Enola Gay, Memphis Belle— names painted on the sides of bombers in the forties. Each was a woman’s name chosen to safeguard the crew. Centuries earlier, Tristan and the knights of chivalry crusaded for Isolde and the Virgin Mary. Such women— always women—were implored to save battlers from burial. Years before Christ, Aristophanes had a better dream. His Lysistrata urged women on both sides to forego sexual intercourse with husbands until they ended the Peloponnesian War. It worked. In fact, it confirmed a thesis of Euripides that beautiful women could shrink machismo to zero simply by withholding, even if forced, the pleasures only they could give. Two playwrights from Athens thought it should be staged. Generals, profiteers and cemetery owners disagreed and had the graves to prove it. Aristophanes called Lysistrata a comedy because he thought that people still might laugh if they observed how women who postpone pleasure for peace could show that war was nothing but pornography. At least he hoped so. Instead, he learned that women were doomed to wait while soldiers killed and killed until no one could doubt they’d killed enough to be saluted, thanked and mustered out.