In the wake of the Supreme Court's disastrous Roe decision in which our highest court saw fit to take away women's bodily autonomy, I reread Lysistrata as at least a hopeful, if temporary, balm to my rage. The theme is serious, that women have genuine leverage potential against male tyranny, if they will just organize and use it.

The play itself is all raunchy fun: the chorus never subducts the players into dark, painful, portentous dialectics. The fun has no limits -- at one point the stage directions are for a group of taunting females to take off the rest of their clothes -- but the point is held firm and the men must capitulate.

Our "Supreme" magistrates hope their Roe decision will scoot us back to tranquilized 1950s where women are forced to marry early, devote themselves to kitchen arts, adopt a missionary pose and learn to love and embrace subordinacy.

But what if women refuse to go along? Apparently as many Gen-Z women are talking among themselves they're reaching the conclusion that collectively saying No is an option. Hopefully this dialogue will expand to include their elder generations. ( )

"Oh, I liked that one – a gecko shitting in Socrates' face!" (pg. 80)

Comedy is always the hardest thing to translate. Even in one society, tastes are subjective, whereas translating into another language inevitably loses something, not least in wordplay, and translating across time – in this case more than 2,000 years – seems a thankless task. With that in mind, it is surprising just how much of Alan Sommerstein's translation of Aristophanes' Ancient Greek plays actually works.

Each of the plays has a good premise: 'The Acharnians' sees a man fed up with his country's politicking decide to make his own private peace with the state's enemies; 'The Clouds' sees a man try to appropriate the 'sophist' arguments of Socrates to try to argue his way out of a debt; and 'Lysistrata' sees the womenfolk of Athens go on a sex strike to force their men to make peace with Sparta. Though much of the flavour is lost, the plays are surprisingly easy to engage with (so long as you keep the restless flicking back and forth to the endnotes to a minimum).

I also found that my prior understanding of the plays was wrong: 'Lysistrata' is often mischaracterised as a feminist, or proto-feminist, play, and to a lesser extent 'The Acharnians' and 'The Clouds' have been labelled pacifistic and atheistic, respectively. In my reading of the plays, I found these labels (not ones supported by Sommerstein, it should be said) to be dishonest, or at least over-eager. In particular, 'Lysistrata' has pretty standard gender roles, and delights only in subverting them for comedic effect. In fact, one of the funniest scenes suggests the women are finding the sex ban as frustrating as the men; the play suggests the battle between the sexes is fundamentally ridiculous and we're all driven by human urges. In fact, when we discard some of the lofty academic analyses of these plays, we realise they are instead just a great example of how, even though comedic tastes change, one of the fundamental purposes of comedy – to provoke, to satirise – endures.

Certainly, the sober textual analysis of Aristophanes – I mean, this is a Penguin Classics edition, for Pete's sake – is unintentionally hilarious when you realise that the humour here is very much scatological and sexual. Dick, shit and fart jokes abound, and the plays are filled with bawdy sexual innuendo. And this is not like Shakespeare, who alongside his astute dramatic plotting and fine use of language also had innuendo designed to appeal to those in the cheaper seats. No – it seems the route to prize-winning, pride-of-place satirical discourse in classical Athens was blunt, full-on ribaldry about arseholes and big red rods that would be considered cheap even for a modern straight-to-video comedy starring Z-list comedians. It's actually fascinating to learn that this ancient society – which we associate with sober politics, philosophy and classical art – could be as base, superficial and easy to please as we are today, the same feeling you get whenever some archaeologist unearths some graffiti of a bell-end at Pompeii. Reading Aristophanes, the two-thousand-year gap of history narrows to zero. ( )

The Acharnians

No idea what I was expecting from my first venture into Classical Greek comedy, but it wasn't the crude, lewd, verbal and physical humour coupled with puns and political and personal satire that I got! The Introduction and notes were extremely useful for setting the historical and cultural scene, explaining how the Comedy of the day worked and elucidating obscure references and jokes. This made me wonder how well it would go on the modern stage, where one would surely expect most of the audience to be oblivious to everything explained in the apparatus. A lot of the humour would translate and the general message of peace vs. war might come through, but all the cultural and historical references would be lost, I think.

Tremendous fun from the page, though.

The Clouds

This time Aristophanes turns his satirical wit on the Sophists, as exemplified by none other than Socrates himself! The new education, based on - sophistry! - and the lack of belief in the traditional pantheon of gods are the prime targets.

It turns out that the surviving text is an unfinished revision of the play. This may be a factor in why I didn't like it as much as The Archarnians, or it might be that it's simply because I have a lot of sympathy for the Sophists' viewpoint on several matters. Either way, I didn't think it was as funny...

Lysistrata

For me the least funny but most interesting of the three plays in this volume. It's full of the same sexual humour as the others and equally preposterous. It's examination of sexual politics is more interesting than its plea for peace with Sparta (perhaps partly because the latter is treated more thoroughly in The Archanians, anyway). It seems that many things have not changes in nearly 2,500 years... One of them appears to be that perceived hairlessness (of women's bodies) was considered more attractive, then as now. I've often wondered if that has been a pan-cultural, pan-historical trend and, if so, whether it is a deep-rooted instinct that has led to evolution away from other, full-on furry, primate species? Odd thing to end up thinking about because of an old Greek drama, but there you go!

The more things change the more they stay the same, people laughed at the same things in Ancient Greece as we do. ( )

"Clouds" is an underrated play; "Lysistrata" is overrated. Excellent notes in this translation. ( )