as quickened in the latter part of the century, owing to
the mistakes of the Peloponnesian War, but the efforts of women to
assert their rights were met by the violent opposition of the
conservative party. The leader in the _Lysistrata_, in her gift of
speech and breadth of understanding, typifies some historical women who
took a prominent part in the movement, and these were, probably, some
aristocratic ladies who had been influenced by Aspasia.

The unique importance of the _Lysistrata_ consists in its portraiture of
the leaders of the woman's rights movement and in its suggestion of the
ambitious projects they were prepared to undertake. The _Ecclesiazusae_
is, like the _Lysistrata_, a picture of woman's ascendency, but it goes
further in satirizing some of the schemes which in daily conversation
and in the works of the philosophers were being presented for bettering
the conditions of society and improving the status of women. The success
of such a play presupposes that the minds of the audience were prepared
for it by the informal discussion of such questions in everyday life.
The Athenian ladies, in the _Ecdesiazusae_, under the leadership of
Praxagora,--who is endowed with much the same gifts as Lysistrata, and
is, in fact, a replica of that clever woman,--disguise themselves as men
and crowd the public assembly; by means of the majority of votes which
they have thus fraudulently obtained, they overturn the government of
the men and proclaim the supremacy of the women in the State.
Praxagora, the leading agitator, is chosen _strategis_, and she
immediately proclaims, as the fundamental principles of the new State,
community of property and free trade between the sexes--ideas which were
prominent in the ideal _Republic_ of Plato and had been earlier
projected by Protagoras. "The point of the satire consists in this: that
the arguments by which the women get the upper hand all turn on their
avowed conservatism; men change and shift, women preserve their old
customs and will maintain the _ethos_ of the State; but no sooner have
they got authority than they show themselves more democratic than the
demagogues, more new-fangled in their political notions than the
philosophers. They upset time-honored institutions and make new ones to
suit their own caprices, squaring the laws according to the logic of
feminine instinct. Of course, speculations like those of Plato's
_Republic_ are satirized in the farcical scenes which il