After surviving two millennia with his reputation for obscenity intact, the comic poet Aristophanes (c.447-c.385BC) suffered a terrible indignity: he was reconceived as "bawdy". The play Lysistrata , which infamously imagines a sex strike ending the Peloponnesian war, was dusted off in the late 1960s and celebrated as a peace-loving, feminist classic. When I was in my final year at an all-girls' school, the satire had made its way on to the state syllabus, and we were cast as vampish pacifists, or - if we happened to be tall - as wild-eyed, priapic soldiers.

It takes a broad mind to read this farce as an expression of girl power - and a particularly earn-est troupe of schoolgirls to believe it. In Lysistrata 's opening scene, the eponymous heroine convinces the women of Athens their celibacy can save Greece. Fighting over a wine-jar, they swear: "I will live at home... wearing my best make-up and most seductive dresses to inflame my husband's ardour. But I will never willingly yield to his desires. I will not raise my legs towards the ceiling. I will not take up the lion-on-a-cheese-grater position..." Rereading, I felt a rising sense of retrospective mortification. Clearly, I had only understood a fraction of the innuendo. Who could have imagined that the ancients had so much slang for genitals? Take any animal, vegetable or mineral reference and assume a euphemism. But worse: how could it not have dawned on any of us, as we shimmied around, how camp it is?

This play has been proudly claimed as the first comedy about women. More precisely, it's the first drag act. In 411BC, Lysistrata and her temptresses were all men dressed in extravagantly padded costumes, and without the trans vestism the jokes fall flat. The old comedy of Athens, of which Aristophanes is believed to be the greatest practitioner, emerged, according to Aristotle, out of the "phallic songs" - a genre now long lost. If Aristophanes is anything to work back from, the songs may have involved ritualised obscenity; the mixing of high lyricism and scatology; the lampooning of politicians, philo-sophers and fellow poets; and what the classicist Erich Segal has referred to as the "institutionalised celebration of the male member". This celebration is particularly noticeable in Lysistrata.

After the Athenian women, very reluctantly, barricade themselves into the Acropolis, peace talks soon become a necessity. Lysistrata 's male chorus would have originally accessorised with an oversized leather member connected to a string, which could be pulled to display excitement, or, in the second act, pain. The speed of the sex strike's dire effect didn't seem unlikely to anyone in our all-girl production, even if it was startling. We mimed the soldiers' mysterious agony, being counselled by the drama teacher to imagine "a burning watermelon" between our legs.

As much of his satire's venom was directed at contemporary politicians, it often dated within a couple of years. Many of its references are now completely impenetrable; on each page footnotes appear to be multiplying. Considering this massive impediment, it seems churlish to point out that Aristophanes has not always been served well by modern translators. All that was obscene is now mildly risqué; the too-overt misogyny is carefully muted. His work has been relieved of sharp edges. For instance, the translation I'm revisiting takes advantage of one of the principal Aristophanic metres coincidentally being found in Gilbert and Sullivan, hence Lysistrata 's chorus has been set to Princess Ida . Ancient Greece never seemed so quaint.

Less sober translations are av-ailable on the internet, with the Beardsley etchings. But perhaps Aristophanes practised the ear-liest absurdism, and although the feminist and pacifist movements would have been inconceivable to him, he might have enjoyed the irony of schools staging such well-meaning misinterpretations. In this moment of escalating global strife, the idea of mass chastity as a political weapon seems beyond ridiculous. But that is to miss his genius. Surely only if warlords' wives are played in drag can the requisite Aristophanic scorn be poured on their husbands. If it's true the word "comedy" may de-rive from the Greek "koma" (sleep), let's dream of an all-singing, all-dancing collective of modern strikers, resplendent in wigs and padding, while more leaders are left lonely at night.