An Epistle to Elysium
Art by Julia Wong
By Astrid Maves
My beloved Alexios,
It has been far too long since I have written to you, yet little time passes that you are not in my thoughts. Aristophanes presented his new play called Lysistrata at the festival recently and I left with tears of laughter in one eye and of sadness in the other. I know you would tease me so for my girlish weakness, but as I tell you about this play, I think you would have felt the same if you had been alongside me.
In the beginning, the women, indignant at the Peloponnesian war, plot a political takeover using their celibacy in order to end the devastation that has troubled our Greek world for so long. I doubled over with laughter when Lysistrata stated that they had taken control of the state’s money, saying to the Magistrate: “What’s so hard about that? We’ve kept the house purses safe for years!” and in response, the Magistrate said: “House purses? House purses? That’s a totally different thing you silly woman!…This is a war fund, you stupid woman!”1 We build our worlds around war; we devote our money, our lives, even our own children to it. Yet we insist it is so separate from our common life, as if the money management of war were so different.
I remember our own general before battle, reprimanding us for the petty fights the men would get into, as if our status as soldiers made us immune to the frivolous anger to which all humans are susceptible. I fear we Athenians have made war such a divine endeavor that we cannot imagine it to be the activity of mortals anymore; the woman Lysistrata seemed to understand this. If each Athenian is truly an extension of our “great” state, then how different must the actions of war be to the actions of the household? How foolish we must be for a woman to understand what our generals still do not.
There is a character, Strynidoros, who reminds me so much of our former commander you would swear that old malakas2 was there in the flesh before you. He raves over how he believes the women’s uprisings must be an indication of a greater conspiracy: “These things are all threads these bastards are weaving to get a cloth of tyranny together over us…I’ll stand—fully armed—behind the statue of our favorite tyrant killer, Aristogeiton, in the marketplace.”3 I remember when we truly believed what we were doing was in the name of democracy, that these wars were more than the aristocracy throwing their drachmae at generals—as opposed to spending them in brothels. This Strynidoros fellow exudes the spirit of our commander, who refused to see the death before him as anything but necessary to staving off tyranny.
I suppose I can empathize; is it much easier to believe you died in service of a great purpose than for nothing. But if I am speaking truthfully, to have you ripped from me feels more tyrannical than anything a damn tyrant could have done to me. Every slight to those commanders was a sign of tyrannical conspiracy, every death in service to democracy; we were supposed to be heroes! I wish I could believe you left me in service to something, but when I saw you nearly indistinguishable from the other broken bodies of fathers, sons, and husbands, something inside me broke that fifteen years of war had somehow failed to break.
On that day nearly five years ago, it was so difficult to find you even amongst the Spartans. On a battlefield I imagined them as a different species; their shields signifying their allegiance may as well have been parts of their flesh. Yet, as I saw you lying there, amongst the dead, you were no longer just an Athenian and he not a Spartan. You were both simply gone. Gone in the way only mortal men can be.
I digress; I realize I have failed to tell you this, but for much of the play the whole lot of them were nude, and if not, they left little to the imagination (spears standing at attention, if you understand my meaning). Towards the end of the play, as Lysistrata told those horny soldiers to make peace, she declared: “Spartans and Athenians alike! You both have the same altars, which you sprinkle with the same sacred water and by using the same cup. Just like relatives and friends…what do you do? You go about with your Greek armies, destroying Greek cities.”4 Of course a simple woman would see men before she sees their national allegiances, but am I so different?
I remember there was another man, frantic as I, when we found you.
As I held you, broken and cold, I watched a man my country told me was my enemy wail like a woman, clutching what I can only assume was his own beloved. In that moment we weren’t the governments we were fighting for; we were two men sworn more to love than anything else, and we could not have been more the same. When Lysistrata pronounced the sameness of us Athenians and those Spartans, I thought of the nights I spent speaking your name and crying to the gods, and wondered if that Spartan I saw was doing the same. The generals of this war and the aristocrats who insist upon it would rather my Alexios be thrown on a pyre a thousand times than consider peace. In the play, the Spartans and Athenians ultimately come to peace over the body of a beautiful woman; eros unites us all, does it not?
So much has been wrecked by the devastation, my dear Alexios, so much that I weep even during a comedy by that crude Aristophanes. I wonder if these wars will end once our sense of loss, our shared weakness, our anguish, unite us. The need for sex would be a much more amusing unification; however, I must admit that in this Aristophanes presented a utopia of sorts. A world in which eros can trump the desire to destroy. Oh, how I wish you could have been with me, and that each mention of war didn’t strike me so deeply. I am glad you can rest and enjoy Elysium as a hero now, but I will never cease in my lamentations for you. You will live on in your honor and in my love of you, my Alexios. I promise to write to you again.
Your loved,
Dionysodorus
Aristophanes, Lysistrata (Bacchicstage, 2000), 2.485-88
Malakas: from the Greek word malakos (μαλακός) meaning “soft,” but frequently used as an insult meaning “jerk off” or “wanker.”
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 2.630-34
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 2.1123-26
Bibliography
Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Translated by George Theodoridis. Bacchicstage, 2000.