Euripides: ‘Iphigeneia at Tauris’

 Iphigeneia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was told she was going to Aulis to be married to the champion Achilles. But when she arrived, her father, leader of the Greeks who sailed against Troy, tossed her on an altar and put a knife to her throat. She was just a sacrifice for favorable winds.

All the Greeks thought she died. But in this story — you know tragicomedy and an alternate world of make believe is coming — the goddess Artemis substitutes a deer for the princess at the last instant. The goddess whisks Iphigeneia off to Tauris, now part of Crimea.

The people of Tauris are wild and barbarous and sacrifice foreigners to a wooden statue of Artemis, the Statue that Fell from Heaven. Iphigeneia becomes a priestess of the goddess, preparing victims for sacrifice. She’s miserable.

Meanwhile, her brother Orestes is pursued by the Furies for killing their mother, Clytemnestra, who had killed their father, Agamemnon. Apollo told Orestes that the only way to get rid of the Furies would be to go to Tauris and steal the Statue that Fell from Heaven.

You can see where this is going.

Orestes is accompanied by Pylades, his friend, sidekick and brother-in-law. They are captured, and when the victims are being prepared for sacrifice, lo and behold.

The Greek poets wrote many wonderful lines about friendship. Some of the best are in this play.

But my favorite parts of the play show Iphigeneia trying to make sense of Artemis. She’s devoted to the ideal of a goddess who saved her from barbaric superstition. She’s appalled by the cruel customs of the cult of the same goddess. Her brother, who had his own problems with gods and Furies, spoke these lines:

 

The wisest men follow their own direction

And listen to no prophet guiding them.

None but the fools believe in oracles,

Forsaking their own judgement. Those who know,

Know that such men can only come to grief.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47. Iphigeneia at Tauris, translated by Witter Bynner, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 116-87. The quotation is on p. 145.