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Stanly Soto

Professor  Brendan Cook

Humanities 1020

18 September 2016

Contrast Paper (Antigone & Lysistrata)

Two plays that were first performed around the same time and are both really great are

Antigone (around 441 BC) and Lysistrata (around 411 BC). The most important difference

between Antigone and Lysistrata is that the title character of the first play fights her struggles

alone because no one would help her, while the title character of the second play has all the

women of Athens and Sparta to help her. This is important because at the conclusion of both

plays, Lysistrata triumphs and Antigone fails. We as an audience can see how important having

someone believe in you and help you struggle through your endeavors truly is the difference

between success or failure. We as an audience care about this difference because we can learn

more about the past because of this difference. It tells us about people's attitudes by portraying

how unity was important back in 5th century BCE for Athenians. They thought about the best for

the community not the individual.

Antigone, which was written by Sophocles, was a tragedy. The biggest difference

between Antigone and Lysistrata is that Lysistrata had help and Antigone did not. One feature of

tragedy is that no one helps when they could have helped. Our tragic protagonist Antigone asked

her sister and others to see things her way but as tragedies go no one sided with her because they

did not agree with her. Like Creon who did not try to help Antigone until it was too late.

Antigone asked her sister Ismene for help burying their brother Polyneices, but Ismene refused to

help. Antigone also told her uncle Creon that he was making a mistake and that he should bury
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Polyneices, but he too decided not to go with Antigone. Everyone Antigone turned to for help,

like Creon and Ismene, left her to do it alone, and one person against all of Thebes, she never

even had a chance, there hence the tragedy.

Lysistrata, was written by Aristophanes, as a comedy. In the play, Lysistrata is a well-

respected woman in the city of Athens. Lysistrata was trying to end the Peloponnesian war that

was going on. For an endeavor as big as ending a war that has been going on for about 20 years

she needed some help. Thus she called for every woman in Athens and even woman from Sparta

who was the enemy of Athens in the Peloponnesian war. Even the men of Athens and Sparta

were willing to work with Lysistrata to resolve the conflict rather than push her away. This was

when the representative of Sparta and the representative of Athens met, they invited Lysistrata

and also listened to her and her proposition. They were willing to join her idea and work with her

rather than against her and the unity made it possible to have a resolution. Like in page 11 of

Lysistrata, were Calonice said “Well, if you two think it's good, we do, too.” This shows the

women’s support for Lysistrata’s plan.

Lysistrata had many people helping her and joining her in her plan to stop the

Peloponnesian war while Antigone struggled to get at least one person to help her fight the

injustice of leaving her brother unburied. This one singular difference of having someone to help

vs having no one to help made these two plays very different,2140 because if either one had been

different in that aspect then they would have ended up very similarly. Either both in success if

people had helped Antigone or both in failure if the women of Greece had refused to help

Lysistrata. Also they could have been reversed if both were different If no one had helped

Lysistrata, while the people of Thebes helped support Antigone’s view, today we would
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probably be studying how Lysistrata is a Greek tragedy and Antigone would not have been a

comedy but definitely also not as much of a tragedy.

Other ways people can say that these two plays differ from each other is that Antigone

uses her head to try and resolve the problem while Lysistrata uses a women’s body to accomplish

her goal, and to some this would be the most important difference. The reason that for me this is

not the most important difference between the two plays is because, yes although Lysistrata used

a women’s body to resolve the issue at hand she did think about the problem, she used her head

to think of a solution just like Antigone. So this difference is not really a valid difference because

Lysistrata also used her head to come up with a valid solution to her problem. Another person

might say that the most important difference between Antigone and Lysistrata is that one is a

tragedy and the other is a comedy and that this is the most important difference because the

message one receives from a piece of art can change entirely depending on how it is presented.

This is also not as important a difference because Lysistrata could have turned into a tragedy if

Lysistrata had not succeeded in her plan. Had she been left to carry out her plan by herself

without the other women’s help she would have failed epically. That’s why when thinking about

what makes these two plays that were performed about the same time so different I believed it

was something deeper than tragedy and comedy but also deeper than a women’s sex appeal and

using their head. The most important difference between Antigone and Lysistrata is that

Lysistrata has all the women of Athens and Sparta helping her, while in Antigone, Antigone

fights her struggles alone because no one would help her. This matters so much because had

Antigone received support and help from Thebes and her sister her story could have ended so

much better than it did, and had Lysistrata’s friends refused to help her the story would not have

ended in triumph.
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This main difference between Antigone and Lysistrata of one receiving help while the

other one didn’t meant most to the original audience. This is because when they went to see

Sophocles’s Antigone they went to listen to something serious, stories of ancient times that had

to do with the gods. So to Sophocles, it was important that Antigone’s isolation was not broken.

For the tragedy to be as dramatic as it was Antigone had to suffer through the problem alone if

not it would not have been as effective as a tragedy. Perhaps changing the aspect of the

protagonist would not have completely changed the stories to make Antigone something else

rather than a tragedy and Lysistrata into a tragedy but changing that one aspect would have

changed how effective they each are in their category. Much like changing one step in processing

tea can drastically change the taste or the smell. Sophocles took into account that his story was a

tragedy and thus he set Antigone to fight alone because nothing is more tragic than to be in the

right but no one will listen. The most important difference between Antigone and Lysistrata is

not that one is a tragedy and the other a comedy but rather that Antigone has no one to help her

and thus she fails while Lysistrata has so many women helping her that she could stop an entire

war that had been going on for many years.

This great difference in this two play beautifully shows how by ourselves we fall in

tragedy but together we can achieve anything.