Ponēra orgē: the problem of ‘anger’ in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and its reception

There is a significant thematization of anger in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata which has largely been overlooked in current classical scholarship. I argue that the play worries about Athens’ positive valorization of anger as a resource for the performance male democratic citizenship. Via its central ‘debate scene’, Lysistrata discloses a relationship between male anger and the pathologies of the men’s deliberations in the democratic assembly. Aristophanes also celebrates the ‘righteous anger’ of Lysistrata and her female followers by contrast to the vicious anger and gendered violence of the men. But things are complicated at the end of the play. Here, anger is effectively reinscribed and reasserted as a routine practice of male citizenship in the city and male guardianship of women in the household. By bringing this reading into dialogue with recent writing on the ‘aptness’, justice and usefulness of anger as a resource for oppressed groups in our ‘current moment’, I suggest that this comedy has great potential for educational and progressive-activist appropriations. To illustrate this point, I close with an analysis of some powerful moments of ‘righteous anger’ from Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s 2015 film adaptation of Lysistrata.