The Athenians’ Syracusan debacle, together with the subsequent renewal of war with Sparta, has by 411 occasioned revolts in the Athenian empire and serious political turmoil at home.
The Council of Four Hundred, a conservative oligarchic group, in 411 persuades the Athenian assembly to suspend the traditional institutions and entrust supreme control temporarily to them.
Athenian politician Theramenes, said to have been a pupil of the sophist Prodicus of Ceos, and whose father, Hagnon, a contemporary of Pericles, served repeatedly as one of the ten annual generals of Athens, is a founding member.
The subversive teaching of the sophists (rhetorically adept “experts” who profess to impart their knowledge of such politically useful skills as rhetoric, usually in exchange for money) may be a strong influence on oligarchic leaders like Theramenes and the more extreme Antiphon, and no doubt on others.
The orator and politician Antiphon, the earliest Athenian known to have taken up rhetoric as a profession, is a logographos; i.e., a writer of speeches for other men to deliver in their defense in court, a function that is particularly useful in the climate of accusation and counter-accusation that prevails in Athens at this time.
Aristophanes writes The Thesmorphoriazusae and his classic anti-war play Lysistrata in 411.
In Lysistrata, the playwright’s' third comment on the Peloponnesian War, women from everywhere in Greece, led by the proud Lysistrata, unite in a sex strike to compel their warring menfolk to conclude peace.
Lysistrata’s simple plot, ribald language, and often hilarious situations is typical of Attic Old Comedy: a combination of song, dance, serious political exhortation, and sublimely lyrical religious poetry with an absurd premise, worked for all the laughs it can provide through savage topical references and unabashed scatalogical and sexual humor.
In The Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes satirizes Euripides when the women at the festival in honor of Demeter elect to destroy the playwright for slandering women, and an elderly relative of his, disguised as a woman, must plead his case.
