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 illustrate the consequences of this female revolution. But perhaps the finest point about the comedy is its harmonious insight into the workings of women's minds--a clear sense of what a topsy-turvy world we should have to live in if women were the lawgivers and governors."