curse: ‘The destruction of the victim symbolized the fate of the perjurer. The sacrifice was, in fact, a conditional curse: The oath-taker wished, in the event he did not keep the oath, to be struck like the victim which he had killed.’

19. For a brief discussion of the treatment of oaths in tragedy see Mikalson, J.D., Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy (Chapel Hill and London 1991), 80–87Google Scholar.

20. Sidwell, K., ‘The Sacrifice at Aristophanes Wasps 860–890’, Hermes 117 (1989), 271–77Google Scholar.

21. Brelich, A., ‘Symbol of a Symbol’, in Kitigawa, J.M. and Long, C.H. (eds.), Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade (Chicago 1969), 195–207Google Scholar; Burkert comments (n.17 above, 40), ‘Ritual is a pattern of action redirected to serve for communication, and this means that the terms of expression are open to substitution…’

22. Obbink explores Theophrastus (as preserved in Porphyry’s treatise On Abstinence), who discusses the origins of animal sacrifice as a substitution for human sacrifice. The bouphonia, for example, involves the substitution of an ox for a human victim (De. Abst. 2.29.2–4), the ploughman who slew his ox. Theophrastus posits an alimentary development in human society parallelled by changes in sacrifice. Simple vegetable products were replaced by cultivated grains, cakes, wine and honey. Due to famine humans were reduced to cannibalism and subsequently offered human sacrifice to the gods: ‘Proceeding from this point they made the bodies of other animals take the place of their own in sacrifices’ (De. Abst. 2.27.3). See Obbink, D., ‘The Origins of Greek Sacrifice: Theophrastus on Religion and Cultural History’, in Sharples, R. (ed.), Theophrastean Studies: On Natural Science, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Religion and Rhetoric (New Brunswick 1988), 272–95Google Scholar.

23. Aristophanes uses a similar device in the Acharnians, another peace play. Reckford observes: ‘Things are always turning into one another, metaphorically and dramatically, in this play; it is a little like Alice. A coal scuttle may be seized and taken hostage like a baby…’ Reckford’s analysis of the connection between the transformations of the Acharnians is perhaps germane to the Lysistrata: ‘How are all these transformations connected? Most of them seem to reflect the unnaturalness of war, its power to pervert ordinary feelings and values.’ See Reckford, K.J., Aristophanes’ Old-and-New Comedy (Chapel Hill 1987), i.169Google Scholar.

24. Hughes, D., Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (London 1991Google Scholar). Hughes concludes that there is no good evidence for the actual practice of human sacrifice in Greek cult from the Mycenean period onwards. Most scholars agree that myths of human sacrifice have no historical value, and as Hughes (see esp. 191) notes, its relative scarcity in epic, prevalence in Greek tragedy and increase in Hellenistic times suggest that it was a convenient narrative device rather than vestigial memory of earlier ritual.

25. Hist. An. 7.1.581a31-b2; King, H., Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (New York 1998), 94Google Scholar; Burkert (n.17 above, 62) explains the ‘exclusively human phenomenon of shedding blood in first intercourse’ for association of sacrifice with the defloration of virgins. In an earlier work he discusses in detail the assimilation of virgin sacrifices into scapegoat mythology: Burkert, W., Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley 1979), 72–77Google Scholar. Also see Loraux, N., Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, tr. Forster, A. (Cambridge MA and London 1987), 31–43Google Scholar, on virgin sacrifice in tragedy and the association of the sacrificial virgin and animal sacrifice.

26. Burkert (n.17 above), 58–60.

27. Jay, N., ‘Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman’, in Atkinson, C.W., Buchanan, C.H. and Miles, M.R. (eds), Immaculate and Powerful (Boston 1983), 283–309, at 283fGoogle Scholar.

28. Burkert (n.17 above), 91f.; see Obbink’s discussion of the maenadic sparagmos in Obbink, D., ‘Dionysus Poured Out: Ancient Theories and Modern Theories of Sacrifice and Cultural Formation’, in Carpenter, Thomas H. and Faraone, Christopher A. (eds.), Masks of Dionysus (Ithaca 1993), 65–88, at 70Google Scholar ; Bowie (n. 2 above, 190) cites a rite celebrated in honour of Demeter at Hermione in which old women slaughtered four cows (Paus. 2.35.4–8). As he notes, the sacrifice deviates from normal practice: the cows run loose inside a shrine until they are killed by sickles.

29. Detienne argues that even the sacrificial slaughtering at the women’s festival of the Thesmophoria would performed by the makairios: Detienne, M., ‘The Violence of Wellborn Ladies: Women in the Thesmophoria’, in Detienne, M. and Vernant, J.P. (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks ( Chicago 1989), 129–47Google Scholar; Osborne, R., ‘Women and Sacrifice in Ancient Greece’, CQ 43 (1993), 392–405, at 397CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. King (n.25 above), 93.

31. Distribution would include selling meat from sacrificial victims at the market. See Rosivach, V., The System of Public Sacrifice in Fourth Century Athens (Atlanta 1994), at 88–89Google Scholar; for detailed accounts of sacrifice also see Ziehen, L., ‘Opfer’, in Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart 1939), 579–627Google Scholar; Bowie, A., ‘Greek Sacrifice: Forms and Functions’, in Powell, Anton (ed.), The Greek World (London and New York 1995), 463–82Google Scholar; Burkert (n.17 above), 1–12. Oath sacrifices featured variations of this procedure: the victim is often neither burned nor consumed.

32 They pay similar attention to the bodies of the Theban and Corinthian women. Myrrhine’s comments (as she inspects the woman from Thebes) anticipate the correlation between women and land which is used in the Reconciliation scene: (‘Zeus! what a fine plot of land Boiotia has’, 87f.).

33. Hangard, J., Scholia in Vespas, Pacem, Aves et Lysistratam, Fasc. iv: Scholia in Aristophanis Lysistratam (Groningen 1996Google Scholar), ad loc.

34. Athenaeus (7, 297d-e) discusses the sacrifice of both an eel and a tuna. According to Durand an olpe now in Berlin depicts the sacrifice of a tuna: J.L. Durand, ‘Ritual as Instrumentality’, in Detienne and Vernant (n.29 above), 119–28, at 127.

35. See [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.9 for the practice of sharing sacrificial meat among the polis; also Rosivach (n.31 above), 3–8, for further discussion.

36. Faraone, C., ‘Molten Wax, Spilt Wine and Mutilated Animals: Sympathetic Magic in Near Eastern and Early Greek Oath Ceremonies’, JHS 113 (1993), 60–80, at 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Faraone cites Dictys of Crete (i 15) for the report of the bisection of a boar prior to the departure for Troy: Greek soldiers passed between the bisected halves as they swore an oath of enmity against Priam. Similar oath ceremonies involving bisected victims occur in Dictys (ii 49 and v 10). See Faraone for cross-cultural parallels in Hittite and Hebrew texts. Kirk offers evidence for the distribution of oath sacrifices: Kirk, G.S., The Iliad: A Commentary Volume 1: Books 1–4 (Cambridge 1985), 304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. Martin (n.12 above) connects a series of allusions in Lysistrata to the Lemnian ritual of the purphoria. While it is uncertain whether the myth of the Lemnian women came before the ritual, both myth and ritual share with the Lysistrata the elements of separation of the sexes, and rule by women. At 89–92 Martin suggests that the oath sacrifice of the Lysistrata with its emphasis on the blackness of the victim and container recalls the chthonic sacrifice of the purphoria. Thus the sacrifice of the Lemnian rites is the ritual equivalent of the murder of the Lemnian husbands. Martin speculates that the murder of the husbands in the Lemnian myth is analogous to the ‘killing’ of men by the sex strike in the Lysistrata ; however for my purposes it is sufficient to note that the Lemnian allusions help to emphasise the transgressive nature of the women’s sacrifices.

38. Detienne (n.29 above), 131.

39. Bowie (n.12 above, 182) notes that the women’s actions ’are both a declaration of war and an attempt to make peace’.

40. Burkert (n.17 above), 164.

41. Cf. the Aeschylean prototype, , at Septem 44; as Faraone suggests (n.36 above), the elliptical wording suggests a self-imprecation linking the fate of the sacrificed bull with that of the heroes should they fail. See also Plescia (n.10 above), 12. Kirk (n.36 above, 304) comments on the practice of distributing the hairs of the victim before an oath sacrifice as a variation of this practice.

42. Just before they took their oath Lysistrata had suggested that they swear ’not to pour water in the cup’ (197). Sommerstein takes this to be a metaphor: the cup is the vagina, the water ‘its lubricating secretion’ (Sommerstein, A.H. [ed. and comm.], Lysistrata [Warminster 1990], ad locGoogle Scholar). But if we accept this correspondence, then the women’s curse is rather circular: that they will have sexual intercourse…if they have sexual intercourse.

43. Eustathius is commenting on the famous oath which the Trojans and Greeks take to mark their peace treaty (Iliad 3.292–301): three victims slaughtered and wine poured on the ground. The wine is not consumed because it symbolises the fate of any would-be perjurers. Burkert cites a Molossian oath ceremony for a similar practice: Burkert, W., Greek Religion, tr. Raffan, John (Cambridge MA 1985), at 251Google Scholar; but see Kirk (n.36 above), 304.

44. Martin (n.12 above); Bowie (n.12 above); Faraone, C., ‘Salvation and Female Heroics in the Parodos of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata’, JHS 117 (1997), 38–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Henderson (n.8 above), 95.

46. The oracle functions as a speech act in this play regardless of the fact that it is a written text, because it is read aloud by Lysistrata. The effect of the oracle is in fact performative, as I argue. See Petrey’s discussion (n.6 above, 42–56) on the performative capacity of written texts.

47. See Henderson for erotic connotations of sacrificial terminology: Henderson, J., The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (Oxford 1975), 177Google Scholar.

48. Konstan, D., ‘Aristophanes’ Lysistrata: Women and the Body Politic’, in Sommerstein, A., Halliwell, S., Henderson, J. and Zimmermann, B. (eds.), Papers from the Greek Drama Conference (Nottingham 1993), 431–44Google Scholar.

49. Other examples of such objectifications in Aristophanes: the Peace Treaties in Knights 1389–95; Vintage and Festival in Peace 523–26, 706–14, 871–76, 1329–57. Stafford investigates the use of feminine forms in personified abstractions in Greek art and literature and concludes that while the convention may have its origins in the grammatical gender, the use of the female body expresses the desirability of the values represented: Stafford, E.J., ‘Masculine Values, Feminine Forms: On the Gender of Personified Abstractions’, in Foxhall, L. and Salmon, J. (eds.), Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition (New York 1998), 43–56Google Scholar. Also see Zweig, B. ‘The Mute Nude Female Characters in Aristophanes’ Plays’, in Richlin, A. (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford 1992), 73–89Google Scholar, who argues that while male characters might be insulted and abused in Old Comedy, they are not deprived of speech as female characters are. Lysistrata’s treatment of Diallage aligns her with comic male characters who handle naked flute girls and the like. It is of course impossible to determine whether mute nude female characters such as Diallage were represented by costumed male actors or by real women (hetairai), yet as Zweig observes the ideological implications of scenes involving naked, silent women would be identical whether or not the roles were played by real women.

50. Taaffe (n.7 above), 71 remarks: ‘ …woman has been put back in one of her rightful places, as a silent token of exchange between men.’

51. I am grateful to Richard Hamilton and Ian Hember for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. Different versions were presented at the following conferences and meetings: The Classical Association of Canada, Ottawa, June 1998; The American Philological Association, Washington, D.C., December 1998; Personification in Ancient Art and Literature, London, England, September 2000 (made possible by Wilfrid Laurier University’s international conference grant).