Iphigenia

“ There is a shadow that broods over the Iphigenia, though it is not the shadow of death. It is exile, homesickness. Iphigenia, Orestes, the Women of the Chorus, are all exiles, all away from their heart's home, among savage people and cruel gods. They wait on the shore while the sea-birds take wing for Hellas, out beyond the barrier of the Dark-Blue Rocks and the great stretches of magical and 'unfriended' sea. Nearly all the lyrics are full of sea-light and the clash of waters, and the lyrics are usually the very soul of Euripidean tragedy. ”

“ The years had passed wearily since Iphigenia first found herself a captive in Tauris. Completely shut off from the world by the sea which foamed round that desolate coast, no word ever came to her from her home in Argos; and she could make no sign to the friends who believed her dead long since. She hated this savage people, and Thoas their king, and the hideous sacrifices at which she had to perform the cleansing rite. Sometimes she would grow sick at their brutality, and wild with loneliness and longing to escape. ”

“ P. 84, 1. 1384, The Maid of Argos and the carven wood of Heaven— Observe how closely Iphigenia and the image are united. She appears with it in her arms; she must fly together with it, or die; she and the image enter the ship together. There is religion behind this. Perhaps there was some old statue of the goddess carrying her own image, as Athena sometimes carries a Palladion; when Iphigenia became the priestess and Artemis the goddess, this was interpreted as the priestess carrying the goddess' image. ”

“ And here I thank the gods, who give me strength
To shun a doom unratified by them.
THOAS.
'Tis not a god, 'tis thine own heart that speaks.
[15] IPHIGENIA.
'Tis through the heart alone they speak to us.
THOAS.
To hear them have I not an equal right?
IPHIGENIA.
The raging tempest drowns the still, small voice.
THOAS.
This voice no doubt the priestess hears alone.
IPHIGENIA.
Before all others should the prince attend it.
THOAS.
Thy sacred office, and ancestral right
To Jove's own table, place thee with the gods
In closer union than an earth-born savage. ”

“ Even Iphigenia is an ordinary girl. It is precisely because she is a common type that we grieve for her anguish and triumph in her exaltation. Macaria in the Heracleidæ is almost unknown save to professed students of Euripides. She knows no fear or hesitation and lives on the heights; we recognize in ourselves no kinship with her. But Iphigenia we meet every day. She is no heroine, but a child. ”

“ Iphigenia was addressing to the chaste goddess her touching prayer for the boon of death in her exile on the savage coasts of Tauris. The singer, in the youthful glory of her body draped in harmonious folds of white, in the majesty of her attitude, in the purity of her face, recalled, though with the added grace of living flesh, those ancient marbles whose motionless charm appeals so strongly to all souls that love beauty and whose empire grows the greater by their defiance of the flight of ages. ”

“ IPHIGENIA.
A seer called Calchas! Did he ever come ...?
ORESTES. Calchas is dead, as the news went at home.
IPHIGENIA. Good news, ye gods!—Odysseus, what of him?
ORESTES. Not home yet, but still living, as men deem.
IPHIGENIA. Curse him! And may he see his home no more.
ORESTES. Why curse him? All his house is stricken sore.
IPHIGENIA. How hath the Nereid's son, Achilles, sped?
ORESTES. Small help his bridal brought him! He is dead.
IPHIGENIA. A fierce bridal, so the sufferers tell!
ORESTES. Who art thou, questioning of Greece so well?
IPHIGENIA. I was Greek. Evil caught me long ago. ”

“ They sing of the old dark story of Agamemnon’s house, from its beginning in the sin of Pelops down to what was for Iphigenia its last and worst enormity, the sacrifice at Aulis. And as their voices rise and fall in the long ceremonial, while Iphigenia is still upon her knees before the altar, there is a violent interruption. A herdsman bursts eagerly upon them, with news that shatters the mournful beauty of their rite. ”

“ However, the time appointed for Iphigenia's wedding being come, and the bridegroom having sent for her, Cimon said to himself:—'Tis now for me to shew thee, O Iphigenia, how great is my love for thee: 'tis by thee that I am grown a man, nor doubt I, if I shall have thee, that I shall wax more glorious than a god, and verily thee will I have, or die. ”

“ The prisoners are led out, and as the procession moves away, Iphigenia utters a prayer for help in her strategy and pardon for the deceit that she has practised on the king. As Thoas returns to the temple to carry out Iphigenia’s injunctions, the Chorus break into an ode in honour of Apollo and Artemis; and for a while there is no sound but the sweet rise and fall of their voices. As time slips by, bringing we know not what fortune to the fugitives, we know that the women of the Chorus, who are in the secret, are tortured by suspense. ”

“ We must realise that Iphigenia has been suddenly confronted by a new and complicated difficulty. She was prepared to make some plot to save her brother's life. She now realises that he is on the verge of madness; that he is determined to commit an act of what will be considered desperate sacrilege by stealing the image of Artemis; and that he expects her to help him to get the image to his ship. —She might hope to send him away safe and be forgiven by the King: if she helps him to steal the image, she cannot possibly be forgiven. ”

“ Iphigenia, on the point of being sacrificed, confesses with a touching ingenuousness that she grieves to part with the light of the sun. Never does the Greek place his glory in being insensible or indifferent to suffering, but rather in supporting it, though feeling it in its fulness. The very gods of the Greeks must pay their tribute to nature, when the poet wishes to make them approximate to humanity. Mars, when wounded, roars like ten thousand men together, and Venus, scratched by an iron lance, mounts again to Olympus, weeping, and cursing all battles. ”

“ The Tauric Iphigenia.—Iphigenia, priestess of Artemis among the Tauri, opens the play with a prologue, announcing her miraculous escape from the sacrifice at Aulis, and her grim duty of consecrating for sacrifice the Greek strangers who land on the coast. She then goes out to seek the attendants she had summoned to join the funeral libations for her brother Orestes. For she feels convinced of his death by a vivid dream of her shattered home, and a single pillar standing, endowed with human voice. ”

“ Throughout the score of 'Iphigénie en Tauride' the declamation is as vivid and true as in 'Alceste,' while the intrinsic loveliness of the music yields not a jot to the passion-charged strains of 'Armide.' The overture paints the gradual awakening of a tempest, and when the storm is at its height the curtain rises upon the temple of Diana at Tauris, where Iphigenia, snatched by the goddess from the knife of the executioner at Aulis, has been placed as high priestess. ”

“ The Tauric Iphigenia is a very beautiful conception of a Greek maiden in exile, compelled by the gloomy rites of Artemis, whose priestess she is, to sacrifice all Greeks that are cast upon the coast—a service which she performs with reluctance and with deep compassion, not without sceptical questioning concerning the morality of her office, or the interpretation of the real demands of the goddess. Her longing for her home and country gives her a special interest in every hapless Greek victim ”

“ She does not know whether to hate her father, but at least she can with a clear conscience hate all the rest of those implicated, Calchas, Odysseus, Menelaus, and most fiercely, though somewhat unjustly, Helen. All the good women in Euripides go wild at the name of Helen. Iphigenia broods on her wrongs till she can see nothing else; she feels as if she hated all Greeks, and lived only for revenge, for the hope of some day slaughtering Greeks at her altar, as pitilessly as they slaughtered her at Aulis. ”

“ Iphigenia then gives way to her feelings. There are strangers to be sacrificed; to that she is accustomed, but these men are Greeks. Yet she herself suffered bitter things at the hands of the Greeks; should she not avenge these? By degrees, however, as she thinks of her youth, of her home, she melts, and at length withdraws into the Temple, raging against the cruel deed that she must do, and not at all sure that she can nerve herself to do it.
The coming of these Greeks has brought Greece vividly back to the thoughts of the Chorus. ”

“ In Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians and Helen the choruses consist of Greek slaves, who would naturally, because of racial ties, plot against their barbarian masters in order to help their fellow-countrywomen. Other reasons, however, are cited. In both plays the actors promise to rescue the chorus as well as themselves (vss. 1067 f. and 1387 ff., respectively) . In the Iphigenia an additional motive for choral secrecy is found in an appeal to sex loyalty: “We are women,” says Iphigenia, “a sex most staunch to one another, most trustworthy in keeping common counsel” (vss. 1061 f.) ”

“ They were playing Iphigenia, that masterpiece of Racine's. The statue of Diana stood in the midst of the stage, and at the end of one act Iphigenia and her train of priestesses, while passing before it, all made a profound bow to the goddess. The candlesnuffer, who perhaps may have been a bad wit, crossed the stage just after wards, and likewise bowed to the goddess. This put pit and boxes in a good humour, and peals of laughter sounded from all parts of the house. All this had to be explained to the Turk, and he fell into such a fit of laughter that I thought he would burst. ”

“ She is no forlorn captive like Polyxena, but a princess in the very bloom and promise of her prime, affianced to Achilles, just entering upon the sweetness of new life divined "in rich foreshadowings of the world." How can she leave it all and go forth to dust and endless darkness? Yet her father has dropped one word which in her first passion of grief seems to be unheeded. "Hellas requires this of us both, my daughter—of you as far as in you lies, and of me also, in order that she should be free." When we next behold Iphigenia, his words had borne noble fruit. ”

“ As usual in Euripides, the central character of this play is a woman, and a woman most unsparingly yet lovingly studied. Iphigenia is no mere 'sympathetic heroine.' She is a worthy member of her great but sinister house; a haggard and exiled woman, eating out her heart in two conflicting emotions: intense longing for home and all that she had loved in childhood, and bitter self- pitying rage against 'her murderers.' The altar of Aulis is constantly in her thoughts. ”

“ The Iphigenia in Aulis is the most perfect of all the tragedies of Euripides, and the best adapted for modern representation. The well-known story of the daughter of the King of Men being devoted to sacrifice, to appease the angry deities, and procure favourable gales for the fleet on the way to Troy, and of the agony of her parents under the infliction, is developed with all the pathos and eloquence of which that great master of the tragic art was capable. Nothing can exceed the progressive interest which the character of Iphigenia excites. ”

“ Lucretius, Virgil, and Diodorus Siculus are in the number of those who assert that Iphigenia actually was immolated. According to Dictys the Cretan, and several of the ancient scholiasts, Ulysses having left the Grecian camp without the knowledge of Agamemnon, went to Argos, and returned with Iphigenia, under the pretext that her father intended to marry her to Achilles. Some writers state that Achilles was in love with Iphigenia; and that he was greatly enraged at Ulysses for bringing her to the camp, and opposed her sacrifice to the utmost of his power. ”

“ Who does not favour her lover? Who could wish to see her slain? Great gods, what heart so hard! None, surely!... On the contrary, the whole audience has already decided that she must die for the general good rather than live for one individual. Achilles seems to all too grand, too superb! Shall Iphigenia be borne away by this Thessalian vulture, as, not long ago, the daughter of Leda was stolen by a shepherd prince from the voluptuous shores of Asia? This is the question of paramount importance to the Greeks and to the audience as well, which takes our measure when we act the part of hero. ”

“ The "Iphigenia in Aulis," in its relation to the Grecian world, possessed, we may fairly surmise, universal interest. For an audience composed, as that in the Dionysiac theatre was, of Athenians, allies, and strangers, there were associations with the first general armament of the Greeks against foreigners, with which a modern reader can but imperfectly sympathise. Priam, Paris, Hector, Agamemnon, Achilles, Helen, and Iphigenia had indeed, centuries before, vanished into the shadow-land of Hades, and the quiet sheep fed or the tortoise crawled over the mounds where Troy once stood. ”

“ There is a subject for tragedy there; and it was brilliantly treated in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, which was probably left unfinished at his death. But our play chooses a later moment of the story.
In reality Artemis at the last moment saved Iphigenia, rapt her away from mortal eyes and set her down in the land of the Tauri to be her priestess. (In Tauris is only the Latin for "among the Tauri.") These Tauri possessed an image of Artemis which had fallen from heaven, and kept up a savage rite of sacrificing to it all strangers who were cast on their shores. ”