Euripides: ‘Iphigeneia at Aulis’

 Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis is hard to read because it’s cruel.

Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition against Troy, was stuck in the harbor of Aulis. The fleet, lacking favorable winds, couldn’t move. A prophet told the king he’d have to sacrifice his daughter to the goddess Artemis.

Agamemnon wavered. He summoned his daughter to Aulis, promising to marry her to the hero Achilles, thought he planned to kill her. He finally thought better of it and wrote a letter telling her not to come. But Agamemnon's brother Menelaus intercepted the letter. Menelaus’ had lost his wife, Helen, to a Trojan prince and wanted recent. He thought his brother owed him.

The brothers quarreled. Astonishingly, Menelaus changed his mind. But it was too late. The soldiers were restless and angry at the delay. The treacherous Odysseus was sure to tell everyone about the prophecy. 

Agamemnon saw no way out: his daughter must die.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out there’s really no tragedy in this play.

 

There is no tragedy of Agamemnon, not is there a tragedy of Iphigeneia. From her point of view the incident is nothing but a cruel blow of fate.

 

Meanwhile, Agamemnon is “drawn as a man who has levered himself into importance by unworthy means, a crafty, indecisive character, undeserving of our serious interest.”

Kitto said that in the old conception of tragedy, a play was just a record of suffering. The suffering was used to create something of meaning.

Euripides abandoned the idea that suffering that's portrayed on the stage had to mean something. This play is a record of the suffering endured by people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do something to save themselves. In this respect, it seems like a contemporary play.

Some of the best lines in the play are dripping with irony. The daughter who loved her father the most arrived, excited by the marriage he’d made for her, and in her ignorance had some heartbreaking things to say about the new home he’d planned for her.

I like these lines, spoken by the chorus as a prayer to Aphrodite:

 

Keep modest my delights

All my desires lawful,

So may I have my part in love

But not in passion’s madness.

 

The text of the play is corrupt. Charles R. Walker’s translation ends with Iphigeneia resolving to die for the good of the Greeks and headed for the (sacrificial) altar. An alternate ending has a messenger reporting that the goddess Artemis swooped down at the last minute and substituted a deer for the girl. Euripides liked to bring in gods and goddesses in the final scene, and there’s some evidence that the original play ended with Artemis descending from the machinery above.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Iphigeneia at Aulis is on pp. 371-83. The quotations are on pp. 386 and 385. Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by Charles R. Walker, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 209-307. The quotation is on pp. 241-2.