David Potter

Parry and Gary Raymond in costume for 'Lysistrata' in 1958 © Getty 1 Robert Shrimsley's column "Sex strike? Not sure I'm pro that choice" (May 18) completely misses the point of Alyssa Milano's proposed response to restrictive abortion bills. The idea is as old as Aristophanes's Lysistrata, produced in 411BC, and the point is to draw attention to abuse of power. Aristophanes's main character is an Athenian woman named Lysistrata (her name means "disbander of armies"), and like all other women in Athens she had no right to vote. How to make her voice and the voices of other women heard in a world the men are ruining? Lysistrata's idea is that if the women of Greece unite in the sex strike, men will listen. And so it happens. As women gather on Athens's Acropolis, the men of Greece are brought to heel. In the play's climactic scene, Lysistrata points out that she has a brain, something men often fail to appreciate, and that the warring sides once had a history of helping each other. As men remember those days, they can now come together to end the strife that has wrecked Greece. Sadly Lysistrata remained a fantasy. When the play was produced, Athens was reeling from the destruction of the large army it had sent to Sicily, an expedition driven by the fatal combination of bad intelligence and political ambition. Seven years later, Athens, its last fleet sunk, would surrender to Sparta. Aristophanes's point was that the powerful should listen to the powerless, who just might be smarter than they are.

AbstrAct There can be no single explanation for the violence connected with the circus factions of the fifth-seventh centuries AD. Some demonstrations were event related, being sparked by the immediate results of the competition while others stemmed from the perception, evidently common amongst faction members that their views aligned the moral compass of the average person (such riots often had a religious dimension and could be connected with anti-Jewish pogroms). The most serious violence, resulting in actions that threatened the authority of the emperor stemmed from overly close associations between emperors and specific factions. Such association encouraged factions, whose members included officials of the government, to view themselves as having a role in determining the direction of the state. Emperors who were uncertain of their position were more likely to form such associations than others. It is significant that Justin II, the successor of Justinian, a noted partisan of the Blues, eschewed association with the factions and that Anastasius renounced his partisanship of the Blues after a particularly violent event with the result that there seems to have been a decline in faction violence. Extreme factional violence reappears in the reign of Phocas, with a new religious dimension linked with post-Chalcedonian religious disputes. The movement of Roman government to the East occasioned and was accompanied by major changes in the public spectacle and entertainment. In so far as civic entertainments had reflected the relationship between the imperial government and cities since the late Republic the proposition of the previous sentence is unremarkable. What is remarkable is the level of change. The later third through fourth centuries AD witnessed the most complete transformation of the venues, structures and forms of entertainment since the archaic age of Greece. A new, more limited, system of entertainment based on theatrical events and, in major cities, circus chariot racing replaced the widespread network of civic festivals largely funded on the local level and managed through the collaboration of civic aristocrats with professional associations of athletes and actors from 'traditional' Greek style events and lanistae, who organized events derived from the Roman amphitheater. Studia Patristica LIV, 1-00.

Given that in any Roman aristocratic household during the Republic elements of the future imperial court can be found, what were the key features that enabled the latter to emerge and grow? Drawing upon Elias’ analysis of court societies, this chapter maintains that the transition depends upon extraordinary religious charisma, access to renewable sources of immense wealth, and the development of integrative structures linking provincial and Roman supporters in a hierarchy dependent upon an individual rather than tenure of office.