•Why it earns a slot
Lysistrata is the earliest surviving work of literature to place women at the centre of a political argument, and its specific mechanism, domestic and erotic leverage deployed against state military power, remains startlingly original more than two thousand years after its first performance.
Lysistrata, an Athenian woman, organizes the wives of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until the men end the Peloponnesian War. The women simultaneously seize the Acropolis and its treasury, cutting off the war's funding. Starved of both money and domestic comfort, the men of Athens and Sparta capitulate and negotiate a peace.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.