Aubrey Beardsley's distinctive black and white drawings for Oscar Wilde's Salomé, published in 1894, brought him an extraordinary notoriety whilst still in his early twenties. His work for the periodical The Yellow Book confirmed his position as the most innovative illustrator of the day, but as a result of the hostile moralistic outcry that followed the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde in early 1895, John Lane and other publishers panicked and dropped Beardsley. Thereafter, almost the only publisher who would use his drawings was Leonard Smithers. Smithers was a brilliant but shady character who operated on the fringes of the rare book trade, issuing small, clandestine editions of risqué books. He encouraged Beardsley's already growing interest in French, Latin and Greek texts of this kind and commissioned drawings to illustrate the Satires of the late Roman poet Juvenal and, most famously, Aristophanes's satirical play Lysistrata.

Beardsley's illustrations capture the amusing, bawdy quality of Aristophanes' text and also reveal the extent to which the artist had absorbed the frank humour of the early Greek vase-painters, whose work he had studied in the British Museum. This print comes from the folio of reproductions made directly from Beardsley's drawings published in about 1929. Utilising the expensive collotype process, these prints are much closer to the originals than the earlier line-block prints of the1896 edition of the book or the various, mostly very poor reproductions included in subsequent pirated printings.