Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis 9781472539762, 9780715629949

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Illustrations Map. The world of Iphigenia at Aulis. Fig. 1. The sacrifice of Iphigenia, wall painting, c. 70 AD, House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii, VI 8, 13. Reproduced courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Fig. 2. Scenes from Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, bowl relief, 300-250 BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 31.11.2. Reproduced courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1931. Fig. 3. The final scene of Jean Racine’s Iphigénie, etching by François Chauveau, frontispiece in the second volume of the collected edition of Racine’s Oeuvres, 1676. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of France. Fig. 4. Iphigenia (Nirupama Nityanandan) and Clytemnestra (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha), photograph from the stage production of Les Atrides (Part I: Iphigénie à Aulis), directed by Arianne Mnouchkine, Paris, 1990-3, photograph Michèle Laurent. Fig. 5. Iphigenia (Tatiana Papamoschou) and Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), still from the film Iphigenia, directed by Michael Cacoyannis, Greece, 1977. Reproduced courtesy of Michael Cacoyannis.

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The world of Iphigenia at Aulis

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Acknowledgements It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the help I have received from friends and colleagues while writing this book. For stimulating discussions, valuable advice, and support of many kinds, I am grateful to Helene Foley, Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Kostas Valakas, and Ruth Winter. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Bill Allan, Richard Buxton, Chris Collard, Pat Easterling, and the general editor of the series, Tom Harrison, for their generosity in reading drafts of the typescript in part or in its entirety. Their thoughtful comments and suggestions saved me from errors and enabled me to refine my thinking on numerous points. Deborah Blake and Margaret Haynes at Duckworth deserve special thanks for the technical efficiency and expertise with which they dealt with the typescript. For the collection of valuable material on the last chapter, I thank Chris Weaver and Amanda Wrigley at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford. Finally, for the reproduction of illustrations, I am grateful to Michael Cacoyannis for his valuable help and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol for its financial support.

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Preface Iphigenia at Aulis (henceforth IA) is one of Euripides’ very last tragedies, first performed together with Bacchae after the death of the dramatist in, or soon after, 405 BC. It enacts the myth of Iphigenia, the young virgin who is sacrificed by her father Agamemnon at the beginning of the expedition to Troy. Produced towards the end of the Peloponnesian War, the play dramatizes another war that is about to begin. It explores the breakdown of social norms which turns Greeks against Greeks and men against women, and which condemns a young bride to death. IA is a play about the socio-political upheavals and the psychological disturbances brought about by war. For an audience suffering from years of (largely self-inflicted) fighting, the beginning of the expedition against Troy represents the world turned upside down: the enemies are not the Trojans, but rather the Greeks; the hero is not Achilles, but rather Iphigenia; and a wedding turns out to be a pretext for a human sacrifice. IA bears a number of features that allow us to locate it within Euripides’ work, and especially in the last phase of his career: the play’s provocative and revisionist attitude towards myth, its engagement with and critical stance towards contemporary culture and politics, its concern with gender and intergenerational conflicts as well as with moral and political corruption, the clash between civic and family values, the tension between individuals and masses, its metatheatrical selfawareness and preoccupation with plot reversals and with the visual display of suffering. Today IA may be less popular than, say, Medea, Hippolytus or Bacchae. Yet its reception history has been rich and diverse. The play, with its focus on human sacrifice, war, and leadership,

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis has inspired artists, poets and dramatists both in antiquity and in modern times. Self-sacrifice and the politics of redemption, violence and its representation in art, and the confrontation between public ambition and private sentiment at times of social and moral crisis are some of the issues through which the play has caught the imagination of successive generations of readers and spectators. Added to this is the notorious debate surrounding the corruption of its text, with all the questions this raises about authorial control, artistic unity, and consistency in characterization. The present Companion attempts to map the changing fortunes and meanings of the play and to account for its significance today. It provides a summary of the plot, discusses the characters and main themes of the play, examines its mythological background, and explores the cultural, political, institutional, and theatrical contexts within which it was originally composed and performed. It also outlines the history of the text and its interpretations on page and on stage. The ongoing debates around Iphigenia’s voluntary sacrifice, the corruption of the play’s moral universe, and the corruption of its text make IA one of Euripides’ most intriguing and challenging plays. References to the text of the play follow the Oxford Classical Text edition by Diggle, Euripides Fabulae: Tomus III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Translations are my own unless stated otherwise.

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1

A Summary of the Play Prologue (1-162) The play is set in the camp of the Greek army at the harbour of Aulis, and opens with the commander-in-chief Agamemnon in front of his tent, represented by the stage building. It is shortly before dawn and the whole camp is still asleep (on the geography and setting see map and Chapter 7). Agamemnon urgently summons an old servant out of the tent. The servant, curious about this early call into the open air, points out that throughout the night his master has been restless and with tears in his eyes has been writing and erasing a message on a wax tablet (a significant stage prop; see Chapter 7). In a long speech that interrupts the dialogue between the two men (and which may have originally been part of an alternative prologue),1 Agamemnon explains his situation and provides information about the background of the plot. When Helen was about to get married, her father Tyndareus asked her suitors to take an oath that they would protect her from anyone who would take her away from the husband of her choice. Helen chose Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, but she later eloped with the Trojan prince Paris. Menelaus invoked the oath of her father to assemble a fleet from all over Greece to sail to Troy and take her back. The fleet gathered at the harbour of Aulis, and Agamemnon was chosen as its leader. However, lack of wind made it impossible for the fleet to set sail. According to Calchas, the expedition against Troy could take place only if the leader sacrificed his daughter to Artemis, the goddess worshipped at Aulis. Agamemnon initially rejected the idea, but he was eventually won over by Menelaus’ arguments. Having communicated 11

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis only with Menelaus, Calchas, and Odysseus, he decided to write a letter to his wife Clytemnestra urging her to send Iphigenia to the Greek camp on the pretext of marrying her to Achilles. But in the course of a restless night, Agamemnon has changed his mind (a recurrent motif in the play; see Chapter 3) and written a new letter to Clytemnestra overriding the first one. The dialogue between Agamemnon and the old servant resumes with Agamemnon informing his servant about the content of his new message to Clytemnestra, namely that the marriage of their daughter has been postponed. The servant expresses his concern about Achilles’ violent reaction to the cancellation of his wedding, but Agamemnon points out that Achilles is unaware of his plan, while also admitting that he has got himself into a lot of trouble. He then urges his servant to go to Mycenae as quickly as he can and deliver the writing tablet which he has sealed. The servant sets off to Argos from one of the side entrances while Agamemnon returns to his tent. Chorus’ entry-song (164-302) The stage is filled by a Chorus of fifteen young married women. They have come to the camp from the nearby town of Chalcis in Euboea (see map) to admire the famous fleet with the thousand ships which has set out to conquer Troy and get Helen back. This rather unusual Chorus (see Chapter 3) have come through the sacred grove of Artemis to see the Greek warriors with their armour and horses. They have already seen some of the most famous heroes playing games and sports, including the two Ajaxes, Protesilaus, Palamedes, Diomedes, Meriones, Odysseus, and Nereus. They have also seen Achilles running by the sea in his golden armour, competing against a four-horse chariot. The ships themselves provide a most wondrous spectacle, which the Chorus had heard of and now at last were able to see for themselves. In what follows (231-302: possibly composed by someone other than Euripides),2 the Chorus convey the size and power of the Greek fleet, thus preparing for a theme that gains significance as the play progresses (see Chapters 3 and 6). The right wing consists of Achilles’ ships from Phthia, and next to them are 12

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1. A Summary of the Play the ships from Argos and Attica, followed by those from Boeotia, Phocis, and Locris (see map). Then come Agamemnon’s ships from Mycenae, Nestor’s ships from Pylos, and the ships of the Aenians, the Epeians and the Taphians. At the left end of the line are Ajax’s ships from Salamis. This is a powerful fleet, the Chorus conclude, that no barbarian enemy could defeat. First scene (303-542) Menelaus and Agamemnon’s servant enter from the side entrance that leads outside the Greek camp, from which the servant left at the end of the prologue. Menelaus holds Agamemnon’s writing tablet while the servant tries to get it back from him. Agamemnon comes out of his tent and accuses his brother of stealing the tablet, but Menelaus, who can guess the message it bears, accuses him in turn of lack of commitment to his own decisions. He reminds Agamemnon that he was appointed leader of the Greek army because of his ambition, which made him first humble and easy-going then arrogant and unapproachable. He also points out that Agamemnon displayed a similar eagerness to see the expedition materialize when the whole fleet stalled in Aulis. He was all too eager to fetch his daughter from Mycenae to have her sacrificed, but now he has changed his mind in a way that is not appropriate to his position and status. His responsibility as leader of the fleet should come before his personal interests: introducing a theme that acquires greater significance later in the play (see Chapter 6), Menelaus argues that Greece cannot accept being laughed at by barbarians. Agamemnon replies that the problem lies with Menelaus’ wounded egoism for having lost his unfaithful wife and his desire to get her back at all costs. The oath that Helen’s suitors took to help her husband was made under compulsion and has no validity before the gods. Changing one’s mind is not necessarily unreasonable, especially if failing to do so is something one is going to regret in the future. The heated dialogue between the two brothers is interrupted by a (probably non-Euripidean)3 messenger who enters the stage from the side entrance used earlier by Menelaus and the servant. 13

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis The messenger announces that Iphigenia is approaching the army camp, accompanied by her mother Clytemnestra and her infant brother Orestes. The news has already reached the camp, and rumours are spreading that Iphigenia will be married. Agamemnon sends the messenger inside his tent and reflects on the yoke of necessity that oppresses him and also on the sense of decorum that he must maintain as a king (necessity and decorum are invoked by the characters repeatedly in the play: see Chapter 4). With an abrupt emotional swing, Menelaus expresses his heartfelt sympathy for Agamemnon and Iphigenia, and urges his brother to cancel the sacrifice and disperse the army: Helen is not worth the death of a virgin and the loss of a brother. Agamemnon thanks Menelaus but argues that the death of Iphigenia is now dictated by necessity. The prophecy of the sacrifice will be revealed to the army by either Calchas or Odysseus, both driven by personal ambition. When this happens it will be impossible to prevent the army (an invisible but menacing force; Chapters 3 and 6) from sacrificing Iphigenia, and any attempt to resist may result in an attack against Argos. The only thing that can be done at this point is to try to keep the sacrifice secret from Clytemnestra, so that it can be more easily endured. Agamemnon returns to his tent, and Menelaus leaves the stage via the side entrance that leads to the army camp. Chorus’ first song (543-89) The Chorus sing of marriage, happiness, and desire. Moderate pleasure contributes to happiness and is welcome, but desire out of proportion brings about destruction. Highlighting some of the key values of the play (see Chapter 4), they point out that virtue and glory depend on one’s nobility, education, and upbringing, a sense of shame, and the quest for excellence. On the other hand, Paris, who was brought up as an ox-herd, profited from the beauty contest among the goddesses and was sent to Greece, where he and Helen fell passionately in love with each other, a love which is now bringing destruction upon Troy. 14

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1. A Summary of the Play Second scene (590-750) Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, and the baby Orestes enter the stage on a carriage from the side entrance leading to Argos (see Chapter 7). The Chorus (or perhaps a group of men from Argos who accompany the visitors)4 cheerfully chant of the lineage and royal status of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, and of Iphigenia’s destiny (590-7). Then, the Chorus urge each other to help the newcomers get off the carriage, trying to make their arrival as pleasant and welcoming as possible (598-606). Clytemnestra thanks them for their warm words and supervises the unloading of the wedding presents. She also makes sure that both Iphigenia and herself, with the sleeping Orestes in her arms, get off the carriage in an orderly fashion. Agamemnon enters, and Iphigenia greets him affectionately. Agamemnon first replies with some reservation and then becomes clearly distressed. When prompted by Iphigenia to explain his strange behaviour, he attributes it to the many concerns that he has as leader of the expedition and to her imminent separation from him. He then informs her of a sacrifice which he will perform before he sets sail to Troy and in which she will take part, and asks her to go into his tent. Iphigenia enters the stage building, and Agamemnon is left on stage with Clytemnestra, who inquires about her future son-inlaw and about the preparations for the wedding. Agamemnon asks her to return to Argos, claiming that he will make all necessary arrangements himself. This absurd claim deprives Clytemnestra of her role as mother of the bride and is met with her resolution to stay. She then enters the tent, leaving Agamemnon behind to reflect on the failure of his plans before heading towards the camp to consult with Calchas and arrange the sacrifice. Chorus’ second song (751-800) The Chorus sing of the arrival of the Greek army at Troy, which now looks more certain than ever. They imagine the prophetess Cassandra foreseeing the future and the other Trojans 15

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis witnessing from the walls of Troy the approaching fleet which has set out to take Helen back. They also visualize the ensuing death and destruction, the dead soldiers, a regretful Helen, and the captive women suffering and tearfully reflecting on their unhappy future. The Chorus hope that nothing like that will ever happen to them and conclude with a reference to the cause of the war, Helen. Can the story of her birth from Leda and Zeus in the form of a swan be true? Third scene (801-1035) Achilles enters the stage from the side entrance that leads to the camp, looking for Agamemnon. Urged by his restless army, the Myrmidons, he has come to ask whether or not the fleet will set sail. Clytemnestra comes out of the tent to meet him and to introduce herself. Achilles denies any knowledge of his wedding to Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra quickly realizes with embarrassment that she has fallen victim to some sort of deceptive plot. Achilles is about to go into the tent to meet Agamemnon when the old servant who appeared in the prologue steps out. After some hesitation he reveals Agamemnon’s plan to sacrifice Iphigenia following Calchas’ prophecy and his stratagem of fetching her to Aulis with the pretext of marrying her to Achilles. Clytemnestra is shocked, and in her despair she turns to Achilles for help. She falls on her knees as suppliant (this is the first of the two supplications enacted on stage in the play; see Chapter 5), setting aside any reservations and sense of decorum, and begs him to protect her daughter and herself from Agamemnon and the army. Achilles agrees to help the two women since Iphigenia has been promised to him. Given that Agamemnon has used his name without his consent, Achilles now has to save Iphigenia, showing himself worthy of his lineage and homeland. Clytemnestra approves of Achilles’ response and offers to call Iphigenia out of the tent so that she will supplicate him as well. Achilles reassures her that saving Iphigenia is a matter of life or death for him and sets out a plan of action (as other characters do elsewhere in the play; see Chapter 4): first of all Clytemnestra should try to persuade her 16

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1. A Summary of the Play husband by reason. If this succeeds, his own friendship with Agamemnon will not be put at risk and the army will not criticize him. If it fails, Clytemnestra should come back and find Achilles, so that he can then intervene to protect her and her daughter. Clytemnestra expresses her doubts about the feasibility of the plan but she agrees to give it a try. She then returns into the tent, while Achilles returns to the Greek camp. Chorus’ third song (1036-97) A song by the Chorus contrasts a blissful past with a dire present. They first sing of the blessed wedding of Peleus and the goddess Thetis at Mount Pelion, a wedding attended by the gods, the Muses and the Nereids. It was there that the Centaurs reported Chiron’s prophecy of the birth of Achilles and his heroic feats in Troy. This happy wedding can only be contrasted with the fate of Iphigenia, who having come to Aulis dressed as a bride will be sacrificed like a heifer (on this conflation of ritual practices, see Chapter 5). Propriety and virtue have given way to lawlessness provoking the anger of the gods. Fourth scene (1098-1275) Clytemnestra comes out of Agamemnon’s tent to look for her husband, who enters the stage from the side entrance leading to the camp. Agamemnon asks her to summon Iphigenia to join him in the pre-nuptial sacrifices, but Clytemnestra calls Iphigenia out of the tent to beg for her own life. Iphigenia appears with the baby Orestes in her arms, face cast down, and with her dress in front of her eyes as a sign of grief. Agamemnon, puzzled, asks for explanation, and Clytemnestra announces to him that she and Iphigenia know about the sacrifice. She then proceeds with a speech in which she reminds Agamemnon that she married him unwillingly after he killed her first husband and child, and after he supplicated her father to save him from the revenge of her brothers (this is probably an innovation by Euripides; see Chapter 2). Nevertheless she has been a blameless wife to him, having given birth to three 17

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis daughters and a son. Is it now fair to have Iphigenia killed for the faithless Helen? Her death will not be excused, nor is Agamemnon going to be received well by the rest of his family when he comes back from Troy (a threat anticipating the events dramatized by Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; see Chapters 2 and 3). If the Greeks want a sacrifice they should choose a victim by drawing lots, or they should kill Helen’s daughter, Hermione. Clytemnestra’s rational speech is followed by an emotional plea by Iphigenia as she kneels before her father. Performing a supplication (the second in the play; see Chapter 5), she begs him to pity her, reminding him of their close relationship when she was a small girl and of his dreams to see her married one day. She asks him to look at her, and prompts the infant Orestes (a mute person with an important function in the play: see Chapter 7) to join her in supplicating Agamemnon. It is better to live badly than to die well, Iphigenia concludes. Agamemnon replies that his position is dire whatever he decides to do. The Greek army is overwhelmed by desire to set sail for Troy, but everything depends on the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Defying Calchas’ prophecy will result in immediate retaliation by the army, which will bring about the death of Agamemnon and his whole family. It is Greece that demands the sacrifice, not Menelaus, and it is now up to Agamemnon and Iphigenia to show that Greece is free and that Greek wives cannot be taken from their men by force. Agamemnon probably exits in the direction of the camp, leaving Iphigenia and Clytemnestra on stage. Iphigenia’s monody (1276-1335) Iphigenia, who now realizes that her death is inescapable, breaks out in a sung lament (on which see Chapter 7) contrasting Paris’ fate to her own. Paris, once abandoned as a baby to die on Mount Ida, was found and brought up as a shepherd, and acted as judge in the beauty contest of the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. By contrast, Iphigenia herself is now about to be sacrificed by Artemis and her own father for an expedition that will bring fame to the Greeks but death to herself. Favourable winds have brought the Greek fleet 18

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1. A Summary of the Play together at the port of Aulis, but only pain and destruction to Iphigenia. Human life is full of suffering, and Helen has now brought great pain on the Greeks. Fifth scene (1336-1474) Achilles rushes onto the stage from the camp, followed by attendants carrying his armour (on its significance, see Chapter 7). Iphigenia, embarrassed at meeting her would-be husband, tries to hide in the tent. However, Clytemnestra stops her, pointing out that this is not the right time to be concerned about manners. Achilles informs them that he has narrowly escaped being stoned to death by the Greek army and his own Myrmidons. When he heard them shouting that Iphigenia must die, he continues, he tried to defend her, but he was confronted with accusations that he is a slave to the proposed marriage. Yet Achilles assures Clytemnestra that he will put on his armour and fight for Iphigenia, even if Odysseus comes to snatch her from her mother’s arms. Iphigenia, who has been listening in silence, suddenly interrupts the agitated dialogue between Achilles and Clytemnestra to declare, in what is a pivotal moment in the play, that it is pointless to try to escape the sacrifice. Resistance can only result in Achilles’ death. She has decided to die willingly: to gain glory for herself, to enable the army to conquer Troy, and to free Greece from barbarian rule. Achilles expresses his admiration for Iphigenia’s determination, praises her for giving in to the inevitable, and renews his offer to save and marry her. He then exits towards the camp, followed by the attendants who carry his unworn armour. Iphigenia asks her distressed mother to accept her decision, not to mourn for her death and to bear Agamemnon no grudge. She then invites the Chorus to sing a hymn of praise to Artemis while the final preparations for the sacrifice take place. Song by Iphigenia and the Chorus (1475-1531) In an upbeat song at odds with her situation (see Chapter 7), Iphigenia exhorts the Chorus to bring garlands and spring water and to join her in celebrating Artemis. She addresses her mother 19

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis for the last time, and says farewell to her homeland and the daylight, ready to die for Greece. She then exits towards the camp, while Clytemnestra returns to the tent with the baby Orestes. The Chorus are left on stage to respond to Iphigenia’s song by singing to Artemis, to Iphigenia herself, to the successful outcome of the expedition at Troy, and to Agamemnon’s victory. Epilogue (1532-1629) In a concluding scene which stylistically and metrically consists of two parts (probably neither of them by Euripides – see Chapter 8), one of Agamemnon’s servants returns from the camp and calls Clytemnestra out of the tent to announce to her the news of her daughter’s miraculous disappearance. The army had assembled in the grove of Artemis for the sacrifice and Agamemnon covered his face with his robe in distress, but Iphigenia, with a speech that everyone admired, assured him that she offered her body to Greece willingly, wishing the army victory and a safe homecoming. Religious silence was then observed, and Calchas crowned the victim with a garland and prepared the sacrificial knife. Then Achilles addressed Artemis with a prayer. But when the priest struck the victim, Iphigenia disappeared, and in her place a dying deer was found. Calchas explained that Artemis replaced Iphigenia with the deer because she did not want her altar to be stained with noble blood; having accepted the sacrifice, she gave the fleet favourable winds to set sail for Troy immediately. Clytemnestra listens disbelievingly to the servant’s report, but Agamemnon returns to confirm that Iphigenia has been saved, that the army is about to depart, and that she should now return to Argos with Orestes. The Chorus wish Agamemnon a good journey and a safe return with many spoils from Troy. All characters leave the stage: Agamemnon exits towards the camp, Clytemnestra returns to the tent, and the Chorus leave from the side entrance leading away from the camp.

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2

Myth To the original audience of IA, the sacrifice of Iphigenia would be familiar from a number of previous representations in poetry, art, and drama. The story of Iphigenia’s sacrifice centres on some key issues to which most of its versions return in various ways, namely Artemis’ reasons for asking the sacrifice, Agamemnon’s motives for consenting to the killing of his daughter – especially the issue of whether or not his decision is a free one – the stratagem he employs to lure Iphigenia to Aulis, and the question of whether she is eventually sacrificed or, if replaced by an animal, what is her posthumous fate. This chapter will start with an overview of some of the most influential representations of the story before IA and will then consider the ways in which the play engages with them, to imitate, revise, undermine or reject them. IA plays with the spectators’ familiarity with earlier versions of the story to challenge their assumptions but also to provide them with an intricate and suspenseful narrative. Epic and lyric poetry The most famous of epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, do not make mention of Iphigenia’s sacrifice. This is probably because a story of this kind, with all the moral and psychological implications it has for Iphigenia’s father, would give Homer’s Agamemnon a dimension which, given his portrayal and function in the two poems, would look out of place. One of the earliest literary treatments of Iphigenia’s sacrifice is that of another epic poem, Cypria, which we know from a summary from late antiquity. This poem, which in fifth-century Athens 21

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis was almost as popular as the Iliad and Odyssey, provides a number of details that IA builds on or challenges. Iphigenia’s sacrifice is presented by Calchas as the only possible means of appeasement of the goddess Artemis, who forces the Greek fleet to stay inactive at the port of Aulis with adverse winds. Iphigenia is brought to Aulis on the pretext of marrying Achilles. During her sacrifice Artemis replaces her with a deer and makes her immortal. As far as we can tell from the extant summary of the poem,1 Cypria is not so much interested in the sacrifice and its moral and ethical dilemmas for the individuals involved, but rather in its contribution to the larger narrative of the war. The narrative of the poem is dominated by a causal logic, where events are linked with each other as cause and effect and where episodes succeed and mirror one another. The expedition to Troy takes place only after Iphigenia has been lured to Aulis under the pretext of her marriage with Achilles: the marriage is the means of realizing the sacrifice. Iphigenia’s death is in turn the means of effecting the expedition against Troy. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is also echoed in the Sack of Troy,2 a poem narrating the sacrifice of Polyxena to the dead Achilles, which concludes the expedition against Troy and guarantees the safe homecoming of the Greek fleet. In the lost poems of the epic cycle, then, the war begins and ends with the sacrifice of the daughter of a king, a sacrifice that, rather than raising questions about the morality and justice of war, appears to move the narrative of the poems forward. Iphigenia’s sacrifice appears in another epic source, Hesiod’s (?) Catalogue of Women.3 In the Catalogue of Women, we are not told why or how Iphimede (a variant name for Iphigenia, although etymologically independent) was lured to Aulis, nor are we provided with insights into the psychology and motives of the primary characters. However, a very interesting departure from the Cypria is that, at the time of her sacrifice, Iphimede is replaced by a phantom, and that subsequently Artemis grants her immortality. Another early poem, which, according to ancient testimonies, dealt with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, is Stesichorus’ lyric Oresteia.4 Stesichorus shares 22

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2. Myth with the epic versions of the story the theme of Iphigenia’s escape from the sacrifice and subsequent immortalization. Another feature of the story that Stesichorus has in common with the Cypria and Euripides’ IA and Iphigenia among the Taurians is the deceptive nature of the wedding of Iphigenia to Achilles. In Pindar’s Pythian 11, 22-5, on the other hand, the sacrifice is brought up as a possible reason for Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon. It is interesting to see articulated in this victory ode, perhaps for the first time, the question of whether Clytemnestra took revenge against Agamemnon because of the loss of her daughter or because of lust. This is a question that in tragedy becomes pivotal.5 Tragedy Iphigenia’s family, the royal family of Argos, is one of the most famous in Greek tragedy. Even when dramatists focus on other episodes of the Argive saga, the sacrifice is often mentioned as a paradigm of the misfortunes of the doomed family, or of the cruelty and lack of responsibility of its individual members. The earliest extant representation of Iphigenia’s sacrifice in fifthcentury theatre is in Aeschylus’ trilogy Oresteia (458 BC). The first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon, deals with the return of Agamemnon to Argos at the end of the Trojan War and his death at the hands of Clytemnestra. The sacrifice is narrated in a long choral section that prepares for Agamemnon’s entrance (40-257). The old men of Argos revisit the past of the royal house and provide an insight into the background of the cycle of violence that the trilogy dramatizes. In this version of the story Iphigenia is not saved by Artemis but dies at the altar. The Chorus’ narrative focuses on the conditional nature of Artemis’ demand, on Agamemnon’s freedom of choice, and on Iphigenia’s helplessness, which prepare the ground for Clytemnestra’s subsequent justification of her own killing of Agamemnon. We know of at least two lost plays named after Iphigenia, one by Aeschylus, the other by Sophocles. Unfortunately we have no concrete facts about Aeschylus’ Iphigenia.6 If its subject was 23

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis Iphigenia’s sacrifice, rather than her ‘afterlife’ in the land of the Taurians, it may have been performed together with Aeschylus’ lost Telephus and Palamedes, plays on subjects from the early stages of the expedition against Troy that could have shared with a play on the sacrifice of a young virgin its thematic preoccupations with persuasion, deception, and the origins of the war. Aeschylus’ Iphigenia could have alternatively been performed together with a play about Iphigenia’s afterlife in the land of the Taurians, thus exploring Iphigenia’s changing roles as victim and victimizer. We happen to know a little more about the Iphigenia of Sophocles.7 In one of the very few surviving fragments of this play, a character, probably Odysseus, congratulates Clytemnestra on her future in-laws: ‘but you, who are getting for your daughter a husband with great parents’.8 This oneline fragment is important in terms of the light it throws on plot, setting, and characterization. First, it shows that the theme of Iphigenia’s deceptive wedding to Achilles was of importance to this play, as it was in the Cypria. Second, it is uttered by a speaker (Odysseus or someone with similarly persuasive skills) who never appears on stage in IA. Third, it suggests that the setting of this play is Argos, not Aulis. This has certain implications for the cast. Agamemnon and Achilles must be absent and therefore less central to the plot than in IA. Clytemnestra, on the other hand, appears in the domestic setting of the palace of Argos, by contrast to IA where she finds herself isolated and alienated in the hostile Greek camp. Sophocles’ Iphigenia must have involved scenes of deception, persuasion, and perhaps violence similar to those of his extant Philoctetes, which, although it dramatizes an episode near the end of the Trojan War, features an Odysseus who, once again, takes part in a difficult mission on which the outcome of the whole expedition depends. The sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon is mentioned in a number of tragic plays which enact Clytemnestra’s death at the hands of Orestes. In Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra and Orestes, Agamemnon’s killing of Iphigenia is often revisited as a crime of paternal 24

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2. Myth cruelty and political ambition. As in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, it is Clytemnestra who returns to the sacrifice of Iphigenia in these plays to legitimize her own revenge against Agamemnon, but also to contrast his cruelty with her own display of maternal affection towards Orestes (which, of course, complicates the act of the matricide). Orestes and Electra, on the other hand, who in these plays seek to justify their own revenge against their mother, sanctify the memory of Agamemnon in a way that leaves no room for Iphigenia. As we will see below, IA draws on the arguments that Clytemnestra rehearses in these plays in a way that redefines their force and seriousness. The only other extant play of fifth-century drama where Iphigenia is a central character is Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians. This play was written and performed some ten years before IA (with most likely dates of 414 or 413 BC), but focuses on a subsequent episode in the myth, Iphigenia’s ‘afterlife’ in the remote and foreign land of the Taurians near the Black Sea. The play dramatizes the version of the myth according to which Artemis saves Iphigenia and transports her to the land of the Taurians to act as her priestess. But the memory of the sacrifice is never far away. Iphigenia reflects on it in the opening lines of the play, where we hear of the delay of the expedition at Aulis, Artemis’ demand for her sacrifice, Odysseus’ central role in conceiving the deceptive wedding plan, and her last-minute replacement, unbeknown to the Greeks, with a deer. Iphigenia revisits with bitterness the details of her sacrifice again and again throughout the play. In fact the sacrifice defines not only Iphigenia’s memories but her whole new life. Although she escapes the sacrifice, she finds herself condemned to a death-like status in the margin of the known world, away from those she loves and the civilized culture and values of the Greeks, expected to serve Artemis through the ‘barbarian’ custom of human sacrifice. She is both ‘dead’ and forced to perpetually re-enact the most decisive and traumatic moment in her life. Iphigenia is arguably the best-known sacrificial victim of Greek mythology, but she is not the only one. Another wellknown heroine who falls victim to the Greek army and a 25

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis superhuman power is Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. In epic poetry (on which see above), but also in art and tragedy, Polyxena is killed on Achilles’ tomb by the departing Greek fleet in the aftermath of the fall of Troy, as a gift of honour for the dead warrior. The similarities between the stories and roles of Iphigenia and Polyxena are striking. Iphigenia and Polyxena are both daughters of kings. One of them dies at the beginning of the Greek expedition, the other at the end; and they are both led to their death as brides of Achilles. It is not surprising that the similarities between them can be traced not only in iconography, where the two heroines are often interchangeable, but also in epic poetry and tragedy.9 Tradition(s) and innovation There must have been other representations of the sacrifice of Iphigenia which have been lost, in addition to the epic Cypria and the plays on Iphigenia by Aeschylus and Sophocles. This makes it difficult to establish with certainty what exactly is new in Euripides’ play. A major innovation must have been the letter device with which Agamemnon lures Iphigenia to Aulis: in Sophocles it is Odysseus who personally delivers the message to Clytemnestra in Argos, whereas in other early versions of the story the means by which Iphigenia is summoned to Aulis does not receive attention.10 The secrecy with which Calchas’ oracle is announced only to Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus seems to be another Euripidean innovation. Elsewhere in literature and drama, similar oracles have a public character: in the first book of the Iliad Apollo’s demand is discussed publicly (especially 53120), in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (199-201) Artemis’ demand is announced ‘to the chiefs’, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King Creon is invited to announce Apollo’s oracle in front of the Chorus (914), and in Euripides’ Hecuba (113-15) the ghost of Achilles makes his demand to the whole army. Among certain or probable innovations the following could also be included: Achilles’ ignorance of the marriage plot, Clytemnestra’s presence at Aulis, the playing down of Artemis’ role in the sacrifice, Agamemnon’s killing of Clytemnestra’s former husband and child, Iphigenia’s 26

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2. Myth volte-face and willingness to die, and the ruthlessness and greed of the Greek army. Such innovations do not merely create dramatic suspense. They complement, refine, challenge, and even flatly contradict previous treatments of the story and create certain expectations about the dramatic characters and their ability to alter the world of myth. The play draws on a wide range of literary and dramatic texts, and its attitude towards myth can be examined not only in terms of narrative and thematic preferences but also in terms of generic debts and juxtapositions. One of the texts that the play echoes in its vocabulary as well as in its plot and character development is the Iliad. The prospect of a repetition of the Homeric quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles is raised as early as the prologue, where the old slave points out that Achilles will get angry at losing his bride (124-40). However, Achilles turns out to value highly his friendship with Agamemnon and refuses at first to intervene personally to save Iphigenia from fear of putting this friendship at risk (1015-23). On the other hand, Iphigenia, having first rejected the code of the heroic death as madness (e.g. 1250-2), appropriates the vocabulary, ethical stance, and moral values of the Homeric Achilles and re-enacts his choice of a short and glorious life over a long and obscure one (especially 1367-1401). The constructive but critical attitude of the play towards the Iliad is best exemplified with the transformation of Iphigenia into a heroine before the eyes of none other than Achilles himself.11 Another example of the play’s creative engagement with the Iliad can be found in the entry-song of the Chorus. This is one of the longest in Greek tragedy, and its ‘epic’ length should be seen in conjunction with the fact that it is modelled on Homeric narratives such as the catalogue of ships in Iliad, book 2, 484760, or the ‘viewing from the wall’ (or teichoskopia) in Iliad, book 3, 161-244, which Euripides drew on also in his Phoenician Women, 88-201. The song evokes Homer’s poetry but it also distances itself from it: the peaceful setting and the athletic activities of the Greek heroes, as well as the glamorized and eroticized tone of the Chorus’ description, contrast boldly with the warlike atmosphere of the Homeric prototype.12 27

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis The play’s attitude towards myth shows a debt also to other types of epic and lyric literature, more celebratory and glamorous in tone, preoccupied with themes such as the miraculous and the romantic, adventure and action, war and sex. It is from such types of literature that the theme of the false marriage and the stories embedded in the songs of the Chorus originate.13 For instance, the judgement of Paris in the first song and the wedding of Thetis and Peleus in the third song (1036-79) derive from narratives which are different in character and content from the Iliad, such as the now lost Cypria. The way the Chorus deal with the mythological material is not elaborate but selective and suggestive. Moreover, the elevated and ornate style of the presentation of the marriage of Thetis and Peleus provides a sense of idyllic remoteness and bliss which also evokes some of the lyric odes of Pindar and Bacchylides. The subject-matter and tone of such choral songs depend on the exclusion of darker mythological themes, including Thetis’ forced union with Peleus, the close connection between the wedding and the Trojan War, and the death of Achilles, the offspring of that marriage, outside the walls of Troy. The songs of IA, with their thematic preoccupations with glamorous stories familiar from epic poetry and with their generic affinities to lyric poetry, provide visions of the mythological past and future which are often juxtaposed with the tragic mood of the rest of the play. In its thematic and generic treatment of mythological material, the play draws not only on the techniques, conventions, and preferences of epic and lyric poetry but also on drama. Agamemnon’s motives and his attitude towards the sacrifice of his daughter, the religious and moral framework within which the sacrifice takes place, and Clytemnestra’s character and feelings towards her husband and the death of her daughter are all features of the story which fifth-century drama explores again and again. Arguably, the most prominent among the extant representations of the story before IA is that of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, to which numerous allusions can be traced in our play.14 For instance, there are hints at the fate awaiting Agamemnon on his return to Argos after the war and at the role Orestes is going to play in the family’s vicious cycle of violence. 28

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2. Myth One could go as far as saying, in fact, that the central plot of IA is developed along lines which are reminiscent of Aeschylus’ play. The sequence of Clytemnestra’s arrival at Aulis, her confrontation with Agamemnon, and her inability to persuade him to save their daughter seem to mirror, ironically, the arrival of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in Argos, his encounter with his wife, and his inability to resist her persuasive skills. Even Clytemnestra’s chariot entrance with the ‘bride’ Iphigenia provides a point of comparison with Agamemnon’s chariot entrance with the war-slave Cassandra. Like other late Euripidean plays such as Orestes and Phoenician Women, IA systematically challenges the audience’s expectations by juxtaposing the dramatic action with past and future events that are familiar from earlier sources. Agamemnon’s second letter threatens the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the whole future of the Trojan War. Achilles’ attempt to save Iphigenia at the risk of his life similarly threatens his glorious future (and death) in Troy. The display of Clytemnestra’s suffering in the play sets her well-known hatred for Agamemnon in an entirely new context. Orestes’ role as a blissfully ignorant infant at the side of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia is ironic in the light of his notorious revenge against his mother for her killing of Agamemnon. Often, there is no resolution to the tensions between what we know from previous literature and drama and what the characters set out – and fail – to do on stage. The audience’s expectations are challenged by the text in ways that not only expose the disjunction between dramatic plot and wider mythological framework, but also underscore the isolation of the characters on the stage and their failure to control the myth. Such tactics of unresolved conflicts and of the disruption of the links between myth and theatre, past and present, and cause and effect are intrinsic to the narrative of the play and typical of its critical attitude towards the mythological traditions within and against which it operates.15

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3

Characters Like many of Euripides’ plays, IA does not revolve around a single character. It may be named after Iphigenia but unlike the majority of Sophocles’ extant plays – or even plays by Euripides such as Medea – it features more than one central figure. The principal focus of IA is not on a character, but on an event, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which is explored through a number of characters and their different attitudes towards it. None of the characters significantly outnumbers the others in terms of the lines they speak: Agamemnon has 314 lines, Clytemnestra 274, Iphigenia 224, Achilles 162, Menelaus 103, and the old slave 75. The Chorus have 368 lines in total, most of them sung, rather than spoken.1 The plot can be divided into three parts, each of them shedding light on the dilemmas of one character: the first part (prologue and first scene) concentrates on Agamemnon and his unsuccessful attempts first to avert the sacrifice and then to keep it secret. The second part (second and third scenes) deals with Clytemnestra, her discovery of Agamemnon’s plan, and her failure to avert its realization. And the third one (fourth scene and epilogue) focuses on Iphigenia and her decision to die.2 The play is rather unique in that all characters on stage are in principle opposed to the sacrifice of Iphigenia and act with good intentions. There are no struggles between irreconcilable opposites, no decisions debated with wider moral and ethical implications, no characters fighting to the death for their beliefs. The play provides a multi-perspectived spectacle propelling the action through the display, not of uncompromising determination by the characters, but of indecision or inability to control events. Any discussion of the characters of the play should probably 31

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis start with what is often considered as the first treatise on dramatic criticism in Western culture, Aristotle’s Poetics. Some eighty years after the play’s first performance, Aristotle criticized Iphigenia’s decision to die willingly as sudden and unexpected: ‘an example of the inconsistent is Iphigenia at Aulis: the girl who begs [for her life] does not seem at all like the later Iphigenia’ (Poetics 54a32-3). However brief and cryptic, Aristotle’s criticism has had a huge impact on the evaluation of the play and its characters in modern times. It is still debated today whether his judgement meant outright rejection or cautious approval and whether the character of Iphigenia is exceptional in the play or typical of a dramatic pattern. Whatever one’s preference, Aristotle’s approach raises some important questions about dramatic characterization that one cannot afford to ignore. Arguably, the characters of the play can invite two conflicting responses: ‘an emotional involvement with the individuals in the play and a more intellectual detachment driven by our inability to remain emotionally involved’.3 The fact that the characters change their mind abruptly (more on this below) can have an alienating effect on the spectator because it challenges the unbroken illusion of the theatrical spectacle. It can be argued, for instance, that if Iphigenia’s sudden change of mind defies credibility, this is the result not of incompetence but of a shock tactic aimed at challenging the spectator’s emotional engagement with the character, enhancing his or her critical appraisal of Iphigenia’s situation and of the play’s narrative. However, the characters, who act and suffer in equal measure and whose bodies and gestures hold the key to both emotional and moral truth, cannot leave the spectator unmoved. References to physical manifestations of powerful emotions such as crying abound throughout the play (see Chapter 7). When Iphigenia exits the stage for the last time to meet her death, she asks her mother not to mourn for her, in terms that can easily have the opposite effect on the spectator. How should we interpret the characters of a play? Should we focus on the needs of the plot, in which the characters should serve as narrative devices? Should we employ psychological 32

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3. Characters tools, in search of the inner thoughts and feelings that will justify the characters’ actions? Or should we examine the relationship between the play and its literary and dramatic tradition, in terms of allusion, influence, or interaction? In the following paragraphs all three approaches will be employed to shed light on different aspects of characterization in the play.4 Agamemnon The play begins with Agamemnon at a moment of crisis, caught between two contradictory courses of action best summarized through the two letters he has written to Clytemnestra. On the one hand he has planned the sacrifice of his daughter, but on the other hand he seeks to avert it. Unresolved conflicts in the representation of Agamemnon abound throughout the play and serve to underscore his lack of self-assurance, balance, and direction. Some of these conflicts derive from the different demands made on him by society and his family. He has duties towards his family but also towards the Greeks, towards his wife and daughter but also towards his brother. Other tensions stem from his own attitude towards his roles. He finds himself unable to make decisions (356, 1257-8), and he experiences defeat when Clytemnestra refuses to go home (745). He fears the mob (517, 1012) and conspiracies of his political rivals (518-31). He feels trapped and yoked to necessity (443, 511) and betrayed by the gods (537), and blames the superhuman powers of fate, luck, and his personal daemon (444, 1136) for obstructing his plans. However, it is far from clear how exactly these forces incapacitate Agamemnon. He flirts with the idea of a life outside politics and with the obscurity and lowliness of the common man (16-18, 85-6), and envies the youthful ignorance of his daughter (677), but from Menelaus we also hear of Agamemnon’s ambitious campaign to become leader of the expedition (337-60; see further Chapter 6). He is willing to tell lies and to deceive. But he also appears humane and emotionally attached to his daughter, unlike the cold-hearted Odysseus and Calchas, the vengeful Menelaus, or the self33

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis centred Achilles. How convincing is his transformation from an opportunist politician to a loving father? From a father determined to save his daughter to a leader persuaded that the sacrifice is inevitable, and that he is in no position to avert it? Is he a realist or a fatalist? The play leaves these questions unresolved. Agamemnon can be seen in theatrical terms as a playwright who composes, rewrites, and eventually loses control over the plot of his own life and the life of those around him. His case also sheds light on the tensions between private and public life at the end of the fifth century, and more specifically on the competing interests of family and state. Moreover, the depiction of Agamemnon enters into dialogue with previous representations of the hero in the literary and dramatic tradition. The Agamemnon of IA shares his emotional swings between overconfidence and despair with the Agamemnon of the Iliad (he insults Achilles in book 1, immediately regrets it in book 2.370-80, suggests flight in 14.65-81, and tries unsuccessfully to put the blame on supernatural forces in 19.86-138) and shares his arrogance and selfishness with the Agamemnon of Sophocles’ Ajax (131973). At the same time, he is more central to the narrative of the play and more developed as a character than Homer’s statesman or Sophocles’ fifth-century politician. Another Agamemnon that the play engages with is that of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, whose terrible dilemma is articulated by the Chorus of Agamemnon. Unlike Aeschylus’ character, though, the Agamemnon of IA does not come face to face with a clear choice.5 He himself argues that in inviting Iphigenia to Aulis he gave in to the pressure of his brother (98), only to be contradicted by Menelaus, who points out that he did so without hesitation (359). The gap between these conflicting perspectives on Agamemnon’s decision is never bridged. Agamemnon is not the kind of tragic king who falls as a result of some misjudgement, like his Aeschylean predecessor or, say, Sophocles’ Oedipus. Nor is he an ideal leader such as Theseus in Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Thucydides’ Pericles, and the philoso34

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3. Characters pher kings of Plato’s Republic.6 Agamemnon seems to reflect only retrospectively on the implications of his decision to sacrifice his daughter. He is neither willing to accept responsibility for what he has decided, nor does he fall tragically as a result of his decision. For all the emotional force of his part (not least his last speech at 1255-75), Agamemnon is a character whose downfall is brought about by his inability to assume a firm moral and ethical stand.7 Menelaus Menelaus’ contribution to the plot is limited to the first scene. Arguably, it is the withdrawal of Odysseus into the background of the plot that provides room for the introduction of Menelaus as an opponent of Agamemnon.8 His dramatic function is to cancel Agamemnon’s attempt to save Iphigenia, and to shed light on Agamemnon’s character through a confrontation that introduces many of the play’s themes, most notably the characters’ change of mind. Menelaus may not be fully developed as a character, but he is certainly more than ‘a dramatic convenience in the play’.9 His fully-fledged attack on his brother introduces the panhellenic theme that Agamemnon and Iphigenia revisit towards the end of the play (on which see further Chapter 6). Another important issue that Menelaus introduces when he changes his mind is that of kinship and of the tension between family values and public interests. Menelaus’ portrayal in the play is not inconsistent with what we know about his self-centred and vengeful character from earlier drama. His desire for Helen and his weak character are features we find in Euripides’ Trojan Women, where he fails to punish his wife despite repeatedly threatening to do so. His selfishness and unlikeability are prominent in his portrayal in Sophocles’ Ajax and in Euripides’ Andromache. In the Orestes he is similarly unimpressive, more so than necessary, according to Aristotle (Poetics 1454a29, 1461b21). Another aspect of Menelaus’ mythological persona that IA revisits is his unreliability. The Menelaus of IA is not just aware of his changeable character, but also proud of it. He admits that he impatiently 35

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis waited for the arrival of Iphigenia (328), and faces Agamemnon’s condemnation for his wicked (333) and shameless (379) arguments.10 Clytemnestra In the aftermath of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, most tragic plays about the house of Atreus portray Clytemnestra less as a transgressive victimizer of others and more as a victim of her lover Aegisthus and/or her own passions. In Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra and Orestes, the moral dilemmas posed by the matricide appear centre-stage, pushing Clytemnestra’s killing of her husband, like Agamemnon’s killing of Iphigenia, into the hazy and controversial realms of memory and rhetoric. IA projects Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon into a future yet to be decided and sets out to explore how it will come about. Clytemnestra appears as a devoted wife and loving mother whose hatred and disdain towards her husband emerge in the course of the play as a direct result of Agamemnon’s actions. Clytemnestra’s concern about the infant Orestes and her interest for, protection of, and affection towards Iphigenia (manifested first in her interest in Iphigenia’s husband to be, then in her personal supplication of Achilles and Agamemnon, and finally in her lament for her daughter) go hand in hand with a very clear sense of her rights and responsibilities both within her marriage (e.g. 1157-65) and in society at large. Consider, for instance, her shock at her husband’s assertion that she should not perform her customary duties as mother of the bride at 725-36 and her anxiety about her position in the military camp at 913-15. The story (probably invented) of Clytemnestra’s loss of her first husband and child due to Agamemnon’s jealousy (1148-56) provides a parallel for her loss of Iphigenia, and highlights not only the suffering and pain that she has already experienced as a mother and wife but also her diminishing patience with Agamemnon. It is likely that the victimization of Clytemnestra was also central to Sophocles’ Iphigenia. However, the relocation of the story from the royal palace of Argos to the military camp 36

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3. Characters in Aulis, which must also be Euripides’ innovation, underscores Clytemnestra’s isolation and vulnerability. Clytemnestra’s revenge on Agamemnon is not forgotten but rather cast in a new light, in a context in which it appears as an understandable reaction of a wife and mother who has been victimized in the past and who is now utterly desperate. Clytemnestra’s revenge is brought up in her own speeches (1185-90, 1455) and also in Iphigenia’s attempt to convince her not to hate Agamemnon (1454). It is also evoked at the non-Euripidean end of the play (see further Chapter 8), when she expresses her disbelief in Iphigenia’s miraculous disappearance (1615-18). Modern readers of the play, who, like Clytemnestra, have been sceptical about the miracle of Iphigenia’s last-minute escape, have often turned towards the theme of her revenge to provide the problematic ending of the play with a sense of retribution and closure.11 Iphigenia The play is named after Iphigenia but she is on stage for only three out of five scenes, and she speaks fewer lines than either Agamemnon or Clytemnestra. We do not know how central Iphigenia was to Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ plays which bear her name.12 What is certain is that among the extant tragedies, IA is the only one to provide the young Iphigenia with a fully developed role and personality. It is also the only one to present Iphigenia as willing to die. Of course, Iphigenia is the protagonist of another play by Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians, but there she appears as a more grown-up and bitter character, forced to serve Artemis as a sacrificial priestess in a barbaric land at the edge of the known world. An interest in Iphigenia’s feelings and emotions as a sacrificial victim can be traced back to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,13 but there the emphasis lies exclusively on the victim’s unwillingness to die and on her helplessness. Likewise, the Iphigenia of IA is not the only willing sacrificial victim in Euripides’ work,14 but she is certainly the most central to the plot. Iphigenia is introduced in the play as a young and impulsive girl, having a childlike affection for her father and showing an 37

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis innocent disregard for social conventions. In her supplication to her father (1211-52), Iphigenia admits the limitations of her rhetorical skills and resorts to physical contact, tears, and her childhood memories.15 She argues that to want to die is madness and that an ugly and poor life is better than a glorious death, thus rejecting the heroic code as it is emblematically articulated in the Iliad through Achilles’ decision of glorious death over a long life.16 She also breaks out into an emotionally charged aria, a lament (1279-1335). Very soon after, however, Iphigenia changes her mind (1368-1401), and proclaims that she has decided to die, stressing the superiority of the collective cause over the life of the individual and of men over women. From a hopeless little girl, she is transformed into the character that, from this point on, dictates the on-stage action, asking Achilles not to attempt to save her (1416-20), her mother not to mourn for her (1433-66), and the Chorus to sing and dance a hymn for Artemis (1467-99; on which see further Chapter 7, under ‘Song and dance’). Why does Iphigenia decide to sacrifice herself? How does her decision relate to the little girl who until the previous scene was begging for her life? Is she fully aware of her situation and free to decide what to do? Or are there external circumstances and forces that restrict or even deny her a choice? Is she a victim or a hero? Any interpretation of Iphigenia’s decision to die inevitably engages with the following issues: whether her change of mind is persuasive (in other words, is it consistent with her earlier behaviour?); whether it is necessary (that is, is the plot of the play, and the myth behind it, conceivable without it?); and finally, what is the effect it has on the world of the play (does it serve the Greek cause or does it expose its barbarism?). Various interpretative possibilities suggest themselves: (1) Iphigenia is a martyr sacrificing her life for Greece, convinced of the justness of the panhellenic cause. As a patriot devoting herself to the well-being of her country, she adopts the arguments employed by her father in the previous scene and is moved by the passion displayed by the army.17 (2) Iphigenia is a victim succumbing to psychological pressure when she realizes that resistance against the agitated army, which nearly kills 38

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3. Characters Achilles in its determination to seize her, is futile. (3) A combination of the two interpretations above: she assumes the role of the martyr, when in fact she is a victim. In order to come to terms with a reality beyond her control she either (3.i) deludes herself, (3.ii) literally goes mad,18 or (3.iii) deceives those around her through a mock-reconciliation with her situation which aims at putting an end to the turmoil which threatens them.19 (4) She is in love with Achilles, and, when she realizes that he is going to die in her defence, she intervenes and follows his example in offering her life to save him.20 Should Iphigenia’s pure motives alter our perception of the wider context of the expedition, which was previously presented as the product of political ambition, patriotic rhetoric, and greed? Or does the context within which Iphigenia dies expose her motives as naïve and her logic as flawed? Does Iphigenia’s perspective redeem the other characters and exonerate them of guilt or wrongdoing? Or is it contaminated, contradicted, or rendered futile and pointless, by their arguments and actions?21 Does Iphigenia desire to surpass herself and to become a heroine with a glorious death, or does she seek to maintain her female identity by obeying her father and society at large and by defusing the tensions that her unwillingness to die have caused? In what ways does her sacrifice preserve social order and cohesion, and in what ways does it threaten them? Our answers to such questions have a bearing not only on the character of Iphigenia but also on the play as a whole. One can either reflect critically on the implausibility of Iphigenia’s transformation, or engage emotionally with her patriotic speech. The complexity of the issue is manifest in the way it divides and perplexes not only modern scholars but also the characters of the play. An index for some of the positions on the issue among the characters is provided by Achilles’ mixed feelings towards the decision of Iphigenia to die: in the course of twelve lines, his admiration for her bravery and nobility (1404-5) gives way to a stir of patriotic sentiment (1406-7), followed by recognition of her pragmatism in the face of inevitability (1408-9), the desire to save her (1410-13), emotional distress at the prospect of her 39

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis death (1413-15), and finally an attempt to dissuade her from accepting her death (1415).22 Achilles The role of Achilles in the play is awkward in that he is expected, not least by Clytemnestra, to save Iphigenia, thus effacing the mythological tradition upon which the Trojan War is based. If he is successful, he will be denied the future from which he derives his reputation and glory. If he fails, his claim to that glamorous future will be undermined. The paradoxical position that Achilles finds himself in is constructed through personality features and behavioural patterns that both evoke and contradict what we know about him from earlier literature, especially Homer’s Iliad (cf. Chapter 2 above). He is expected to behave angrily at the news of Agamemnon’s abuse of his name (133-5), and when he first appears on the stage he is indeed impatient (801-18) and easily offended, with a strong sense of honour and of what is right (e.g. 897, 899), which echo his portrayal in the Iliad. However, Achilles’ commitment to the Greek cause (965-7) and his concern about his friendship with Agamemnon (1019) come as nothing less than a surprise. Moreover, he is welleducated (708-10, 926-7), self-aware (919-31), in favour of measure and moderation (919-31), and preoccupied with decorum (821-54). He is no longer the problematic hero of Homer but rather an upper-class young man of late fifthcentury Athens, proud of his ancestry (944-54) and sophistic training (919-31), highly thought of by his intended mother-inlaw (e.g. 819-36) and the Chorus (e.g. 206-30), but finally exposed as inexperienced, immature, self-centred and bombastic. Like other young men of Greek tragedy, Achilles adjusts to the times. His Homeric features are reduced to narrative devices brought up by characters in need of a saviour, but they fail to materialize. The character who emblematically stands as symbol of heroism in the Iliad, the single most authoritative poem of the Greek world, is now reduced to a figure unable to defend Iphigenia and his own heroic identity. 40

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3. Characters His admiration of Iphigenia (1404-15, 1421-32) is an admiration of a heroism he is unable to claim for himself. With its portrayal of Achilles, the play challenges a whole set of values and beliefs which are traditionally associated with his Homeric heroism.23 The Chorus The chorus consists of young married women (187-8) from Chalcis (168), the town across the strait from the camp of the Greek army at Aulis (see map), who arrive to watch the famous Greek fleet that they have heard about from their husbands (171-8). It may not be accidental that the first testimonies of the sanctuary of Artemis and the harbour at Aulis as tourist attractions come from around the time the play was first performed. Nor is this the only Euripidean chorus to be associated with sightseeing: the Athenian women of Euripides’ Ion are tourists at another important site, Delphi.24 In terms of the plot, the identity of the chorus is probably less well justified than that in most plays by Euripides – and certainly by Aeschylus and Sophocles. In Bacchae, for instance, which was first performed on the same day as IA, the chorus consists of non-Greek female followers of Dionysus who have an integral part in the plot. In Ion, the women of the chorus do not travel alone but accompany their mistress Creusa, one of the play’s principal characters. IA, on the other hand, can be seen as substantiating a criticism that has been levelled against Euripides ever since Aristotle (Poetics 1456a25-32), namely that his choruses are not properly integrated into his plots. However, the seemingly arbitrary introduction of this group of young women into the play is far from ornamental and clearly has certain merits. It allows the Chorus to comment on the action and to intervene in the dialogue parts of the play as detached onlookers. In their songs they introduce and reflect on themes that permeate the plot: love and desire in the first song, war and peace in the second, marriage and sacrifice in the third. They also offer emotional, moral and mythological filters through which to view what happens on stage. For instance, they revisit the prehistory of the Trojan War, especially Paris’ 41

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis judgement of the goddesses (573-81), Helen’s elopement with Paris (582-9), and the wedding of Thetis and Peleus (1036-79). They also provide glimpses of the future at Troy, including the triumph of the Greeks, the defeat of the Trojans, and the sack of their city (751-800, 1524-31). Moreover, the gender, age, and marital status of the Chorus counterbalance their apparent detachment. Unlike a male chorus of soldiers, like the one that the Roman dramatist Ennius chose for his Iphigenia,25 they engage emotionally with Iphigenia and Clytemnestra throughout the play and participate in the song with which Iphigenia makes her final exit (1500-9). Of course, the Chorus are far from impartial and disinterested spectators. Their point of view is subjective. Their entry-song (164-302) establishes them as a group of observers fascinated by the display of power and glamour of the Greek fleet. Their eroticized description of the glamorous army contrasts sharply with the picture of impatient and violent troops which emerges later in the play. Moreover, their vision of the mythological past and future is limited in range and celebratory in tone. For instance, in their second song (751800), they see the sack of Troy and the agony of the Trojan women but not the destruction of the Greek fleet on its way back to Greece. In their third song (1036-97), they sing of Achilles’ triumph in Troy but not his premature death nor how his future glory precludes his successful intervention to save Iphigenia. It is possible that a secondary chorus was used to sing lines 590-7. These lines (which may or may not be by Euripides)26 are full of praise for Iphigenia and excitement at her wedding, and are rather inappropriate for the Chorus who already know Agamemnon’s plan. Moreover, they are sung by members of a group that addresses the Argive Iphigenia as ‘my princess’ (592), not what one would expect from women from the town of Chalcis. If a secondary chorus sings these lines, it may well consist of men from Argos who accompany Clytemnestra and Iphigenia in Aulis. Secondary choruses are not so common in tragedy but the presence of this particular group, even if not fully integrated into the scene, certainly contributes to the 42

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3. Characters impressive spectacle of the entrance with the carriage, the attendants, the baby Orestes, and Iphigenia’s wedding presents.27 The old servant Characters with minor roles often act as catalysts for the action in fifth-century tragedy. Not only do they move the plot forward; they also guide the emotions and reactions of the spectators in a way similar to and as complex as that of the chorus. This is certainly true for the (probably non-Euripidean) messenger who excitedly reports the arrival of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia at Aulis in the middle of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus (414-39). It also holds true for the second (also non-Euripidean?) messenger who enters the stage after Iphigenia’s final exit to report her miraculous disappearance from the scene of the sacrifice (1532-1612).28 Here I will focus on the old servant of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. It is the servant who inquires about Agamemnon’s emotional state in the prologue and triggers his expository speech (28-48). It is also the servant who raises expectations about Achilles’ temper and draws the spectators’ attention to Agamemnon’s inability to predict, let alone try to avert, the consequences of his fictitious plan (124-7). More importantly, it is the servant who reveals to Clytemnestra and Achilles the prophecy of the sacrifice and the fictitiousness of the wedding, thus setting in motion the second half of the play (855-95). Although the depiction of the old servant as morally upright, honest, and sympathetic is not inconsistent with the portrayal of ageing characters of servile status elsewhere in Euripides, his contribution to the plot in two scenes is quite remarkable.29 Moreover, his presence in IA performs another important function, in that it sheds light on the way in which the issues of slavery and freedom are thematized in the rest of the play: the old slave sets an example for free men, proving to be wiser, more decisive, and more reliable than his master. Despite its centrality to the plot, the role of the old servant is not without a comic side.30 His first entrance in haste despite his old age (2-5), his verbal and 43

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis physical confrontation with Menelaus over Agamemnon’s letter (303-17), and his hesitant intervention behind a half-opened door to reveal Agamemnon’s plan to Clytemnestra and Achilles (855-7) all point towards a character whose social status, age, and manners set him apart from the other characters. Off-stage characters Some characters who never appear on stage, but who should be discussed here because they feature prominently in the speeches of the other characters, are Odysseus, Calchas, and the collective group of the Greek army.31 Odysseus is presented as an opportunistic politician and conspirator with no consideration for morality or justice. He is ambitious and unreliable, and uses the support of the army to promote his own plans (524-7, 1362-4). The accusations levelled at Odysseus by the characters on stage are reminiscent of the criticisms he receives elsewhere in late fifth-century tragedy, for instance in Euripides’ Hecuba and Sophocles’ Philoctetes.32 Calchas is similarly presented as a self-serving and ambitious conspirator (518-21), thought to make false prophecies (955-8), rather than as a religious authority whose power derives from Artemis, as he is in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (123-59). His portrayal, like the portrayal of other prophets in plays of the Peloponnesian War (say, Tiresias as depicted by Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, e.g. 380-403) draws on the widely held view that prophets are not representatives of the gods but untrustworthy tricksters (on this, see further Chapter 6). The Greek fleet assembled in Aulis is referred to as ‘army’, ‘navy’, ‘army of the Greeks,’ ‘army of the Achaeans’, ‘Danaans’, ‘expedition’, but also pejoratively as ‘mass’ and ‘multitude’ (526, 735, 1030, 1357). In the entry-song of the Chorus, the army is the object of admiration, occupied with manly pastimes and surrounded by epic glamour. Similarly, the messenger announcing the arrival of Iphigenia presents the soldiers as excited onlookers speculating about Iphigenia’s wedding (425-34). However, the characters repeatedly point out that the camp is an inappropriate place for Clytemnestra 44

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3. Characters and Iphigenia (e.g. 735, 825-6, 1028-30): the soldiers love ‘malicious gossip’ (1001). What is more, the army is under the control of Odysseus and Calchas (518-36, 1362-4), undisciplined (914), insulting and violent (1345-68), and possessed by a desire to sack Troy (808-9, 1264, 1519-20). According to Agamemnon, they are vengeful to the point of burning Argos to the ground (533-6, 1267-8). From being detached spectators, the soldiers gradually become powerful agents who decide the future of the characters on the stage.33 The camp is transformed into a site of corruption, violence, and anarchy. The theme of the unruly mob manipulated by demagogues is explored in other plays by Euripides such as Orestes and Hecuba. A significant departure from such treatments of the theme is that the decisions taken by the army of IA are not debated in an assembly. Rather, they are the result of gossip, manipulation, desire, and uncontrollable temper. The reported violent quarrel between Achilles and the army is spontaneous and with near-disastrous consequences for Achilles. In extant tragedy, only Sophocles’ Ajax features a similar encounter between a character and the army reduced to a mob, where Teucer risks his life in defence of his brother Ajax (723-8).34 The ambitions of Odysseus and Calchas and the desire of the army to sack Troy can be seen as powerful forces operating behind the scenes. At one level their invisibility looms large over the plot and underscores their power. At a different level their absence raises questions about the seriousness of the claims made against them. Both Menelaus and Clytemnestra consider Agamemnon’s fear of the army excessive and attribute it to his cowardice (517, 1012). But the stoning of Achilles in the last scene of the play comes to show that the power of the army under the guidance of Odysseus cannot be underestimated. On the contrary, it can be seen as a catalyst for Iphigenia’s sudden decision to change her mind and to accept her sacrifice. Having said that, the presence of the army does not dominate the whole play. Bringing Odysseus or Calchas onto the stage would substantiate Agamemnon’s fears and hesitations, silence his critics, and necessitate the sacrifice much more effectively than the stoning of Achilles near the end of the play. Clearly IA is not 45

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis preoccupied with the power or psychology of the army as such, but with the contrasting attitudes towards it among the onstage characters.35

46

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4

Themes and Issues As we saw in the previous chapter, the machinations of Odysseus and Calchas and the power of the army, although often discussed, remain out of the spectators’ field of vision (see also Chapter 6). Similarly, the lack of prominent references to the goddess Artemis, and more generally the absence of a divine framework, is felt throughout the play (Chapter 5). The different mythological traditions and generic conventions upon which the play draws do not collide with one another but rather coexist, each serving a different function in the narrative of the play (Chapter 2). As a result, there are no voices of authority or forces of disruption to dominate the stage or to necessitate certain turns of the plot. Often arguments are rehearsed not for their intrinsic value or overwhelming force but merely for their desired effect on the interlocutor. For instance, Agamemnon’s arguments against Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, who both beg him to spare Iphigenia’s life, are never quite substantiated. Likewise, the grounds on which Agamemnon disagrees with Menelaus are undermined by the ease with which he swaps sides. Religion, ritual, genre, and politics, they all serve as frameworks through which the characters attempt to give meaning to the world they inhabit and to console themselves for their failure to exercise control over their lives. These frameworks will be discussed in subsequent chapters. The aim of this chapter is to explore the complex grid of ethical issues, intellectual concerns, and social values and practices to which the characters return again and again and which provide the narrative of the play with a purposeful dramatic thrust: these include themes that dominate the linguistic fabric of the play such as 47

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis persuasion, falsehood, friendship, reason and irrationality, freedom and necessity; but also wider intellectual and cultural issues which can shed light on the conceptual universe of the play such as role-playing, memory, identity, and gender. Role-playing The choral song that prepares for the arrival of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia (543-89) provides a useful sample of the moral values with which the characters are preoccupied throughout the play. The Chorus focuses on the complementary roles of nature and education, the gender-specific nature of virtue, and the importance of modesty, shame, and friendship.1 Clytemnestra takes up the issues of morality and propriety in the second and third scenes, both in her questioning of Agamemnon regarding her future son-in-law (691-741) and later on in her encounter with Achilles himself (819-1035). Ethical values are not simply the object of discussion; they are also embodied by the characters and reflect a range of social functions. In their entry-song, for instance, the Chorus speak of their excitement but also of their youthful and feminine inhibition and modesty upon arrival at the military camp at Aulis (187-8). The scenes of Clytemnestra’s arrival at the Greek camp and of her meetings with her husband and especially with Achilles are full of references to proper ways of behaviour in a wide range of settings: in the company of family members, prospective in-laws, members of the opposite sex, and foreigners, as well as in circumstances causing embarrassment and distress or calling for urgent action. The frequency with which the characters refer to virtues and morality reflects familiarity with contemporary thinking and especially with the views about virtue and education popularized by the sophists.2 However, the dramatic significance of these references lies not in their novelty and radicalism but in their domestication and familiarity. Nature and nurture, or birth and education, are not presented as polar opposites, as is often the case in the thinking of contemporary sophists. Rather than being debated, virtues are made to complement each other. 48

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4. Themes and Issues They are embedded in world-views that the characters actively pursue but which the plot comes to undermine and sidestep. It is not the relative merits of these virtues that matter but rather their shortcomings. Both the characters’ ethical standards and their sense of social etiquette fail to make an impact on the world of the play. Gradually the characters are forced to set them aside or to redefine them in accordance with the changing situations in which they find themselves. Clytemnestra does not hesitate to abandon her role of the respectable lady to supplicate Achilles (900-16; see further Chapter 5), encouraging her daughter to do the same (1343-4). Similarly Iphigenia, who apologizes to her mother for being so excited at the sight of her father (631-2) and who is ashamed to look at her would-be husband (1340-1), moves on to adopt a different type of role that leaves no room for shame, decorum, or distress. Achilles, who is initially embarrassed at the mere presence of Clytemnestra (821-34), eventually tries – and fails – to defend Iphigenia and his own honour in a violent confrontation with the angry army (1349-57). Ethical standards and norms of behaviour serve to expose the ordinariness of the characters and to emphasize their inability to rise to the extraordinariness of their situation. Social conventions or ideals may serve as a yardstick for humanity but under the strain of the circumstances they are also questioned, parodied, and satirized, being exposed as superficial or inadequate.3 The characters strive to control the narrative of the play by setting up plans of action and by assigning specific roles to themselves and other characters. These plans either fail to materialize or, like lies (on which see below), turn out to have unexpected and unwelcome consequences. Agamemnon’s attempt to cancel Iphigenia’s trip to Aulis by dispatching his second letter (117-62) is frustrated by Menelaus’ interception of the letter at the beginning of the first act (303). Achilles’ plan to save Iphigenia by having Clytemnestra talk to her husband at the end of the third scene also fails (1009-35). Agamemnon’s initial plan to get his daughter to Aulis has profound implications for his own role as a father. Achilles’ plan to defend Iphigenia by direct confrontation with the Greek army can only 49

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis lead to his death, as Iphigenia points out (1372-3). The characters find themselves trapped in roles they do not enjoy and fantasize about the possibility of escaping from them. Agamemnon, who struggles under his competing responsibilities as a military leader and as a father, feels envy of the ordinary quiet life of his servant (16-19) and of Iphigenia’s youthful innocence (677). Iphigenia, unable to persuade her father to spare her life, wishes she had the power of speech of Orpheus (1211-14). And Achilles, envious of Iphigenia’s determination to face death and of her devotion to Greece, wishes that he could marry her (1404-6). The characters display a certain degree of self-consciousness about their roles and their attempts to take control over the plot. Like the authors, directors, or actors of a play-script, they blur the distinction between the fiction of the play and the reality of the performance, and seek to rewrite and perform the plot according to their needs.4 At the beginning of the play, Agamemnon writes and erases his second letter to Clytemnestra ‘as a writer or rewriter of myth’, acting as ‘the poet’s double’.5 His role as an author continues at the end of the first scene (538-41), where he requests that Menelaus find Clytemnestra and keep secret from her the fate of Iphigenia. Similarly, throughout the third scene (especially 900-16) Clytemnestra plots, directs, and acts in a drama that aims at persuading Achilles to help her. Achilles responds with a counter-plan whose materialization involves Clytemnestra’s supplication of Agamemnon (1009-35).6 Iphigenia does not only supplicate her father in a performance that fails to persuade him (1211-52; see further Chapter 5). She also directs and enacts her transformation into a heroine on whom the expedition against Troy depends (1368-1509). As Luschnig notes, Iphigenia can be seen as a personification of the artist who overcomes dishonour and transcends death: ‘she moves from victim to director of the action. She calls for her sacrifice (‘sacrifice me’, 1398), she calls for the expedition to take place, she commands the army to take Troy (1398) … Iphigenia has chosen the destinies of all the actors, even forbidding her mother’s tears’.7 50

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4. Themes and Issues The crisis of value and belief systems and the loss of power and control result in a crisis of identity, clearly manifested in the problematization of the relationship between the individual and his or her name and body. This is most evident in the case of Iphigenia. The whole plot is driven towards the possession and violation of her body. Possession and violation of a virgin’s body are central to the ritual imagery of wedding and death. The Chorus, for instance, note how blood from the throat of Iphigenia’s lovely body will stain Artemis’ altar (1514-17). Iphigenia, having lost control over her fate because of her body, seeks to regain control over it by negotiating her body’s boundaries and ownership. When supplicating Agamemnon, she lays her body at his knee in exchange for her life (1216-17). When she later realizes that her would-be husband is approaching, she seeks to hide herself (literally: ‘to hide my body’ 1340) from Achilles out of shame for their ill-fated marriage. Her decision to sacrifice herself is a decision for her body to be not a cause of trouble but a present to Artemis (1395) and to Greece (1397), a present to be left undefiled after her death (1559). If Helen’s body caused battles and murders, Iphigenia declares, her own body should not lead to Achilles’ death but rather help save Greece (1417-20). Iphigenia no longer perceives herself as a victim of Helen (a common theme in the play: 494, 682-3, 881-2, 1201-5, 1236-7, 1253-4, 1315-16) but as her double who brings to an end, through her self-sacrifice, the injustice which originated in Helen’s desire. Given the centrality of Iphigenia’s body to the plot of the play, it is not without dramatic irony that she claims in 1494-6 that the Greek ships are eager for battle because of her name. The other character whose body and name are central to the plot and his identity is Achilles. The separation between his name and his person is first highlighted in the prologue when Agamemnon uses Achilles’ name without his permission (12832). The separation is skilfully questioned by Clytemnestra (900-16) and rejected by Achilles himself, not on moral grounds but on grounds of ownership: he is offended not because his name was used for deception but because it was used without permission (961-9). It is through this logic that Achilles finds 51

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis himself in the paradoxical position of accepting ‘responsibility for a deed that only his “name” helped to commit’.8 It is due to the same logic that he also risks having his body stoned to death by the agitated army (1345-68). Agamemnon’s abuse of Achilles’ name and Achilles’ own unsuccessful attempt to protect it have profound implications not only for Achilles’ name but also for his body and identity. The relation between Achilles and Iphigenia and the redefinition of their roles in the fifth scene is representative of the wider dynamics of gender as played out through the play. Iphigenia enters the stage as a virgin of marriageable age ready to fulfil her duty as a woman and a daughter, but exits convinced of the heroic nature of her decision to die for a greater cause. Achilles enters as a soldier devoted to his army and eager to achieve fame on the battlefield but leaves the stage preoccupied with marriage and eager to exchange his public role with a private one. The Chorus may claim that excellence has different meanings for the two genders and that male values differ from female values (see especially 56872): however, in the course of the play the male virtue of excellence, associated with prowess on the battlefield and in public life, is appropriated, promoted, and celebrated by Iphigenia, whereas feminine virtues such as modesty and shame are associated with Achilles. Similar observations can be made about Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Agamemnon, like the adult, male Athenians watching the play, is the master of his daughter and can take decisions about her future husband and the timing of her wedding without consulting her and her mother at all. Yet Agamemnon is also a liar and a coward with ruthless political ambitions and no inhibitions, whose actions are hardly paradigmatic of a responsible husband and father. Clytemnestra deems it inappropriate for someone of her status to talk to strangers and to seek their help, just as she considers her supervision of household activities and her participation in the wedding ceremony of her daughter as an important part of her clearly demarcated sphere of responsibilities. But her victimization through the loss of her first child and husband, and the 52

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4. Themes and Issues revenge she promises to exact on Agamemnon for the death of Iphigenia, put her in a very different position. The juxtaposition between these two models of wifehood would resonate very powerfully with the play’s original audience. The play may replicate many of the assumptions about the roles of the two genders attested for the world of the Athenian spectators. However, it also explores and challenges the ideological system upon which the differences between the two sexes are based. The feminization or vilification of male characters and the masculinization or marginalization of female characters show how the play reiterates and in equal measure questions gender stereotypes and values.9 Rhetoric The more unsatisfied the characters are with their position in the plot of the play, the more keen they become to assign to themselves and to their interlocutors roles they believe will change their fortunes. The art of arguing and persuading is an essential part of effective public speaking and of the education of late fifth-century Athenian citizens. As such it is also central to tragedy, whose civic identity is interwoven with its didactic function.10 In IA the seductive power of rhetoric is explored side by side with its subversiveness but also with its failures and limitations. The characters either fall victims to persuasion or fail to exercise it to their advantage. In the first scene, for instance, Agamemnon and Menelaus fail to persuade each other about the reasons rendering Iphigenia’s sacrifice necessary or inevitable. Similarly, Agamemnon fails to persuade Clytemnestra to return to Argos before the beginning of the alleged wedding ceremony (739-41). Clytemnestra and Iphigenia are unable to persuade Agamemnon to save his daughter (1011, 1211-12). Achilles is also unable to persuade the Greek army that Iphigenia should not be sacrificed, in a scene where arguments give way to shouting (1346, 1349, 1357). However, when persuasion is successful, it can have devastating consequences. The death of Iphigenia is the result 53

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis of Agamemnon falling victim to his brother’s arguments to summon her to Aulis (97-8) and of Clytemnestra falling victim to the persuasion of her husband’s letter (104-5). When not destructive, persuasion helps deceive characters by creating false hopes or by disguising harsh reality. Clytemnestra is persuaded by Achilles to talk to Agamemnon in the hope that this will enable her to save her daughter (1009-23). When it becomes clear that Iphigenia has no chance of escaping death (e.g. 1372-3, 1392-3, 1409), she persuades Achilles not to fight with the Greeks for her (1416-20), Clytemnestra not to lament for her death (1435-66), and herself that her death is a personal choice rather than a necessity (e.g. 1374-6). Persuasion may set in motion processes that become unstoppable, but it also serves as a comforting device that makes dramatic reality easier to bear for the characters. However, when it comes to some of the most spectacular changes of mind in the play, the processes of decision-making that inform them are often obscured in ways that mystify, rather than expose, the workings of persuasion. It is suddenly and inexplicably that Menelaus is overwhelmed by emotions of remorse and of sympathy and pity for Iphigenia, and it is equally abruptly that Agamemnon decides it is futile to try and save Iphigenia, after both of them have argued along very different lines (471-542). Similarly Iphigenia announces her decision to die suddenly and unexpectedly, in the middle of a scene in which both Clytemnestra and Achilles try frantically to find a way to save her (1368ff.). Closely connected with persuasion is the theme of falsehood. Lies bring about dramatic changes to the life and behaviour of the characters. They raise issues of responsibility and identity both for those who have recourse to falsehood and for those who find themselves unknowingly implicated in its web. In IA, as elsewhere in early Greek literature and fifthcentury tragedy, lying is thematically connected with the deceptive and treacherous practice of writing, whose impact on everyone involved is overwhelming.11 Euripides’ Hippolytus provides one of the best examples in extant tragedy of the close relationship between writing and lying: the false accusations 54

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4. Themes and Issues levelled against Hippolytus in the suicide note by his stepmother Phaedra set in motion events which lead to his ultimate death and the destruction of his father Theseus. In IA, lies lead not only to the death of Iphigenia but also to the abuse of Achilles’ name and his near death at the hands of the Greek army. Both Iphigenia and Achilles undergo a profound change of character and status as a result of their implication in Agamemnon’s marriage plot. Iphigenia is transformed into an unusual heroine, whereas Achilles fails to assume his heroic persona (cf. Chapter 3 under the headings ‘Iphigenia’ and ‘Achilles’). Writing and falsehood maintain their destructive power even when their instigator tries to avert their consequences. Agamemnon’s attempt to take control over his actions and to limit the damage they cause only serves to underscore his helplessness, bringing him to the unhappy position of having to invent new and more desperate lies to cover up the initial one. Like persuasion, lies can help characters escape, even momentarily, the consequences of their actions, but they also have far-reaching and devastating effects which are difficult to predict and impossible to avoid. Another tool that characters use to establish reciprocity with their interlocutors is friendship. In the Greek world, friendship is a culturally codified relationship involving rights and responsibilities related to support, solidarity, and co-operation.12 The world of the play shows how kinship relationships, traditionally seen as strong ties of friendship, break down: brothers quarrel, a husband turns against his wife, a father against his daughter, an army against their leaders, and Greeks against Greeks. The characters that invoke or seek to forge friendships in IA are those who can only succeed in their aims with the help of others. Menelaus, having lamented that Agamemnon is no longer a friend (404), explicitly associates friendship with problem-solving solutions: if Agamemnon is unwilling to help with the expedition, he warns, there will be other friends to help (413-14). Clytemnestra supplicates Achilles by pointing out that he is the only friend left to her (912), which is a powerful way of assigning moral responsibility to Achilles (though strictly speaking inaccurate since Achilles is 55

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis not really her son-in-law; cf. 981-2). Iphigenia makes the same claim about the young Orestes when she supplicates Agamemnon (1241-3; see Chapter 5). On the other hand, Achilles puts his friendship with Agamemnon above his promise to save Iphigenia by personal intervention (1019), in a way that exposes his preoccupation with status and undermines his commitment to Clytemnestra and his defence of his own stolen name (see Chapter 3). Friendship also features prominently in Iphigenia’s language when she changes her mind. In order to make the expedition possible, to save Achilles, and to restore the ties within her family (for instance by asking her mother not to hate her husband: 1454-7), Iphigenia declares ‘I should not be too much of a friend to my life’ (1385).13 A set of issues, which, like friendship, is discussed and debated throughout the play, relates to reason and irrationality. Reason, associated with intelligence, self-control and argumentative skills, is systematically extolled. Achilles, for instance, stresses its importance in his own decision to help Clytemnestra and in Clytemnestra’s attempt to approach Agamemnon (e.g. 922-3, 1011 and 1013). He also calls Iphigenia’s decision to die the result of careful deliberation and praises her for abandoning the idea of fighting with the gods (1407-9). On the other hand, irrationality is interwoven with madness, passion, and desire. Agamemnon speaks of the desire of Helen and Paris for each other (75), of Menelaus’ maddening desire at the realization of the loss of his wife (77), of the suitors’ eagerness to marry Helen (392), and of Greece’s sickness brought about by ‘some god’ (411). Similarly, Achilles speaks of Greece’s longing for the expedition (808-9) and Agamemnon of ‘some kind of Aphrodite’ maddening the army (1264). Agamemnon also juxtaposes the pitiful state he considers himself to be in with the madness he would display had he not loved his children (1255-6). Irrationality is a theme that brings together a wide range of seemingly unrelated issues such as personal passion and collective aggression, abnormal desire and military excess, myth and contemporary politics. As such, irrationality is systematically juxtaposed with the beneficial qualities of reason, good social 56

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4. Themes and Issues behaviour, and normal social practices such as the union of marriage. IA dramatizes the devastating but also inescapable power of irrationality in terms not altogether unfamiliar elsewhere in late fifth-century literature. Thucydides, for instance, likens the collective desire that seized the Athenian assembly to embark on the expedition against Sicily in 415 BC with erotic frenzy and associates it with patriotic fervour and the hope for material gain (6.23). Similarly, the plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC, focuses upon the madness of war and the desire for sex, which, in this play, are set against one another. An obvious Euripidean parallel for this exploration of reason and irrationality is in Bacchae, where the two themes are recast not in opposition to one another, as in IA, but in ways that challenge the distinctions between them.14 Other themes that become of focal attention in the play are those of freedom and necessity. Agamemnon declares to his brother that he is not his slave (330), but he then goes on to admit that he is trapped and yoked to necessity (443, 511) and that he is a slave to the masses (450). He also contrasts the obligations that ancestry, power, and decorum impose on him with the freedom of speech and emotional expression that people of low status can enjoy (16-28, 446-53). Achilles speaks of the army that accused him of being a slave to his proposed marriage (1354), and Iphigenia argues that through her sacrifice she will set Greece free (1383-4), celebrating the distinction between Greeks who are – and should remain – free, and barbarians who are slaves (1401). The concepts of freedom and necessity are brought up throughout the play, but their function remains opaque and perplexing, which is hardly surprising in a world where every attempt to effect change fails. It is far from certain, for example, that the necessity to which Agamemnon yields is real and not imagined, dictated by external circumstances and not by indecisiveness, self-victimization, or even selfishness. By contrast, both Iphigenia and Achilles speak as if they were free from restrictions when in fact they both face severe adversity, and have very limited room for movement. The freedom Greece enjoys or deserves is also problematized as it appears to depend upon the death of a young woman. 57

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis Fortune, good or bad, is often involved in contexts where necessity and freedom are explored, to emphasize the randomness and unpredictability of powers that human characters are unable to control (e.g. 56, 351, 441, 864).15 A constitutive part of their identity on which characters often draw to stir each other to action is their personal and family past. Patronymics and matronymics, for instance, are in abundance in the play and are usually associated with glamour, courage, and nobility.16 Menelaus, who is eager to set sail for Troy, accuses Agamemnon of not living up to the greatness of their father Atreus (406). Achilles encourages Clytemnestra to implore her husband, asking her to behave in a manner worthy of her father Tyndareus (1031-2). Both Menelaus and Achilles take an oath to their grandfathers, Pelops (473-4) and Nereus (948-9) respectively. Iphigenia begs her father to save her life in the name of his grandfather Pelops and his father Atreus (1233). Names derived from a character’s father or mother or their ancestors are used to encourage the character in question to take a certain action in the name of his or her illustrious family. This stratagem usually results in unsuccessful plans of action, and has an effect opposite to the one intended: rather than bridge the gap that separates the characters from their glamorous ancestors, it serves to accentuate it. For instance, Clytemnestra not only repeatedly associates Achilles with his heroic father Peleus and divine mother Thetis (e.g. 819, 836, 896), but also comes very near to calling him a god (911), a role that Achilles is all too happy to accept (973). This raises expectations about his power to save Iphigenia and makes his subsequent failure even more spectacular. Moreover, not all references to ancestors have unambiguously positive associations. References to notoriously treacherous and violent characters such as Atreus and Tantalus have an impact on the argument within which they are embedded that is not always beneficial. When Iphigenia, for instance, evokes Pelops and Atreus in her plea to Agamemnon at 1233, one is left to wonder how the dark family history of infanticide and curse can possibly support her case. Similarly, when Clytemnestra 58

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4. Themes and Issues accuses Agamemnon of killing Iphigenia by a trick ‘unworthy of Atreus’ at 1457, one is struck by the unintended irony of the reference to someone who not only killed the sons of his brother (Thyestes) but also served them to him as a meal.17 Another means that characters use to bind their interlocutors in reciprocal relations and to force them to endorse their views is memory. Menelaus tries to dissuade Agamemnon from cancelling the sacrifice by reminding him of the events which led to the current crisis, contrasting his own unfailing support and advice with Agamemnon’s unsteady mind, ambition, and arrogance (334-65). Similarly Clytemnestra reminds Agamemnon of her devotion as a wife despite the fact that he killed her first husband and child (1148-70). Iphigenia also tries to convince Agamemnon to spare her life by reminding him of their tender conversations when she was a small girl (1220-32). Past events feature prominently not only in the exchanges between the characters but also in the songs of the Chorus, which draw on the collective past of myth to provide yet another backdrop to the unfolding of the dramatic action.18 The failure of the personal or collective past to shape the present and the tension created by their disjunction highlight the futility of the characters’ attempts to overcome their isolation and to master time. The characters define themselves and each other and negotiate their position in the world of the play through moral and ethical standards and social values and norms, which, one by one, the plot comes to question. What it means to be a free man or woman, to have friends, to be rational and persuasive, they are all exposed as fragile, unstable, deceptive, and full of contradictions. As we will see next, the dramatic world in which the sacrifice of Iphigenia becomes inevitable is devoid not only of moral and ethical certainties but also of a firm and stable religious framework.

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5

Religion Religion is one of the areas of cultural activity with great significance for Greek tragedy at the levels of narrative composition, language, imagery, and performance. As a genre, tragedy evolved from religious songs and maintained its associations with ritual throughout the fifth century. For instance, it was performed in the context of a festival in honour of the god Dionysus. Gods who enjoyed sacrifices in contemporary religion appeared on stage as dramatic characters. Likewise, the mythological characters that would appear on the stage were often known to the audience as cult heroes, and many religious and cult practices were drawn upon by the dramatists, from sacrifices and prayers to libations and rituals of birth, maturation, marriage, and death. However, for all their importance to tragedy, religion and religious practices are not treated with awe in it. Rather they are deployed with boldness. They are made not only to echo the pervasive role of religion in fifth-century Athens, but also to provide a commentary on the uncontrollable and often incomprehensible or hostile forces that dominate the life of mortals and often inform their acts or behaviour.1 Iphigenia would be familiar to the original audience of Euripides’ play not only through her representations in literature and art but also as a priestess of Artemis in cult. The goddess Artemis had a central role in the myth of Iphigenia, and so did the prophet Calchas. In fact, given the play’s focus on a human sacrifice, the cultic associations between Iphigenia and Artemis, and the religious associations of tragedy as a genre, it is surprising that Artemis does not feature more prominently in the plot. Although the role of Artemis is restricted, for reasons which will be explored below, ritual and religion are systemati61

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis cally used either as a backdrop for, or as foil to, the dramatic action. Apart from the ritual act of supplication, there are three major religious practices which receive attention in the play: animal sacrifice, wedding rites, and funeral rites. These spheres of religious and cult activity are not independent from each other but bear similarities in terms of structure and imagery, which the play underscores and exaggerates. Iphigenia and Artemis in cult The worship of Iphigenia as a cult heroine both in Attica and elsewhere in the Greek world is well attested.2 In Attica, Iphigenia’s sanctuary was in Brauron, some 17 km south-east of Athens (see map). Here, as in other locations around the Greek world, Iphigenia was worshipped together with Artemis, goddess of birth, maturation, and death. As such Iphigenia was being offered the clothes of mothers who died at birth. But the cult of Artemis and Iphigenia at Brauron was also associated with an initiation ritual for girls who had not yet reached puberty. Girls aged five to ten would become ‘bears’ in the service of Artemis, a ritual thought to expiate the goddess for the accidental killing of a bear under her protection. The girls prepared themselves for their transition from childhood to adulthood by assuming temporarily a liminal and death-like status which evokes Iphigenia’s life-long devotion to Artemis as her priestess. In addition, the fifth-century audience of Euripides’ play may well have been familiar with the cults of Iphigenia in the neighbouring city of Megara (see map). Moreover, they would know of the temple of Artemis at Aulis, which they would associate with the origins of the Trojan War, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the story of the sacred deer which Agamemnon killed in the sanctuary of the goddess. The Athenian audience of the play would also be familiar with Iphigenia’s afterlife in the land of the Taurians in the Crimean peninsula of the Black Sea. Euripides’ contemporary Herodotus talks in his Histories of the local goddess whom the Taurians identify with the Greek Iphigenia (4.103). The production of Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians less than ten years before IA would certainly have 62

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5. Religion helped maintain the interest of the Athenians in the cultic connections of Iphigenia with the area north of Thrace, as would the economic and political interests of the Athenian alliance around the Hellespont and deep into the Black Sea. The religious status of Iphigenia as priestess of Artemis is not an element of the plot of IA, but it nevertheless provides an important backdrop for any understanding of the imagery of the play. Awareness of Iphigenia’s cults creates expectations regarding her miraculous escape and afterlife in the service of Artemis that the play does not engage with until the epilogue. On the other hand, Iphigenia’s religious associations with birth, death, and maturity provide a rich and complex nexus of ritual practices, beliefs, and ideas which, as will be argued below, the play weaves into its imagery. Artemis and other gods In several of Euripides’ plays, including Bacchae, the gods are all too present and all too powerful. Their interventions provide a platform for raising a wide range of questions regarding divine morality and cosmic justice. The role of Artemis is so central to the myth and cults of Iphigenia that her prominent position in a play like IA would probably be taken for granted by the audience. However, in contrast to previous versions of the story such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Artemis has a noticeably small role in IA. She is introduced casually (87-93),3 and the sacrifice that she demands is conditional: it is necessary only if the Greeks want to set sail to Troy (cf. 358-9). Agamemnon does not question or criticize Artemis’ demands (as Iphigenia does in Iphigenia among the Taurians 380-4). Rather, he declares that he will co-operate with Calchas, doing what the goddess wants (746-8). The motif of the winds withholding the fleet and necessitating the sacrifice similarly receives little attention.4 The fleet is held back through either lack of winds (10-11, 89) or contrary winds (1324-29). The whole issue is never explicitly connected to the arguments for or against the sacrifice. When Clytemnestra questions Agamemnon’s choice of the victim, she focuses her attention on 63

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis Agamemnon’s and the army’s decision-making rather than on Artemis’ demand (1192-1202). Similarly Iphigenia attributes the adverse winds to Zeus, rather than Artemis (1323-5). Artemis’ demand, then, is mediated through and given expression by the prophecies of Calchas which the characters repeatedly question, Odysseus’ manipulations, the pressure from the army to set sail to Troy, Agamemnon’s insecurity and uncertainty, the narrative skills of the messenger who reports Iphigenia’s miraculous disappearance, and Clytemnestra’s disbelief at the news of her daughter’s escape. There is a strong sense that Iphigenia is going to be sacrificed not because of Artemis, or because the gods are all too powerful, but because mortals demand it or are unable to avert it. Among the characters, it is only Iphigenia who seeks to establish a relation with Artemis by offering her body to her (1310-11, 1395-6) and inviting the Chorus to sing a song for her (1467ff.). The diminished role of Artemis in IA allows the drama of human motivation and responsibility to unfold yet more clearly. References to gods are not infrequent in the play but they are often confined to colloquial expressions, generalizations, and gnomic statements. Agamemnon evokes the gods in his despair at Menelaus’ opening of his letter (327), attributes to a god Menelaus’ good luck at losing Helen (390), and argues that the gods can tell when an oath is taken for the wrong reasons (394a). Clytemnestra wonders whether the gods are sensible/wise (1034). The Chorus speak of the ill will or anger of the gods, which the sacrifice will incur (1097). Once Iphigenia has decided to sacrifice herself, Achilles says that she has stopped fighting with the gods (1408) and earlier he has concluded that the desire of the army to set sail against Troy is due to the gods (808-9). With the exception of Artemis and Zeus, other gods are not referred to by name. The desire of the army to go to war is described as ‘a certain Aphrodite’ (1264), an expression reducing an anthropomorphic god to violent human urges defying rationalization. Elsewhere in the play, quite the opposite process can be observed, with an abstract concept being deified: Agamemnon attributes the oath that Helen’s suitors swore to ‘hope’, which, 64

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5. Religion he argues, must be a goddess (392). Clytemnestra wonders which of the ‘spirits of destruction’ has seized Agamemnon (878). Achilles similarly remarks that he will prove to have been born of such a being and not of Peleus, if he fails to save Iphigenia (946). Agamemnon also speaks of his personal divinity (1136). How such superhuman forces operate in the life of the characters remains unclear, as none of them make a stage appearance to display their power in the manner of Dionysus in Bacchae or Aphrodite and Artemis in Hippolytus. In IA, the gods, or divinities, appear as something more or less abstract, standing for anything that the characters perceive as capable of affecting their lives. Such generalized and abstract references to the divine do not just divert attention away from Artemis as a controlling power behind the plot. They also cast doubts over the power of traditional gods at large to shape human life. Of course the absence of a strong religious or moral universe within or against which the characters operate does not reduce their suffering, nor does it diminish their responsibility for their actions. For instance, Thetis, Achilles’ divine mother, is repeatedly mentioned by Clytemnestra first as a symbol of the social status of her wouldbe son-in-law, then as a token of his ability to save her daughter. Subsequently, Achilles himself boldly promises to ‘become a god’ for Clytemnestra (973-4) but he quickly undermines this claim with his unwillingness to exercise physical force and his delegation to her of the task of supplication of Agamemnon (1009-32). His mortality becomes all too clear when he comes close to being stoned to death, as Iphigenia is quick to observe (1392-3). A word is necessary at this point about the ending of the play and its implications for the role of Artemis.5 The surviving, probably non-genuine, epilogue is consistent with the rest of the play in that it keeps Artemis out of sight. Her divine intervention and Iphigenia’s miraculous escape are confined to a reported speech which may be powerful enough to restore the faith of some of the internal spectators of the scene in Artemis’ divine benevolence, but which Clytemnestra questions in her final lines. In its current version the epilogue provides a sense of restoration of the moral and religious order, but it also 65

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis confirms our feeling that the gods are distanced from the events enacted on stage. An alternative ending that would bring Artemis to the stage to narrate or foretell Iphigenia’s escape from the altar would certainly counterbalance the earlier absence of Artemis and the more general uncertainty about the role of the gods in the play. However, like other Euripidean gods from the machine, Artemis’ on-stage presence would probably raise questions about the arbitrariness of divine benevolence and the possibility of a satisfactory closure to the plot of the play which would be not too dissimilar to those raised by the epilogue we have.6 Human sacrifice The sacrifice of animals was one of the most important religious practices in ancient Greece. By contrast, the sacrifice of human beings was seen with mixed feelings of awe, curiosity, and revulsion. The only human sacrifice by Greeks to have allegedly taken place in the fifth century BC is attested to centuries later and is probably the product of fiction rather than facts.7 The Greeks thought human sacrifice was an act practised only in the distant past and on the periphery of the known world, for example in places such as Carthage or the Black Sea. They thought of it as a barbaric habit and a sign of lack of civilization but also (on the part of the victim) as the ultimate sign of altruism and devotion to the community. In Iphigenia among the Taurians, Iphigenia, who as a priestess of Artemis is forced to sacrifice foreigners at the altar of the goddess, feels the need to condemn the practice as totally uncivilized and to dissociate the goddess from it (e.g. 389-91). At the same time, Greek myths and rituals abound in examples of men and women who gave their lives to save their cities from war or plague. In Athens alone there were numerous heroines such as the daughters of Cecrops and Erechtheus, worshipped for having saved the city at a time of crisis. Such heroines could feature in funeral orations (and a little later in the orators) as paradigms of virtue and of devotion to the city, paralleling the death of soldiers on the battlefield.8 Sacrifice is 66

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5. Religion a ritual of exchange and aggression, a symbolic representation of violence, but also an attempt to contain and control violence. The individual victim is given to a deity in exchange for collective success but also becomes the target of collective aggression securing the survival of the community by fostering solidarity.9 Fifth-century Athenians’ conflicting feelings of horror and admiration towards human sacrifice are explored in IA at equal lengths. On the one hand human sacrifice is an abhorred, barbaric practice. On the other hand self-sacrifice is an ideal. The tragic sacrifice draws on both religious and civic discourses in ways that simultaneously affirm and put strain on religion and state ideology. Sacrificial victims appear often in Greek literature and art but nowhere as often as in late fifth-century tragedy (see Chapter 2). To judge from the extant plays, Euripides dealt with the theme of self-sacrifice more than the other two tragedians: Iphigenia appears in IA and Iphigenia among the Taurians, Polyxena in Hecuba, ‘Macaria’ in Children of Heracles, and Menoeceus in Phoenician Women. In all these cases a young, noble, and often female character decides to offer their life voluntarily to save a community in crisis. The reasons that necessitate the sacrifice, the reactions with which it meets, and the results it yields all differ. Generally speaking, the initial and instinctive horror at the thought of death (e.g. IA 1218-19, 1250-2, 1281-2) gives way to an idealistic devotion and commitment to a cause that transcends the individual and benefits the community. The sacrifice meets with opposition of various degrees and types, but once performed it is recognized as noble even if it raises new and disturbing questions: the idealism of the sacrificial victims is often set against the opportunism, cynicism, and lack of moral direction dominating the dramatic world that surrounds them. Despite the similarities between the various sacrificial victims in Euripides, the case of Iphigenia stands out for a number of reasons. Firstly, the theme of human sacrifice is developed much more elaborately in this play than anywhere else in Euripides. Secondly, the rhetoric of patriotism is used here not for a specific Greek city (such as Thebes or Athens) but for Greece at large. Thirdly, the sacrifice is for a war that has not yet begun and, 67

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis more importantly, a war that is neither defensive nor inevitable. There is no one here that needs to be saved from a plague or the enemy, except perhaps Helen, who willingly eloped with Paris. Fourthly, although the sacrifice fulfils its expected role as a mechanism for solidarity and order within the community, it also leads to the complete collapse of the family unit and the eruption of domestic violence as Clytemnestra warns Agamemnon of his future punishment. Fifthly, the play focuses on a victim who in previous literature was unwilling to give her life and who now appears to construct her own myth. Finally, the theme of the self-sacrifice is more systematically interspersed with elements of the wedding ritual than in any other play focusing on the premature death of a sacrificial victim. Euripides, in contrast with earlier dramatists and poets (see Chapter 2), is not so much interested in the decision-making and psychology of the person who performs the sacrifice (Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon), or in the reasons for which a divine force demands the sacrifice (Artemis in Cypria). In IA the emphasis is largely placed on the way in which the victim herself experiences and comes to terms with her fate (see Chapter 3). This appears to be a major departure from previous representations of Iphigenia as an unwilling victim and, although we cannot know how Sophocles dealt with her character (Chapter 2), it certainly makes good sense in the context of Euripides’ interest in voluntary sacrifice. Animal sacrifice The imagery and terminology of the representations of human sacrifice in Greek literature and especially tragedy draw on elements taken from different religious practices: both animal sacrifices and rituals related to marriage and death. As a salient feature of Greek religious practice, the sacrifice of animals accompanied many religious events, including those marking important moments in the life of the individual and the city. Animal sacrifices would take place at weddings and funerals but also at civic festivals (such as the Great Dionysia) and before battles. In all these cases the individual or the community sought to appease the 68

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5. Religion gods or spirits of the underworld and to reinforce the family or civic ties through communal gathering and feasting. The sacrifice of animals involves a number of ritualized stages: the preliminaries alone include the ceremonial guidance of the animal towards the altar, walking around the altar three times, tying a ribbon on the horns of the animal, pelting it with barley grains and sprinkling it with water (which secures the nodding of its head and is seen as a gesture of acquiescence reinforcing the sense that the ritual is orderly), cutting a lock of the animal’s hair, the revelation of the sacrificial knife which is hidden in the basket that the priest holds, and the prayer before the blow is struck.10 In literature and drama, the sacrifice of human beings, and especially young women, is closely modelled on that of animals.11 The preference for female victims is probably no coincidence, because at least some authors in classical Athens made a connection between the menstrual blood of young girls and the blood of freshly sacrificed animals.12 The similarities between the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the sacrifice of animals are evident in IA both when the sacrifice is actually described at length in the epilogue (1565-79) and earlier in the play when different characters visualize its details. For instance, references to the sacrificial knife (875, 1429), the lustral water, and the sacrificial barley grains (675, 955, 1111-12, 1470-2, 1479, 1513, 1517-18) abound. Iphigenia is compared to a young calf (1083), and she wears a wreath on her head just as hinds and heifers do (1477-9; cf. 1080-9). The exploitation of the similarities between the sacrifice of animals and the sacrifice of a human being shows how contemporary reality and the mythological past are made to interact in the play and how they come to be defined in terms of each other. The description of human sacrifice becomes more vivid and even claims for itself the same atmosphere of religious reverence and sanctity as animal sacrifices. On the other hand, there are plenty of signs throughout IA that the close proximity of human and animal victims is deeply problematic and abnormal. The characters reiterate this. As elsewhere in tragedy, this appropriation and distortion of ritual elements extends beyond animal sacrifice to include wedding and funerary rites. 69

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis Marriage and death Marriage and death are both important moments of transition in the life of the individual and as such they are invested with enormous social and religious significance, manifest in the elaborate rituals that accompany them. For all their differences, the rituals of marriage and death share a number of features which reflect the fact that they both focus on separation, transition, and submission to biological or social order. In both of them the (female) person concerned is bathed, adorned, veiled, crowned, and accompanied to her new home in a procession.13 The conflation of marital and death rituals is well attested in funerary epigrams and practices. For instance, when an unmarried girl dies, her death is described as ‘marriage to death’.14 This is not just a figure of speech, but in a sense literal as the young virgin is thought to depart from her home to unite with the (god of the) underworld. It is such concepts of ‘dying as a journey to the “house” of Hades’15 and of Hades as a husband of virgins that the characters repeatedly evoke in IA (460-2, 540, 1278), and that inform the ironies of both Iphigenia’s anticipated journey to her husband’s home in lines 664-71 and Clytemnestra’s inquiry about the arrangements of the wedding at 695-736. Also, it is the similarities between the rituals surrounding death and those of marriage that enable Agamemnon to delay the revelation of the plan of the sacrifice and to prolong his awkward lies and troubled silences. The connections between marriage and death are reinforced in the play through sacrificial imagery which conjures up associations of both marriage and war. The messenger who announces the unexpected arrival of Iphigenia refers to the army’s excitement at the prospect of her consecration to Artemis before her presumed wedding (433), when the audience is already aware of the central role of Iphigenia in the realization of the expedition. Later on, Agamemnon speaks of a sacrifice which it is necessary for him to make before he sets off for Troy (673), which Iphigenia associates with celebratory dances (676) like those the messenger earlier anticipated for her wedding (438). Towards the end of the play Iphigenia comes 70

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5. Religion to realize that she herself is going to become an early sacrificial victim for the expedition against Troy (1310-11), but this does not stop her from singing a celebratory hymn in honour of Artemis (1475ff.) rather than breaking out into a lament.16 As a bride, Iphigenia would wear a wreath (cf. 436, 905), but so will she as a sacrificial victim (1080, 1477, 1513, 1567). In IA, as in other tragedies such as Antigone, the similarities between wedding and funerary rituals are explored in a systematic way to bring out the complexity of the situation in which a young woman faces death before fulfilling her social role of becoming a wife and mother. They are exploited to underscore the ironies of Iphigenia’s position but also the ambiguities of the plot, and the different attitudes of the characters towards her sacrifice. The play questions not the social and religious practices of marriage and sacrifice but the framework of the play and the myth, a framework which turns the similarities between marriage and sacrifice into interchangeable qualities. Iphigenia herself presents the conflation of death and wedding imagery as some sort of solution to her drama. But the significance and weight of this solution are far from unproblematic.17 Iphigenia’s sacrifice may reaffirm the power of ritual practices to restore social solidarity and order. What it fails to do, however, is to address questions about the nature of the social order that Iphigenia strives to restore and the nature of the mythological tradition (on which see Chapter 2) with which it seeks to realign the plot. Supplication Another significant ritual of the play is supplication. Unlike the rituals of sacrifice, death, and marriage, supplication is a type of action which contributes less to the verbal imagery of the play and more to the development of its plot. Supplications involve the ritual kneeling of the suppliant in front of the person from whom they seek help and the clasping of his or her knee or chin.18 Supplications rely heavily on the ability of the suppliant to exercise rhetorical and emotional force by means of his or her arguments (see Chapter 4) and through physical contact (see Chapter 7). As such they usually constitute turning points in the 71

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis plot of a literary or dramatic narrative, calling for either the termination or the warding off of a crisis and the return to order. There are two supplication scenes in IA. The first takes place when Clytemnestra begs Achilles for help, falling on her knees and clasping his chin and beard (900, 909). She probably remains kneeling throughout Achilles’ long reply. Another supplication occurs in the fourth scene, where Iphigenia begs her father to save her life, falling on her knees and touching his chin (1216, 1247). In both cases the suppliant uses all the verbal and physical means of persuasion available to her, while also seeking the assistance of other suppliants. In the first scene Clytemnestra offers Achilles the option of calling Iphigenia out of the tent to supplicate him as well (992-6). In the second case Iphigenia invites her young brother, whom she holds in her arms, to supplicate Agamemnon for her – which is all the more telling because Orestes is too young to perform such an action (1241-8).19 Clytemnestra’s supplication is more successful than Iphigenia’s in that she is promised help whereas Iphigenia is not. However, as Achilles fails to protect Iphigenia, Clytemnestra’s attempt to change the plot proves as ineffective as her daughter’s. In IA, as in various other plays by Euripides where ritual supplication plays an important role, the success and failure of supplication depend not only on the respective qualities and power balance between suppliant and supplicated in it but also on the larger narrative context within which it takes place.20 Religious and ritual practices are prominent in the play, and their distortions and limitations offer a running commentary on its plot. The performance of ritual supplication, the conflation of wedding and funeral imagery, the persistent and disturbing associations between animal and human sacrifice, and the rather generalized and abstract references to the divine, pose challenges of various kinds to the spectators. As we will see next, the pressures of war play no small role in the way in which religious rites and rituals, like the moral and ethical values which were explored in the previous chapter, are dramatized in the play.

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6

Politics When Euripides probably left Athens in 408 BC (see Chapter 7), the city had been at war against Sparta and its allies for more than twenty years almost without interruption. In the course of this war Athens had suffered important blows, including a plague that cost many lives (one of the victims was Pericles, arguably the single most important Athenian politician in the second half of the fifth century) and a disastrous expedition against Sicily. More importantly perhaps, in the last few years before Euripides’ death civic conflict and unrest were manifest in violent clashes between democrats and oligarchs, moderates and reactionaries. A few important battles were still to take place before Athens was actually defeated in 404 BC, but the Persian support of the Spartans from 412 BC and the mistakes of military policy brought the end of Athenian supremacy closer than ever before. In early 404 BC, approximately two years after Euripides’ death and a year after the first performance of IA, Sparta imposed on Athens a pro-Spartan government of a group later called the Thirty Tyrants. Athens lost not only its independence and democracy but also its empire. It recovered in the fourth century to the extent that it managed to rebuild much of its naval power in the course of the so-called Second Athenian Confederacy, but the end of the Peloponnesian War was on all counts a low point in the history of the city.1 Coincidentally, this was also a moment when the death of Euripides in 407/6 BC, followed by the death of Sophocles a year later, meant that Athens had lost all three of its greatest tragedians. Aristophanes’ Frogs, performed in early 405 BC, attempts to register the implications of this loss for Athens not only in cultural terms, but also in terms of political significance: the 73

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis tragedians were not just artists but also teachers, enjoying honours and prestige for their ability to educate the spectators. The educational function of tragedy is widely attested in contemporary sources. However, the nature of the lessons it provided is far from straightforward.2 The way we assess the relation of the three tragedians (and their fellow dramatists) to the value system of the festival and the Athenian state has huge implications for the way we read their plays. Should IA be read as celebrating this value system or as undermining it? Does it or does it not seek to expose its shortcomings and ideological contradictions and if so to what degree? These are some of the questions this chapter will address. Fifth-century tragedy, unlike comedy, does not engage directly with the reality of the world outside the theatre. Allusions to the world of the spectators are unusual on the tragic stage and attempts to discover specific historical events or individuals between the lines of tragic characters are not a particularly fruitful route of critical inquiry. Although contemporary reality is not commented upon directly, the mythological world of tragedy often serves as a mirror in which the world of the audience refracts itself. IA engages with the reality of war, the themes of self-sacrifice and patriotism, the opposition between Greeks and barbarians, the idea of panhellenism, the tensions between the individual and the larger community, the distrust of prophets and politicians, and, at a more general level, the tension between rhetoric and politics, and the lack of a moral framework to define and legitimize action. This chapter will explore the institutional, cultural, and historical context within which the play was originally performed and with which it engaged. War It is not difficult to see why Iphigenia’s sacrifice mattered to the Athenian audience of the play’s first performance in the early spring of 405 BC: the play, performed at a time when the Peloponnesian War was about to come to an end, leaving Athens humiliated, without empire and without allies, dramatizes a war that is about to begin. It explores the pressures placed on social 74

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6. Politics norms which turn Greeks against each other and which condemn young and innocent people to death. IA does not explore a war between Greek city-states, like the Peloponnesian War. Rather it focuses on a war in which Greeks unite to fight against barbarians. Does the play condemn war at large, or does it present the war against barbarians as an attractive alternative to the internecine war between Athens and Sparta? IA has been seen as both a patriotic play celebrating the victory over the enemy and a pacifist or ironic play showing the absurdity of war and exposing the irrationality of war rhetoric and power politics. Some scholars argue that war is glamorized and romanticized in the play. ‘If there is any criticism of the Trojan War in our play, it is unemphatic nearly to the vanishing point. It would seem that Euripides has reshaped the story of the Greek fleet’s departure from Aulis to express the way he thought such a war should be conducted.’3 However, most scholars today agree that the glorification of war in the play, far from being unchecked, is assimilated to anti-barbarian chauvinism.4 Considering the emphasis in a number of Euripides’ plays on the problematic ethics of war and on the pain it inflicts, it is difficult to imagine how IA could be read as anything other than a poignant look at the workings and realities of military aggression.5 Death on the battlefield for the sake of one’s city is an idea which goes all the way back to Homer’s Iliad and the seventhcentury war-elegies of Tyrtaeus. In the fifth century, the concept of the death on the battlefield becomes an ideal that features prominently in the official ideology of the Athenian state as expressed, for example, in funeral orations (such as Pericles’ speech in Thucydides, 2.35-46).6 One of the pre-performance ceremonies in the festival of the City Dionysia was the procession of war orphans, to whom the city offered armour on their coming of age.7 IA, with its emphasis on patriotism and self-sacrifice, engages directly with this ideology. However the play distances itself from the world of the spectators in two respects. Firstly, it presents self-sacrifice not as a powerful metaphor for glorifying one’s death in battle, but as a gruesome ritual. Secondly, it associates self-sacrifice with a woman, rather than a man, as often elsewhere in Euripides. The transforma75

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis tions that self-sacrifice undergoes serve not to celebrate but to defamiliarize and to invite reflection on the value-system that it is made to uphold. Perhaps it is not accidental that Euripides revisited the concept of self-sacrifice on a number of occasions during the Peloponnesian War, when the logic and purpose of war must have come under intense scrutiny.8 An issue closely bound up with war is that of the opposition between Greeks and barbarians. Throughout the fifth century, the stories around the Trojan War were appropriated in literature, drama, and art as a mythological (the Greeks would think of it as ‘historical’) parallel to the contemporary opposition between Greeks and Persians.9 Both in drama and in contemporary culture the opposition between Greeks and Trojans is articulated not only in ethnic terms but also through evaluative gender stereotypes. The victorious Greeks are often presented as masculine and disciplined in opposition to the defeated, effeminate, and unruly Trojans. In many of Euripides’ plays such as Hecuba, Andromache, Trojan Women, and Helen, such oppositions are systematically challenged as simplistic and problematic. In Trojan Women we are presented with glimpses of the horror of war from the point of view of the Trojan captives. In Helen it is the victorious Greeks who must come to terms with the futility of a war they have conducted for Helen’s phantom. In IA stereotypes about the superiority of the Greeks over the barbarians are not always dismissed. As Iphigenia proudly declares at 1401, Greeks are free and barbarians slaves.10 Similarly, Achilles associates Agamemnon’s deception and Menelaus’ cowardice with the barbaric origin of their greatgrandfather Tantalus from the Asian mountain of Sipylus (952-4 and 970-1). However, the army’s aggression in anticipation of the expedition and Agamemnon’s inability to keep it under control make abundantly clear that the Greeks are no less cowardly, deceptive, unruly, and bloodthirsty than barbarians. Panhellenism The idea that Greek city-states have more in common with one another in terms of language, culture, and institutions than with 76

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6. Politics non-Greeks never became as powerful as the ideology of nationalism in modern nation states. However, both the panhellenic festivals of Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea and the popularity of epic poems such as the Iliad and the Odyssey around the Greek world shed light on different aspects of an emerging Hellenic ethnic identity. In the early decades of the fifth century this identity developed through the confrontation with and defeat of a common enemy, the Persians. In the aftermath of the wars, the need for Greek solidarity against the continuing Persian threat was exploited by Athens and Sparta, the superpowers of the time, for the consolidation of their supremacy over the rest of the Greek world. By the end of the fifth century, when the Peloponnesian War had torn the Greek world apart – with the political interference and financial backing of the Persian king – ‘panhellenism’ emerged as an appeal to an expansionist war against barbaric Asia which would unite the Greek citystates and put an end to their divisions. It is in this sense that fourth-century panhellenism would establish itself as a political vision and a rhetorical theme, gaining famous supporters such as the orators Lysias and Isocrates, but also playing a role in the expeditions of Alexander the Great against Asia.11 At the end of the fifth century it was primarily the sophists, above all Gorgias, who capitalized on the glory of the Persian Wars and the misery of the Peloponnesian War to popularize the idea of a united Greek expedition against the Persian empire. Gorgias delivered a speech on the subject at the well-chosen venue of the Olympic Games (perhaps in 408 BC). The theme of panhellenism was also explored by dramatists such as Aristophanes in Lysistrata (411 BC) and poets like Timotheus in his citharodic song Persians (c. 410-407 BC).12 In IA the rhetoric of the panhellenic is constructed through a complex web of often gendered metaphors which range from victimization to aggression. Greece is assigned different and often competing roles. It can be seen as a woman which, like Helen, must be set free (1273), is in need of help (410) and of a benefactor (1446), and for whom countless soldiers are prepared to fight and die (1389). But Greece also becomes a synonym for the army, taking revenge for the loss of Helen 77

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis (270-2), being brought to Troy with spears and ships (588-9), seized by a desire for the expedition (808-9), enslaving Agamemnon (1269-72), and looking, ‘in all its greatness’, to Iphigenia (1378). Moreover, Greece becomes a substitute for Artemis when Iphigenia offers her body to it (1397), and rivals Achilles when it takes Iphigenia away from him (1406). The theme of panhellenism is first introduced by the Chorus in their entry-song when they refer with great admiration to the warriors assembled from all over Greece. It is then taken up by Menelaus to support his argument that Helen must be returned (especially 350, 370-2). After its almost complete absence for several hundred lines it is brought up again by Agamemnon in defence of his inability to save his daughter and to stop the expedition (especially 1260-75). Finally it becomes of focal interest when appropriated by Iphigenia in the speech in which she discusses the reasons for which she wants to die (especially 13781401). There are two observations that need to be made on the function of panhellenism in the play. Firstly, it is ignored for large chunks of the narrative and gains momentum only as the narrative advances, and the sacrifice becomes inevitable. Secondly, the rhetoric of panhellenism is closely bound up with the needs and desires of the characters who introduce it. The idealism of the Chorus, Menelaus’ selfishness, Agamemnon’s indecisiveness and cowardice, Iphigenia’s youthful naivety and enthusiasm, as well as her response to pressure, are all elements which inform and condition the force of panhellenism in the play. IA engages with a concept that must have been popular at the time it was first performed. It does not celebrate this concept as powerfully as it could have done, yet neither does it dismiss it altogether. Rather it exposes the associations of panhellenism with a complex nexus of interrelated issues which include collective ideals and personal interests, enthusiasm and cynicism, naivety and aggression.13 Mass and elite The City Dionysia was one of the greatest festivals of fifthcentury Athens, an event not only religious but also political and cultural. It was the venue in which thousands of people 78

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6. Politics gathered from all over Attica and beyond. The audience of the dramatic competitions included various social and ethnic groups including foreign representatives, immigrants, and perhaps women and slaves. But the vast majority and target audience of the plays was the adult, male citizens and soldiers of Athens who attended the festival to be entertained and educated, to see and be seen, and to affirm their collective identity as the body and soul of one of the most powerful city-states of the Greek world.14 Yet the official ideology of fifth-century democracy that the festival served, which promoted equality and unity, was not exactly consistent with the reality of late fifth-century politics and warfare. Tensions between democrats and conservatives, and between masses and their political, religious, or military officials, were not rare, and would often lead to widespread manifestations of unlawfulness and irrationality. That was particularly true for the turbulent years of the Peloponnesian War. The army of IA is not modelled on the Athenian army or assembly of late fifth-century Athens. However, it does offer reflections on the role of the multitude in contemporary politics and warfare, both in terms of their power and also in terms of their manipulability and volatility. The Greek army is represented in conflicting ways, at times as a nightmarish reality, at times as an ideal: it is an impatient and unruly mob which can be manipulated by skilful and immoral politicians but also a panhellenic force fighting for justice and freedom. The enthusiasm of the Chorus and the excitement of the army for the expedition recall the inexperienced and excitable mass which, according to Thucydides (2.8.1 and 6.24.3), eagerly looked forward to the Peloponnesian War and opted for the disastrous Sicilian expedition.15 Agamemnon’s claim that the army will turn against Argos and raze it to the ground in revenge for his failing to keep his promise to sacrifice his daughter (531-5, 1267-72) is not as outrageous as it has sometimes been argued. Rather it echoes historical practices used against allied cities which revolted in the course of the Peloponnesian War.16 The play engages with late fifth-century anxieties about the power of the many and the threat it can pose to the well-being of indi79

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis viduals and society. The changeability of the masses and the unpredictability of their reactions play an important role in establishing fortune as a dominant factor in IA, just as they do in Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War.17 Like the power and volatility of the masses, distrust of politicians is a popular theme in the theatre of the last few decades of the fifth century. During this period Pericles’ age was often idealized and it was not uncommon for his successors to be viewed as a series of politicians and demagogues ready to compromise on anything for power, glory, and money. Aristophanes targeted such individuals systematically in his comedies. In IA it is Odysseus who appears to please the crowds and to instil enthusiasm in them for dubious reasons, and in this he resembles demagogues who had the power to sway the crowd in the Athenian assembly.18 Agamemnon is another character portrayed in contemporary colours. Menelaus speaks of his brother’s ‘election campaign’, his desire to succeed, and his willingness to use violence and to lie even to his own family to achieve his purpose. Agamemnon’s fear of responsibility and his inability to control the army may not be pathetic, as has often been argued, but suggestive of a historical and cultural context where army leaders could be punished by death for falling short of expectations: that was certainly what the Athenian assembly decreed for the generals who, in bad weather, failed to collect the corpses of Athenian sailors after a victorious sea-battle against the Spartans at Arginusae in 406 BC – only a few months before the first performance of IA.19 Agamemnon’s desire to escape his public role and his flirting with the idea of the trouble-free life of his servant can also be linked to the wider cultural context of the late fifth century (see also Chapter 3). Escapist tendencies are a rather common feature in the literature and drama of a time when private life, away from the obligations and corruption of the city, is often idealized.20 The play scrutinizes the shortcomings of traditional role models and authority figures such as the father, the leader, and the warrior, exposing their inability, under the strain of war, to maintain their importance and to hold together the social institutions and values they are supposed to serve.21 The pressures 80

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6. Politics put on all types of authority could not leave unaffected the representatives of the gods. At a time when the divine fails to provide guidance and protection, the ability of prophets to interpret the past and predict the future comes under attack. The accusations that Calchas attracts of unreliability, venality, political ambition, and conspiratorial behaviour reflect the distrust of prophets that appears elsewhere in Euripides (including the contemporary Bacchae, 255-7), in Sophocles (e.g. Antigone, 1055-6), and in other authors writing in the second half of the fifth century, especially during the Peloponnesian War.22

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Performance Date and venue The play was first performed in Athens, in the Theatre of Dionysus, which can still be visited below the Acropolis rock on its south-east side. It was performed in the festival of the Great Dionysia which was held in late March each year. The most likely date for the first performance is 405 BC, a year after Euripides’ death, but 404 is also possible.1 According to his ancient biographers, Euripides died in the kingdom of Macedon in the north of Greece (see map) in the winter of 407/6, having spent the last two years of his life at the court of the Macedonian king Archelaus.2 IA was probably one of the last plays that Euripides wrote in his forty-year-long career and, together with Bacchae, the very last of his seventeen surviving plays. Euripides was not the only Athenian dramatist of the fifth century to travel (or to be thought to have travelled) outside Athens. Aeschylus visited the island of Sicily on the invitation of the tyrant Hieron I, and died there, having written at least one play specifically for performance on the island. There are various reasons why Euripides might have left Athens after the first performance of his Orestes in the early spring of 408. Ancient commentators speculated about his dissatisfaction with the political atmosphere in Athens at the time, his relative lack of success at the theatrical festivals – he won only five victories, one of them posthumously, during a career that spanned over five decades – but also the honour (which we should not discount) attached to a possible invitation by Archelaus, king of Macedon.3 Whatever the reason, real or imagined, the kingdom of Macedon was certainly an attractive destination for a drama83

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis tist at the end of the fifth century. During the reign of Archelaus, Macedon had become a politically and economically powerful centre on the periphery of the Greek world that was keen to foster links with the Greek city-states. Macedon attracted a number of poets, dramatists, and other intellectuals. Thucydides, for instance, was in Macedon in the last decade of the century, as was the painter Zeuxis, the lyric poet Timotheus, and Euripides’ younger contemporary Agathon, who also produced plays there.4 We know that at least one of Euripides’ plays, Archelaus, was commissioned for performance in Macedon, focusing on the ancestor of the Macedonian king. Archelaus must have been performed in one of the cultural and administrative centres of the kingdom: Pella, Dion, or Aegae.5 According to ancient sources, at least one other play by Euripides had been previously performed outside Athens, namely Andromache in the late 420s.6 Was IA composed in Athens or in Macedon? What audience was it meant for? IA’s exploration of political and social issues such as patriotism, military expansionism, and panhellenism, may well have been the product of Euripides’ distancing from, and reflection on, Athenian and more largely Greek politics from the geographical, cultural, and political point of view of the Macedonian kingdom. Moreover, a play with so much emphasis on ritual would have arguably made more out of Iphigenia’s cultic associations with Brauron in Attica, if it was intended for an Athenian audience. In other plays by Euripides such as Iphigenia among the Taurians (e.g. 1449-61), the religious associations of the mythological characters with Athens are given greater attention. But such evidence cannot be conclusive: the whole issue of the intended audience and venue of the play cannot be anything but speculative. The fact remains that IA, together with the other two plays of late Euripides, was rehearsed and performed in Athens to win the first prize at the Great Dionysia of 405. According to an ancient note on Aristophanes’ Frogs 67, the play was produced by the son (or nephew) of Euripides with the same name.7 The posthumous victory of the last plays of one of Athens’ greatest dramatists shows the huge prestige that Euripides enjoyed in the city at the 84

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7. Performance end of the fifth century and must have contributed to the awareness of the Athenians, enhanced by Aristophanes’ Frogs, that an important era of tragedy as a genre had come to an end. The trilogy For most of the fifth century tragedians would compete with sets of four plays consisting of three tragedies followed by a satyr drama. IA was performed together with what is today considered as Euripides’ last masterpiece, Bacchae, and the now lost Alcmaeon in Corinth. It is not known whether the three tragedies were accompanied by a satyr play. Nor is it clear whether they were meant to form a trilogy, or even whether they were complete at the time of Euripides’ death, an issue that will be discussed in more detail below. Moreover we do not know in what order the three plays were performed. If the order in which they are mentioned in the ancient note on Aristophanes’ Frogs has any validity, IA was performed first, followed by Alcmaeon in Corinth and Bacchae. The nocturnal setting of the prologue of IA (especially 4-15) makes the possibility that it was performed first, that is, in the early morning, more likely. At first sight IA and Bacchae could not have been more different in setting and atmosphere. IA is characterized by plot reversals, turbulent politics, and moral corruption, which are features it shares with other late plays of Euripides such Orestes but not with the world of religion and ritual of Bacchae. Both in form and content, IA anticipates the fourth century, its political realities, and the further evolution of drama as an art form. By contrast, the traditional and formal elements of style, structure, and content of Bacchae mark a different attitude towards tragedy, which has often been seen as archaizing.8 It is no coincidence, then, that the two plays have never been performed together on the modern stage (see Chapter 8) and that some of the preoccupations they share have been overlooked in modern scholarship. Both plays prepare for and culminate in the death of a young character central to their plot: Pentheus in Bacchae, Iphigenia 85

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis in IA. Both plays explore the implications of this death for the victim him/herself but also for other characters in their immediate environment and in the wider community. The death of the protagonist exposes the competing and mutually exclusive interests of family and society, and foregrounds gender and generation conflicts: Bacchae ends with the triumph of the civic religion of Dionysus and the destruction of the royal family of the city of Thebes; and IA ends with the successful departure of the panhellenic fleet and Agamemnon’s family in ruins. Both plays dramatize the path of an important character to her or his destruction by means of perverted ritual imagery and action: Pentheus walks out to his death dressed as a female follower of Dionysus, Iphigenia as a bride. Iphigenia may be too quick to be persuaded by the panhellenic rhetoric of her father, whereas Pentheus resists the religious rhetoric of Dionysus until it is too late. Both characters give in to forces beyond their control. In both plays the mothers of the protagonists are central to the plot and its resolution. Clytemnestra fights to save her daughter whereas Agave kills her son in Dionysiac frenzy. They both end up lamenting the fate of their offspring which they cannot avert. Pentheus resembles also another character of IA, Achilles: like Achilles, he is young, ambitious, and stubborn, with rigid views about his identity and the world around him, and unable to accommodate change and to prevent (self-) destruction. The archaizing Bacchae dramatizes the forces that assure or threaten the identity of the individual and the city-state. The city of Thebes, a city represented by the primarily female worshippers of Dionysus, is saved at the expense of its male king and his family. The modernizing IA dramatizes the futile resistance of a young princess and her family against a male community that transcends the boundaries of the city-state and stands for Greece as a whole. For all their differences, the two plays share similar preoccupations with gender and with the encounter between the individual and the collective, politics and religion, the family and larger communities. Our knowledge of Alcmaeon in Corinth is very fragmentary, and any connections with IA and Bacchae in terms of themes 86

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7. Performance and structure can only be made with great caution. The play dramatized the recognition and reunion between Alcmaeon and his two children. Both children were brought up in the palace of Corinth, his daughter as a slave and his son as a prince and heir to the throne. When Alcmaeon arrives in Corinth to find his children, he discovers that the female slave accompanying him is his own daughter whom the childless queen of Corinth sold from fear that her husband might want to marry her. In a series of dramatically powerful scenes, the girl is recognized by the Corinthian king Creon, Alcmaeon is seized by frenzy, and then confronts a Creon who refuses to disclose the identity of Alcmaeon’s son. The family is eventually reunited, and the royal couple are punished with exile. Like IA and Bacchae, Alcmaeon in Corinth focuses on a family tragedy based on misrecognitions and deception. But unlike these plays it has a happy ending. It explores not the breakdown of family bonds but their reconstitution. Deception is a weapon used not within the family but upon it from the outside. The responsibilities of fatherhood must have been central to the play, with the difference that, unlike Agamemnon, Alcmaeon is successfully reunited with his children.9 Setting Aulis is situated on the Boeotian side of the Euripus strait that separates the island of Euboea from the Greek mainland (see map). At the time when the play was first performed, Aulis was probably just a village, but also an important harbour of Boeotia. It was well known for Artemis’ temple, whose remains are still visible today, but also as the harbour from which the poet Hesiod made the crossing to Euboea.10 Most famously, though, Aulis was known as the place from which the Greek fleet departed in its expedition against Troy. The huge symbolic significance with which Aulis was invested in ancient Greece because of the Trojan War is evident in the numerous stories of military leaders who used it as a starting point for ambitious expeditions. The Aeolians were said to have set sail from here to Asia.11 In 397 BC, only a few years after the first performance 87

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis of IA, the Spartan king Agesilaus, who compared himself to Agamemnon, attempted to make a sacrifice here before setting off to Asia.12 And in 364 BC the Theban general Epaminondas used Aulis as his naval base.13 When the women of the Chorus from the nearby town of Chalcis, just three miles away on the other side of the channel (cf. 166-7, 1493), arrive at the harbour through the sacred grove of Artemis (185-6), they combine pilgrimage with sightseeing in a way that may not have been entirely unusual at the time of Euripides. Aulis may well have been popular with tourists in the fifth century – though surely not as important religiously and politically as Apollo’s temple at Delphi, visited by the female Chorus in the Ion.14 The play starts before sunrise (4-16) in front of Agamemnon’s tent (12) in the army camp at the harbour of Aulis (14). The convention of the plot starting before dawn is common in Greek tragedy but it is not a secure indication for the actual time of the performance. Similarly, the reference to the star Sirius and the Pleiades constellation in the night sky (6-8) suggests that the action is set in the summer, the time when military expeditions take place, rather than early spring when the play was actually performed. Even if the nocturnal setting of the play and the tranquillity of the environment, which includes the silence of the birds and the lack of winds, a quiet sea, and the immobile guards on the walls (9-15), do not correspond to the time when the play was performed, they certainly have a very clear dramatic role in that they contrast sharply with the restless and distressed Agamemnon and the emergency of the situation. The stage building, which often in Greek tragedy represents a palace, stands here for the temporary dwellings of the leader of the expedition. The stage building is called a tent (12) but also a house (1, 678, 685, 1098, 1532), and its entrance is referred to as ‘gates’ (317, 803, 862), a word which in tragedy usually refers to palace doors. It can be imagined as something more elaborate than a shelter of animal skins, although the different terms used to describe it point to a stage building with few or no visual markers of identity. Iphigenia and Clytemnestra treat it as a home in which they find protection away from the eyes of the soldiers, whereas the male characters 88

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7. Performance approach it as the headquarters of the Greek fleet. The temporary dwelling of the warrior is also the setting of other Greek tragic plays. Sophocles’ Ajax is set in front of Ajax’ tent, and Rhesus, attributed to Euripides but probably not his, is set in front of Hector’s tent. This type of setting goes back to the Iliad, where many scenes are set in front of or inside the tents of Achilles and Agamemnon. The camp by the sea is another familiar tragic setting. Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women are set in the Greek camp in the aftermath of the sack of Troy. The camp at Aulis may first seem to the Chorus like a miniature version of the Greek world in all its glamour (164-302), but it soon turns out to be a no-man’s land, a masculine world of politics and war which contrasts sharply with, and can even threaten, the safety, permanence, and fixedness of the civic order and domestic harmony of Argos (531-5, 1267-8). As a counter-community, the camp is not an appropriate place for girls like Iphigenia, as her father points out (678-9; cf. 995-7), or for ladies like Clytemnestra, as both Achilles (825-6, 1029-30) and she herself (913-15) note. It is a male, threatening, claustrophobic, moneyand power-hungry world.15 Actors and acting Like all tragic plays in the second half of the fifth century, IA was first performed with three professional male actors who shared among them all the speaking parts, a group of fifteen amateur, but intensively trained, men of Athens who played the Chorus, and a group of extras who played mute servants and followers. The actors were allocated to the dramatists by lot. One actor must have played the roles of Agamemnon and Achilles. A second actor played the parts of the old servant, the messengers, and Iphigenia. The third actor played the roles of Menelaus and Clytemnestra. Only the principal actor would compete for the best prize but, in a play where no character significantly outweighs the others in terms of stage presence, it is difficult to tell whether the roles he would go for are those of Agamemnon and Achilles or that of Iphigenia. 89

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis The assignment of multiple roles to the same actor has certain implications for the audience’s perception of the characters in question. For instance, the fact that Agamemnon and Achilles were played by the same actor underlines the similarities between two characters who antagonize each other and who both try and fail to save Iphigenia. Menelaus and Clytemnestra have contrasting motives and aims, but share their hostility towards Agamemnon’s plans and attempt to make him change his mind. The actor playing Iphigenia, the old servant, and the messengers brings together figures that, in terms of age and status, are all marginal and all find themselves involved in an extraordinary situation.16 If the three actors had different vocal tones, the actor whose voice had the highest pitch would probably play Iphigenia, who sings two arias.17 The same actor would probably play the effeminate Dionysus and the old prophet Tiresias in Bacchae, and perhaps the daughter of Alcmaeon in the play that bears his name. The actor who played the male roles of Agamemnon and Achilles would probably play Pentheus in Bacchae and Alcmaeon in the third play of the trilogy. The text of IA is rich in details regarding the movements, gestures, posture, and appearance of the actors. Such details shed light on characterization, plot, and themes. Jones talks of the pains taken by Euripides ‘to plot the stages of change and contradiction through facial expression and gesture and the subtle personal language of mood’.18 In his encounter with Menelaus, Agamemnon declares that he will not raise his glance ‘too high in a shameless manner’ (379) and proceeds to accuse his brother of puffing up, his eyes bloodshot with rage (381). Iphigenia invites her father to unfurrow his brow and smooth his face (648). These may be mere manners of speaking but the possibility that they were visualized through codified movements of the head and the body cannot be discarded. References to eye-contact and to tears also abound in the play. A guilt-ridden Agamemnon asks himself how he will receive Clytemnestra and with what expression (lit. ‘eye’) he will meet her (455). He also notes that Clytemnestra’s and 90

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7. Performance Iphigenia’s distress is noticeable in their eyes (1128), just as Iphigenia earlier points out that her father doesn’t give a happy impression when looking at her (644). Agamemnon can hardly withhold his tears at the news of Iphigenia’s arrival in Aulis, and Menelaus speaks of his own tears at the sight of his distressed brother (451-2, 477-8). When Iphigenia first meets Agamemnon, she notices his distress by the tears running down his face (650). In the scene of her supplication of her father, it is first Agamemnon who draws attention to her tears, followed by Iphigenia herself who also invites her baby brother to cry with her to gain Agamemnon’s pity (1122-3, 1214-15, 1242). Shortly before she leaves the stage for the final time, Iphigenia also asks Clytemnestra why she is weeping silently (1433). The realistic representation of facial expressions, eye contact, and the shedding of tears are of course incompatible with the convention of the theatrical mask and ill-suited to the large open-air space of the classical theatre. However, the posture of the actor’s body and skilful use of the mask and gesture against or away from the sunlight can help the articulation of the emotions which feature so prominently in the text. When, for instance, Agamemnon points out that Iphigenia is no longer looking at him with pleasure but casts her eyes on the ground, drawing her mantle before her face, she is most likely keeping her veiled head lowered (1122-3). Later on, it is Iphigenia who asks Agamemnon to look at her (1238), which suggests that he has turned his face (and perhaps his whole body) away from her. Bodily displays of the characters’ inability to come to terms with the dramatic reality appear also in narrative passages. The messenger at the end of the play refers to the Greek army lowering its eyes at the moment of the sacrifice and more famously describes the grief-stricken Agamemnon turning his face away and covering it with his cloak (154750). This striking image, earlier prepared for by Agamemnon’s refusal to look at his suppliant daughter (especially 1238), was immortalized around the time of the play’s first production by the painter Timanthes. The relation 91

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis between the passage and Timanthes’ much admired but now lost painting (described by the Roman orator Cicero in Orator 22.74, and imitated widely in the ancient world; see, for instance, Fig. 1), is obvious – though it is not possible to tell which came first. Another vivid description of Agamemnon’s emotional turmoil appears at the beginning of the play, when the old servant speaks of Agamemnon’s restlessness, of his tears, and of the tablet which he keeps writing and erasing, sealing and breaking open again, and throwing on the ground, at the light of the lamp (34-41).

Fig. 1. The sacrifice of Iphigenia, wall painting, c. AD 70, House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii, VI 8, 13.

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7. Performance Moments of heightened emotional intensity are sometimes accentuated through gestures that aim specifically at establishing physical contact between characters. Following the news of Iphigenia’s arrival in Aulis, Menelaus invites Agamemnon to clasp his hand, and Agamemnon consents (471-2). This is intended as a gesture of symbolic reconciliation between the two brothers in view of the grim prospect of Iphigenia’s death, but it signposts a new stage of their exchange in which they once again find themselves taking opposite directions. The very first words Iphigenia utters in the play are about her desire to throw herself into the arms of her father (635-6), while later in her exchange with Agamemnon it is he who invites her to kiss him and to give him her hand (679). The embrace of father and daughter visualizes the strong bond between them but also stresses the gap that separates Agamemnon’s role as a leader from his role as a father. Later on, it is Clytemnestra who attempts to clasp Achilles’ hand as a proud mother-in-law who seeks to seal her daughter’s wedding (831-2). Eighty lines later, Clytemnestra, who has now discovered Agamemnon’s plan, repeats her attempt to establish physical contact with Achilles, this time by clasping his right hand and chin as a humble suppliant who desperately needs his help (909). In this play, as often in tragedy, silences are a powerful dramatic device for the articulation of meaning.19 Agamemnon welcomes Clytemnestra and Iphigenia to Aulis with a pregnant silence of distress, embarrassment, and guilt. He is on stage from line 630 (if not from 607), but he does not speak until 641, after his wife and daughter have addressed him. As Mastronarde puts it, ‘Agamemnon may have withdrawn slightly, and in any case there is a dramatic point in his silence and in postponing direct contact’.20 Similarly, Achilles reacts to the revelation of Agamemnon’s plot at 873 with a silence to which Clytemnestra draws attention at 896. Whether it is a silence of indignation, anger, or perplexity, Clytemnestra is quick to point out that he is responsible for Agamemnon’s abuse of his name. In the ensuing scene of Clytemnestra’s supplication of Agamemnon, the device of silences is exploited again. A distressed Iphigenia enters the stage tearful and veiled 93

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis at 1117 and remains silent for more than ninety lines, down to 1211. Another character reduced to silence is Agamemnon, though his silence is filled with shame and guilt – as both Clytemnestra points out and he himself admits at 1142-5. Iphigenia goes silent again in the following scene of the agitated dialogue between her mother and Achilles. However, the urgency of the situation makes her set aside the inhibition and shame that seize her at the sight of her would-be-husband (1340-2). Iphigenia strikingly breaks her twenty-five-line silence in the middle of 1368, to deliver her longest speech in the play and to change the direction of the plot. Later in the same scene it is a distressed Clytemnestra who goes silent at 1466, this time at the prospect of Iphigenia’s imminent sacrifice and at her request not to mourn for her. Finally it is with a very different type of silence, signifying indignation and anger, that Clytemnestra meets ‘Agamemnon’s conciliatory and buoyant words’ (1621-7) in the concluding scene of the play.21 Entrances and exits Numerous ‘stage directions’ embedded in the text serve as signals for the entrance and exit of characters. In the very first line of the play, Agamemnon calls the old servant to come out of the tent. At 440 he requests that the messenger who announces the arrival of Iphigenia go inside, as he also does with Iphigenia herself at 685. Clytemnestra asks her daughter to come out to supplicate Agamemnon at 1117. Clytemnestra hears Achilles from inside the tent and emerges at 819-20. Here I will look at the few entrances and exits which become the focus of attention because they are unexpected, delayed, cancelled, imposed upon, or because they mirror one another for dramatic purposes. When characters enter the tragic stage unannounced or unexpectedly, a change of direction in the plot is usually under way.22 The entrance of Menelaus and the old servant in the middle of their quarrel over Agamemnon’s tablet (303) may set a light tone strikingly at odds with the secrecy and urgency of the preceding prologue and the joyous song of the Chorus with its epic associations, but it also brings the play a step closer to 94

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7. Performance its tragic denouement. Similar is the function of the messenger’s unannounced entrance and his interruption of Menelaus in the middle of a line to deliver the news of Iphigenia’s arrival (414).23 Another character whose unexpected and hasty entrance marks a new direction in the plot is Achilles (801). He himself expects Agamemnon or a servant to come out of the stage building (802-3), but it is Clytemnestra who appears instead (819), to Achilles’ great surprise. In less than forty lines’ time, a third unexpected person makes his appearance, the old servant who steps out of Agamemnon’s tent (855). As Halleran puts it, ‘[u]sing the entrance of the wrong person twice in such proximity, Euripides underscores the sudden turn of events, and creates a tension that builds up and reaches its peak in the inevitable encounter of husband and wife (1106ff)’.24 The unexpected entrance of the old servant would probably be more powerful if he stepped out of a second, so far inactive, door of the stage. That would also make more marked Achilles’ decisive direction towards the central door (853-4), and its subsequent cancellation when the old servant asks him to wait (857).25 One of the highlights of the play must have been the entrance of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia on a carriage, followed by the transportation of Iphigenia’s dowry into Agamemnon’s tent. The travelling carriage was probably pulled into the stage by horses (rather than mules or mute extras: 422, 613, 619, 620, 623). Lavish entrances with chariots are not very common in Greek tragedy, which makes them very impressive when they do take place, conveying as they do a sense of status and glamour.26 In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, for instance, Agamemnon returns from Troy on a chariot in the company of his war-slave Cassandra. In Euripides’ Electra, Clytemnestra arrives by chariot at the poor farmhouse where Electra supposedly gives birth. In both cases the visual display of power and wealth contrasts sharply with the fate that awaits the characters, namely death, but as an act of hubristic arrogance it also prepares for it. In IA the effect of the scene with the carriage is rather different. The scene helps establish the social status of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, creating an atmosphere of excite95

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis ment in anticipation of the wedding. It also helps the audience to visualize the world of peace, harmony, and female decorum from which Clytemnestra and Iphigenia come and its contrast with the military world of the army camp where they have just arrived and where Iphigenia will meet her death. Iphigenia’s first entrance on the stage and her emotional reaction at the sight of her father are full of energy, excitement, and impatience (631ff.). Her second entrance at 1117 offers a complete reversal of that image. Iphigenia is now tearful, with her head veiled and the young Orestes in her arms, remaining silent for almost a hundred lines and eventually breaking her silence only to beg her father for her life. Achilles, too, is a character whose entrances are marked by striking contrasts. His first entrance at 801, brisk and unannounced, shows his impatience and confidence. His second, at 1345, having just escaped a violent attack by the Greek army and his own Myrmidons, also conveys a sense of urgency, but this time it also displays his inability to protect Iphigenia and his name and to live up to his own expectations and the expectations of the other characters. It is not only entrances but also exits which can make a contribution to the themes that the play explores and to the portrayal of its characters. After Clytemnestra introduces herself to Achilles and he turns away to exit from one of the side entrances ‘overcome with modesty’, Clytemnestra calls him back and invites him to shake hands (831-2).27 By the end of the scene, the roles of Achilles and Clytemnestra are totally reversed: Achilles leaves the stage in full control of his own actions and of the actions of his interlocutor (1028-32). A similar pattern occurs in the fifth scene, where Iphigenia is transformed from a timid girl to a heroine. When Achilles returns to the stage after his unsuccessful attempt to protect Iphigenia, she initially asks the servants to open the doors of the tent to hide herself from him, out of a sense of shame which her mother finds ill suited to the circumstances (1340-4). If her first attempt to exit the stage is checked by Clytemnestra, her final exit is under her own full control. This prolonged farewell enables her to articulate her conflicting emotions as a heroine and a bride of death, not only in spoken verse but also in song, and not just in a mono96

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7. Performance logue but also in dialogue with her mother and the Chorus. As in the third scene, Clytemnestra is made to exit the stage, soon after 1466, following a plan of action which has been set out by another character. As for Achilles, his early and quick exit after 1432 is anticlimactic and, like his hasty entrance after his attack by the army, raises questions about his heroic status and his promise that he will save Iphigenia at the altar. Song and dance The songs of the chorus were usually set to music and choreographed by the dramatist himself. Since Euripides died before the first performance of IA, the composition of music and the training of the chorus were probably left to Euripides the Younger, who directed the play. It is very likely, though, that both the music and the choreography would, to some degree, be dictated by the metrical patterns and subject matter of the odes and that they would also be informed by the more general features of Euripides’ late music. Like all choral songs in fifth-century tragedy, the lyric passages of IA were sung and danced by the male, amateur Athenians who constituted the chorus, in circular or rectangular formations. The music accompanying the chorus of IA may well be evoked at 576-8, 1037-9, and 1085-6, where references are made to pipes, panpipes, and the cithara. IA has more elaborate songs than many of Euripides’ other plays, which, in combination with musical innovations in other late plays such as Orestes, suggests a strong interest in this aspect of the tragic spectacle towards the end of the fifth century. The longest and most complex of the songs of the play is the one the Chorus sing when they first enter the performance space.28 The play features two solo arias which are sung and, probably, danced by Iphigenia (1283-1335, 1475-99), the second one giving way to lyrical exchanges between Iphigenia and the Chorus (15009). In both cases, Iphigenia breaks into song to express the emotional intensity of her isolation and distress. Her first song must have sounded like an informal lament of the kind that we often find in late Euripides: ‘ornate, rhapsodical, loose-knit, repet97

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis itive’.29 It is difficult to imagine the music, the musical instruments, and the details of movement and gestures which no doubt accompanied this aria. However, such monodies often served for the articulation of intimate and passionate feelings of usually female characters, mostly of fear or grief. Compare, for instance, Antigone’s lament towards the end of the Phoenician Women (1480-1538, followed by her duet with Oedipus), also a late play. It was such monodies that Aristophanes parodied for their elevated language, metrical innovations, and the doubling of words in his Frogs (1329-63), a comedy performed only a month before IA. If Iphigenia’s first song is one of sorrow and grief for her fate, the second song is much more ambiguous and ironic. Where a lament for her fate would have been more appropriate, Iphigenia asks her mother not to mourn for her (1466), and sings instead what she calls at 1468-9 a paean to Artemis, a celebratory song of praise to the deity, which, however, also focuses on her own death and triumph.30 This song must have sounded uplifting, expressing her idealistic view of her death. It is possible that it was accompanied by a circular dance by the Chorus which imitated the dance around Artemis’ altar to which Iphigenia invites them at 1480-1.31 Breaking into an upbeat song when the situation calls for lament is paralleled elsewhere in Euripides’ work: see for instance the wedding song that Cassandra sings in a frenzy in Trojan Women (308-41) with its tragic irony.32 The emotional power of solo singing and the vocal talent and skills that it required must have made it particularly appealing to professional actors who, from 449 BC onwards, would enter in the tragic actors’ competition, and who, from the fourth century onwards, would choose such arias for virtuoso performance ‘selections’. Similarly, the songs of Euripides’ choruses retained their popularity for a long time after his death. In fact, two of the songs of IA were used in musical competitions in the third century BC (see further Chapter 8). Mute persons Mute attendants appear in the scene of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia’s arrival – hence some of the commands in 98

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7. Performance Clytemnestra’s first speech (610-12). Attendants are also present in the scene where Iphigenia attempts to hide at the imminent arrival of Achilles and asks servants to open the doors of the tent for her at 1340. Later in the same scene mute persons (attendants or fellow-soldiers) bring onto the stage Achilles’ armour (1359; see also ‘Props’ below). The servants who open the door of the tent for Iphigenia must be female. Those who carry Achilles’ armour are identified as male. In the scene of Clytemnestra’s and Iphigenia’s arrival the attendants who are assigned the task of unloading the carriage are also identified as male (612), whereas the more delicate tasks of helping the women and Orestes to get off the carriage require the involvement of the female Chorus (615-16). A mute person with a special role in the play is the infant Orestes. Infants, or young children, do not appear on the tragic stage often. When they do, they are the offspring, most usually sons, of mythological heroes and are central to the plot on account of their emotional appeal and their significance for the future of their family.33 In Sophocles’ Ajax, for instance, the protagonist’s address to his young son Eurysaces (550-64) includes some of the most moving lines of the play while also offering unique insights into Ajax’ personality and state of mind. One of the most famous roles of the child Orestes on stage was in Euripides’ now lost Telephus, performed in 438 BC, which was set in Agamemnon’s palace in Argos and involved a scene in which the suppliant Telephus snatched Orestes from Clytemnestra and in his despair threatened to kill him. This scene is well known from its parody in Aristophanes’ Acharnians (performed in 425 BC), 325-51, where the baby Orestes is comically substituted by a basket of coals, and more famously in Women at the Thesmophoria (performed in 411 BC), 689-758, where the baby becomes a wineskin that is eventually ‘slaughtered’. In IA the infant Orestes stands as a symbol of the harmony of family life that the sacrifice of Iphigenia comes to destroy. Agamemnon imagines his baby son unable to grasp the monstrosity of his plan to sacrifice Iphigenia (465-6). When Orestes arrives asleep in the cradle, and Clytemnestra is so 99

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis concerned about him (621-6), we have an extended scene of domestic tenderness that contrasts sharply with the military environment of the camp and the pending violence of the sacrifice. Later on, Iphigenia encourages the infant Orestes to supplicate Agamemnon, using him as a non-linguistic symbol of her own innocence and vulnerability when language has failed her (1241-8). The presence of Orestes on the side of Iphigenia and Clytemnestra is dramatically significant not only for the pathos it creates but also for the room it provides for ironic juxtaposition with the grown-up Orestes of earlier literature, art, and theatre, who becomes a matricide and a violent defender of his father’s memory. In artistic representations of scenes of the play from the second century AD (see Chapter 8), Orestes appears not as a baby but as a small child. It is not impossible that a real child played the role of Orestes in the play’s first performance, but the alternative of a doll seems equally attractive: unlike the more grown-up children of Medea, Alcestis, Andromache, or Heracles in the plays that bear their names, Orestes is too small to speak or even walk and is held by Clytemnestra and Iphigenia in their arms. Props Fifth-century masks and costumes provided basic information about the characters’ gender, age, and social status. The text provides us with specific details about the actor’s costumes. Menelaus’ hair is golden or fair (175) as often in epic poetry. Iphigenia’s hair is also golden (681) like the hair of many young and pretty princesses in Greek literature and drama. Her mask, like the masks of Clytemnestra and the Chorus, would be paler than the male masks: theatre, like iconography, reflects the convention that women stay indoors. Agamemnon’s mask must be bearded (although the noun geneion in 1247 could simply mean ‘chin’) and so must Achilles’ mask, which Clytemnestra clasps in her supplication (909). It is left to us to decide whether Achilles has a fully grown beard like Agamemnon or whether his youth and inferior status are signposted through a smaller beard. It is more significant perhaps that this seeming detail 100

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7. Performance runs counter to contemporary representations of the hero on vase paintings as a beardless youth: if his appearance establishes Achilles as a mature character, it also makes his eventual inability to save Iphigenia more anticlimactic.34 There are several stage props in the play. For instance, Menelaus holds a sceptre which signifies his royal status but which can also be used, as he himself warns, as a weapon to hit Agamemnon’s servant on the head (311). Three props that deserve attention here because of their contribution to issues of characterization, plot, and theme are Agamemnon’s writing tablet, Achilles’ armour, and Iphigenia’s garland. The sealed writing tablet is in Agamemnon’s hands from the very first line of the play but it is not identified until lines 35-6 and it is only in 109-12 that it is handed over to Agamemnon’s trusted servant. The same tablet reappears in the first scene, now in the hands of Menelaus, with the wax or lead seal broken (307), while the old servant tries to take it back. This ‘unusually small and naturalistic prop’35 is at the centre of attention throughout this early part of the play: its content was composed by Agamemnon in the course of a sleepless night, discussed at length in the prologue, and debated in the first scene.36 The tablet carries an alternative script for the play’s plot, on which the life of Iphigenia depends. As such it can be seen as a symbol of her body: whoever has the tablet controls the plot of the play and Iphigenia’s future.37 As a narrative device, the tablet reveals Agamemnon’s indecisiveness and emotional reactions, the old servant’s devotion and physical weakness, and Menelaus’ impatience and pettiness, while also acting as a catalyst for the transformation process that Iphigenia and Achilles undergo. It creates suspense by bringing about abrupt changes of plot direction and even adds a potentially comic note as Menelaus and the old servant quarrel over it. Finally, it allows the emotions around the sacrifice to build up and the arguments for and against it to unfold naturally through the dialogue between master and servant and the ensuing confrontation between the two brothers. Achilles’ armour is brought on stage in the fifth scene by attendants who follow Achilles and who are ready to help him 101

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis to put it on (1359). Will Achilles’ armour succeed in changing the plot where Agamemnon’s tablet has failed? Once again a plan of action associated with a stage prop is cancelled, this time by Iphigenia. The fact that Achilles fails to don his armour symbolizes his failure to change Iphigenia’s fate, a fact not without implications for his own ability to assume his heroic identity.38 Another significant prop in the play is Iphigenia’s garland. At 905 Clytemnestra says that she has garlanded Iphigenia as a bride. Later on, a triumphant Iphigenia, who is about to exit the stage to face her death, encourages the Chorus to give her a garland to crown herself as a victorious athlete or warrior (1477-8). It is likely that Iphigenia exits the stage for the last time with the garland visible on her head symbolizing both her victory, but also her wedding with death and the sacrifice she is about to face. Like the characters who seek to control the writing tablet and the armour, Iphigenia tries to control the meaning of the garland, but its significance extends beyond her intentions, and serves to underscore the ambiguities and ironies of her roles as a bride, a victorious athlete, and a sacrificial victim. Comedy An aspect of the play not unrelated with the numerous reversals of the plot and with the changing roles of the characters, as well as with the more general issue of Euripides’ dramatic technique, is that of its comic elements. The play opens with the restless Agamemnon nervously pacing up and down the stage and calling the old servant, who despite his old age enters the stage in haste. This scene may recall the restless Agamemnon and Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, but the closest stage parallel is from a comedy, Aristophanes’ Clouds (originally produced in 423 BC), where the restless Strepsiades similarly calls a servant near the beginning of the play (at line 18). In the first scene, the quarrel between Menelaus and Agamemnon’s servant over the tablet, and the quarrel between the two brothers which follows, are similar to the quarrels we find in Menander’s fourthcentury comedies. In the second scene, Clytemnestra’s detailed 102

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7. Performance directions to her entourage upon arrival to Argos and the overall emphasis on the orderly disembarking from the carriage depart from the tragic norm – where the practicalities of the arrival of chariot-borne characters do not usually receive such attention. Similarly, the almost obsessive preoccupation of Clytemnestra and Achilles with decorum and social etiquette in the third scene recalls the self-consciousness of Menander’s comic characters. In fact, a section of Menander’s Brothers seems to echo this very scene, where Clytemnestra thanks Achilles for agreeing to save her daughter, in terms of both the emotions expressed and the arguments employed.39 To be sure, the elements of IA and of numerous other plays by Euripides that we consider comic today have nothing to do with the comedy of Euripides’ contemporary Aristophanes, based on slapstick humour, obscene jokes, and loosely connected scenes. They are the result of a tight plot of twists and misunderstandings, and of a preoccupation with social satire and irony, which do not become central preoccupations of comedy until the emergence of the so-called ‘New Comedy’ (as opposed to Aristophanes’ ‘Old Comedy’) in the second half of the fourth century. In modern productions and adaptations of IA the comic potential of such scenes has often been exploited to varying effect.40 Comic elements can provide entertaining distraction from the tragic plot. They can also transcend tragedy, exposing grotesque or absurd aspects of the plot, or the myth on which it is based, that defy credibility. Finally, they can enhance the tragic vision of the play by stressing the ordinariness of characters who find themselves in the midst of an extraordinary situation.41 The comic elements of IA have often been discussed in conjunction with the generic identity of the play (how tragic is its form and content?), an issue to which we will return in the next chapter.42

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8

Reception The diverse and changing fortunes of IA can be traced all the way back to the time before its first performance. Even if the script of the play was complete when Euripides died, the music, the choreography, the training of the chorus, and the overall responsibility for the production must have fallen on Euripides the Younger. In the two and a half thousand years since IA was composed, its reputation has undergone extraordinary changes: from a play in a production which won Euripides a posthumous victory, it became an example of inconsistent characterization in Aristotle, of statesmanship and patriotism in rhetorical and philosophical schools in Rome, a vehicle for the celebration of absolute monarchy in the Renaissance, a notorious example of the pitfalls presented to the textual critic in the nineteenth century, and a case study for anthropological and feminist approaches to violence in the twentieth century. The relation between secular and divine authority, politics and rhetoric, selfsacrifice and redemption, nationalism, morality, and authorship, are all themes that have made scholars, artists, dramatists, painters, orators, and philosophers return to the play again and again. What the shifts in the conceptualization of IA show is that the history of its readings is neither linear nor smooth. This chapter is divided into three sections, which explore different but interconnected aspects of the histories of the text and its interpretations on page and on stage. The text and its history The oldest among the commonly used modern translations and editions of IA is not more than a few decades old. However, the 105

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis first printed editions of IA appeared five centuries ago, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The earliest among these was produced in 1503, at the Venetian press of Aldus Manutius. It was only three years later, in 1506, that the first translation of the play was published, in Latin, by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus.1 IA had been transmitted into the modern world through two medieval manuscripts that date to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Both of them can be found today in Italy, Laurentianus 32.2 (often abbreviated as L) in Florence, and Palatinus gr. 287 (P) in the Vatican. P is most likely a copy of L, so effectively the play survived into the modern world thanks to a single manuscript. A few short passages from the play have also been preserved on ancient papyri. The oldest among them, held in Leiden, in the Netherlands, dates to the third century BC and preserves lines 1500-8 and 784-93, in this order. This papyrus carries musical notations and will be discussed in more detail below (under the heading ‘Performance history’). A second papyrus, held in Cologne, Germany, dates to the second century BC and preserves lines 301-9, 390-2, 569-83, 745-9, 796-806, and 819-20. Finally a papyrus in Oxford, UK, from the third century AD, preserves lines 913-18. For the first three generations after Euripides’ death, a copy of the text of the play was probably kept in the possession of his family, like the rest of his work. The first official copy of the play was probably made in the 320s when the city of Athens sought to protect the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from accidental or deliberate change. The play must have become the object of scholarly study in the third and second centuries BC, when it was included in an edition of Euripides’ plays in Hellenistic Alexandria. It is from this edition that the medieval manuscripts of the play ultimately derived. We cannot say anything confidently about what happened to the text during the intervening centuries, but the fact that it survived into the modern world through one manuscript only suggests that, unlike other Euripidean plays with a richer manuscript tradition such as Hecuba and Orestes, IA did not enjoy great popularity during this long period.2 106

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8. Reception Today IA holds a special position in textual studies of Greek tragedy because of the suspicion that an unusual number of lines have been inserted into the play after Euripides’ death. The only other Euripidean play to have been suspected of extensive rewriting and additions is Phoenician Women.3 Interpolations may have taken place at three stages in the history of IA. First, before it was first performed, so that an incomplete play could have been made suitable for public presentation. This is how the irregular prologue of the play, which will be discussed below, has sometimes been explained. A second group of additions or changes perhaps took place in the course of the fourth and third centuries BC, at a time when professional actors might have taken liberties with the text of the play, seeking to heighten its theatrical impact. This is the period when additions such as the second chorus (if this is what it is) at 590-7 may have been introduced.4 A final stage of interpolations may have occurred several centuries later, in late antiquity or during Byzantine times. Likely reasons for such interpolations were the mistaken copying of marginal comments into the text and the ambition to complete parts of the manuscript accidentally lost such as its ending (1578-1629, which will be discussed below). The text, then, may contain additions and alterations introduced for a variety of reasons, in all three stages. However there is little agreement among modern editors of the play about the extent and nature of such changes. The editions by Kovacs, Diggle, and Günther suspect many passages of having been interpolated, whereas those by Jouan and Stockert are more reluctant to accept widespread interpolation. A debate about interpolations in IA is not attested in antiquity, unlike, say, the problem of authorship of Rhesus (attributed to Euripides) or the ending of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. It is rather the product of modern scholarly study and more specifically of the discipline of textual criticism that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, for instance, a constant stream of new studies of disputed passages of the play appeared. The impressive results of this method for the study 107

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis of Greek drama can be seen in Denys Page’s classic study, Actors’ Interpolations in Greek Tragedy, which is subtitled Studied with Special Reference to Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis. By the time Page’s study was published in 1934, IA had become one of the most famous examples of the limitations imposed on our knowledge of ancient texts by centuries of copying and interpreting, a paradigm of the need for scientific criteria and methodologies to separate the ancient authors from their imitators.5 IA shows most clearly how the history of a play’s text cannot be studied independently from the history of its interpretations. It also shows that the lessons to be learned from this close interaction between a text and its interpretations are far from straightforward or unambiguous. To be sure, there have been numerous technical discussions of issues of language, style, metre, and dramatic technique that have sought to expose, with a greater or lesser degree of confidence, the discrepancies and inconsistencies of the text of IA and the incompetence of the various hands that have been at work on it. However, there have also been many interpretative discussions of the play which have ignored, dismissed, or disputed the issue of authenticity and have unproblematically attributed the whole play to Euripides. The first group of approaches has set out to find the ‘real Euripides’ and to distinguish him from his later imitators at the expense of the text which has been transmitted to us. The second group of approaches has explored the artistic values and ideological forces operating within the text at the expense of its history. In other words, discussions of the play have been polarized between those preoccupied with the corruption of its text and those more concerned with the corruption of its moral universe. The very debate over the nature and extent of interpolation reveals something about the different readings to which the play has been subjected, and about the different assumptions and expectations of scholars regarding the playwright, the plot, and the characters. Here I will substantiate this point by focusing my attention on the two most fiercely contested sections of the play; the prologue and the epilogue. The prologue consists of two metrically distinct parts, a 108

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8. Reception central monologue in iambic trimeters (49-114) and the two dialogue sections in anapaests with which the prologue begins and ends (1-48 and 115-62). This structure of a prologue is unique among the eighteen extant plays of Euripides. Most begin with an expository monologue that conveys background information about the plot. In Sophocles’ plays, on the other hand, such information is often provided through a dialogue between two characters: in the Antigone, for instance, a secret is discussed outdoors, as in the anapaestic parts of IA. Since 1762 scholars have debated the structure and authenticity of the prologue of our play on structural but also metrical, stylistic, and linguistic grounds.6 Some have argued that both sections of the prologue are by Euripides, others that only one of the two is, and others that neither is. There is no consensus, though, as to which of the two ‘prologues’ should be favoured or whether they were written as distinct alternatives or to complement each other. One of the most popular views is that the prologue that Euripides left when he died was incomplete and that a new prologue was written for the first performance of the play, which either incorporated or replaced what Euripides himself had written. The two prologues, then, were put together either when the play was first performed or at a later point in its performance or textual history. One cannot ignore the problems that the current state of the prologue poses, even if their implications and significance are debated today more vehemently than ever. The two sections duplicate information regarding characters and location, which strictly speaking is unnecessary, while they also appear to contradict each other slightly here and there. For instance, details about the locale are provided not only at 14 but also at 81, 88, and 120-1. The old servant is concerned about Achilles’ violent reaction to Agamemnon’s plan at 124-6, when twenty lines earlier at 106-7 Agamemnon informed him that the only four people who know about the plan are Agamemnon himself, Calchas, Odysseus, and Menelaus. For all the problems, there are arguments to be made for keeping the prologue as we have it. First, the two sections of the prologue convey different types of information about the background of the plot and the 109

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis portrayal of Agamemnon that we cannot afford to ignore. Second, the prologue in its current state can be very effective in performance, especially in translation, where problems of style, language, and metre can be smoothed over. It can even be argued that some of the discrepancies between the two sections, whether we accept them as the product of dramatic technique or of bad editing, raise expectations about the plot and the characters that the play later frustrates in a way which is not entirely untypical of the rest of Euripides’ work.7 Another notoriously problematic part of the play is the ending, where a messenger reports to Clytemnestra the scene of the sacrifice and the miraculous, last-minute substitution of Iphigenia by a deer. This is in a sense the moment towards which the whole plot moves from the beginning. However this scene, especially the last part (from line 1578) has long been suspected as not being genuine. The third-century AD writer Aelian attributes to Euripides ‘in the Iphigenia’ (it is tantalizingly unclear whether it refers to IA or Iphigenia among the Taurians) a small fragment that is not in our play as preserved in the two manuscripts. In this fragment the goddess Artemis herself addresses Agamemnon and foretells Iphigenia’s substitution by a deer: ‘I will place in the dear hands of the Achaeans an antlered hind, and, when they slay it, they will boast they are slaying your daughter’.8 To be sure, the diction of the fragment and its similarity with Iphigenia among the Taurians 28-9 make one hesitant to attribute it to IA with confidence. On the other hand one cannot simply ignore this fragment: the onstage appearance of ‘gods from the machine’ is a popular closure device in many of Euripides’ late plays.9 The evidence for the non-Euripidean character of the narrative of the sacrifice is not only external but also internal. On the basis of metrical and linguistic anomalies it is generally agreed that the last fifty-two lines of the epilogue (1578-1629), which include the second half of the messenger speech and the reactions it generates among the on-stage characters, were written, or revised, during early Byzantine times.10 The penultimate part of the epilogue, which consists of the first thirty-eight lines of the messenger speech (1540-77), has only a few linguistic 110

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8. Reception peculiarities. However, it poses other difficulties. For instance, it bears striking similarities to the messenger speech about the sacrifice of Polyxena in Euripides’ Hecuba.11 It also shows affinities with a famous but now lost pictorial representation of the sacrifice, a painting by the late fifth-century Timanthes.12 The penultimate part of the epilogue, then, although not by Euripides himself, was probably written soon after Euripides’ death, perhaps to make the unfinished script of the play suitable for performance. In the following few paragraphs I will work on the basis of the assumption that most textual critics share, namely that the scene is not genuine. However, I will not rehearse arguments for the clumsiness and lack of imagination of its authors. Nor will I embark on fruitless speculation as to what Euripides might have written. Drawing on the fascinating work that has been recently carried out in the field of reception studies, I will ask the rather different question of whether there is perhaps something to be learned from the interpolated ending and its encounters with the rest of the play. What kinds of understanding of the rest of the play does it display? With what issues does it engage and in what way? The narrative of Iphigenia’s sacrifice may not necessarily be an obstacle between us and Euripides, but rather, perhaps, a useful link, a window on what some ancient readers thought about Euripides’ plot and characters. The scene consists of two parts that were written centuries apart. The first was probably written because the play was left unfinished, the second because the text was damaged. The first part was written for the play to be performed, the second for the play to be read and copied. For all the differences in the circumstances of their composition, the two parts share their determination to provide the play with a conclusion, to bring the plot to an end. In order to see how they respond to the discrepancies and ambiguities which are so typical of Euripides’ original, we shall focus on one example, characterization. In 1547-50 (in the first part) Agamemnon is presented as a father in mourning, holding his garment before his face to hide his grief. This is a depiction of Agamemnon that follows natu111

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis rally from his earlier speeches about his inability to save his daughter (especially 528-42 and 1255-75). However, the emphasis here is placed not on the questionable arguments with which he earlier justified his lack of resolution but purely on his emotional response to the loss of his daughter. Agamemnon is transformed from an indecisive leader to a powerless father. Now to Iphigenia: not only does she bear her father no grudge, she also delivers a patriotic and heroic speech that gains everyone’s admiration (1551-62, also in the first part). In effect she summarizes and reaffirms her earlier speech in which she abruptly announces her decision to die (1211-52). By strengthening Iphigenia’s resolve, the author of these lines takes sides in a debate which goes at least as far back as Aristotle’s famous criticism of Iphigenia’s sudden change of mind as being inconsistent with her earlier distress (on which see Chapter 3, and ‘Critical views’ below). Let us now turn to the other characters. Achilles, who contributes to the sacrifice as assistant of the prophet Calchas (in the first part again: 1568-76), may seem to contradict his earlier promise to save Iphigenia. But he also displays a preoccupation with good repute and the Greek cause, which is so typical of him from earlier parts of the play (819-1035). Calchas appears not as the ruthless manipulator that Agamemnon and Menelaus accused him of being (518-21), but as a devout representative of the gods (see 1565-7 in the first half of the epilogue, but also 1578-86 and 1590-1603 in the second). Similarly, the army is presented as an orderly and pious audience; they are not the violent and impatient mob that earlier attacked Achilles with stones (1345-68), but the innocent bystanders who initially welcomed Iphigenia to the military camp (in both parts of the epilogue: 1561-2, 1577, 1582-7, 1598-9). Finally Artemis: the goddess who asked for Iphigenia’s sacrifice, and who nevertheless received very little attention in the rest of the play, is here presented as a benevolent deity who confirms that gods not only exist but also care for humans (also in both parts: 1570-6 and 1591-9). The messenger, then, provides an affirmative, celebratory conclusion to the play. His enthusiasm is shared not only by the 112

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8. Reception audience embedded in his narrative, namely the Greek army, but also by the on-stage characters of the Chorus and Agamemnon. However, one character remains reluctant to participate in this scene of jubilation, namely Clytemnestra (1615-19 of the second half of the epilogue). Her hesitation in accepting the plausibility of Iphigenia’s miraculous escape casts doubt on the validity of the narrative and on the ability of an eyewitness to perceive and represent the reality of the sacrifice. The messenger lacks the authority of a god from the machine, and this enables Clytemnestra to question the ability of the narrative to offer consolation and to achieve closure. Does her reaction expose the scene as dramatically weak, or does it add to its effectiveness, testing the limits of meaning and interpretation? In recent years, Clytemnestra’s brief intervention has exercised an impact on readings of the scene which has been more powerful than the exuberance of the rest of the characters. Both parts of the epilogue, despite the chronological distance that separates them, set out to eliminate the discrepancies of the rest of the plot and the complexities of its characters. They provide a reading of the play that seeks to align the dramatic world with the world of myth and to put an end to the characters’ constant changes of mind and inability to control the plot. This is a reading that sacrifices many of the nuances of Euripides’ play to celebrate the power of the divine, of fatherhood, heroism, and patriotism. However, it is also a reading that ultimately acknowledges its own limitations in playing down the disturbing aspects of human sacrifice. The role of Clytemnestra in the scene shows how even a prescriptive and rigid reading of the play is ultimately made to reproduce some of the tensions upon which Euripides’ original is built. While reaffirming the world of order and of the collective, it also exposes the violence upon which it is based. It may unite the majority of the on-stage characters but it does not completely suppress the voices of dissent. In conclusion, the scene of the sacrifice has taken us beyond Euripides’ IA into the early transmission and reception of the play. I hope it has served as an example of a constructive way of looking at the debate about suspected interpolation and the 113

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis false opposition between textual criticism and literary interpretation. Passages of contested authorship can help us reconstruct ways in which dramatic characters and the plot of a play have been interpreted in ancient and modern times. They can be considered as attempts by ancient readers to address the complexities and subtleties of Euripides’ text. But they also enable us to take a fresh look at some of the assumptions and preoccupations that inform ancient readings of the play and its characters, and continue to inform our own. Critical views Euripides’ authoritative treatment of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, with its emphasis on politics, rhetoric, and emotions, had a profound impact on later treatments of the myth. References to, and citations from, the play occur in the literary tradition, for instance in handbooks and anthologies including those by Plutarch in the first and second centuries AD and Stobaeus in the fifth century AD.13 Rhetorical and philosophical schools must have also found IA fertile ground for the issues of patriotism and self-sacrifice, for the challenges of fatherhood and statesmanship, and for the themes of pseudo-intellectualism and of distrust of philosophical speculation. Treatments of the sacrifice that provide ample scope for comparison and contrast with that of Euripides appear in Roman literature – in Ovid, whose poetic version played an instrumental role in the rediscovery of the myth in medieval Europe, in Cicero, and in the Epicurean poet Lucretius.14 The earliest and certainly most influential among the ancient readers of the play is Aristotle in the fourth century BC. His assessment of the character of Iphigenia as an example of inconsistency in Poetics 54a32-3 (quoted in Chapter 3 above) has had a profound impact on the evaluation of IA in the modern world. However, the force of Aristotle’s assessment and the degree to which it is meant to be critical are not so clear. Aristotle does not explain whether he considers Iphigenia’s behaviour to be exceptional within the framework of the play or whether it reflects a more general pattern shared by other 114

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8. Reception characters. Since, as we have seen, all characters change their mind at least once, IA can be considered as an example of what Aristotle calls in the same passage of the Poetics the least unsatisfactory type of inconsistent characterization, one that is consistently inconsistent. The criticism of the play in the Poetics and the impact it has exercised on modern criticism should not obscure the fact that elsewhere in Aristotle’s work the play meets with his approval. In Politics 1252b8, Iphigenia’s patriotic speech and especially her assertion of the natural superiority of the Greeks over the barbarians are used to illustrate Aristotle’s views on slavery and more specifically to support his argument that barbarian and slave are essentially the same and that slavery is a natural practice. As proof for the validity of his claim, Aristotle quotes IA 1400: ‘it is right that Greeks should rule barbarians’. Aristotle is not the only fourth-century author to draw on Euripides’ overt moralizing to legitimize his naturalization of the opposition between Greeks and barbarians. But he is the only one to draw on IA. This kind of unambiguous reading of Iphigenia’s patriotism may have been popular in the political context of fourth-century panhellenism. It reveals something not only about the authority that Euripides’ work commanded in the classicizing culture of the fourth century, but also about the process of decontextualization and appropriation to which it could be subjected. The first printed editions and translations of Euripides’ IA appeared in the sixteenth century. As a result of its early translation into Latin, a language accessible to learned people across Europe, IA was read and adapted in the early modern world earlier than most, today more canonical, tragedies such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Antigone, or Euripides’ Bacchae. However it was not until the nineteenth century that the play gained its reputation as the subject of serious academic study (see previous section). Even then, the intensive investigation into the authorship of the text, together with a more general suspicion and contempt for Euripides as the last and least classic of the three tragedians, cast a shadow on IA. Well into the twentieth century, the play was still seen, at least in 115

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis some quarters, as ‘a thoroughly second-rate play’ and a ‘WestEnd half-tragedy’ (Kitto) or ‘lack[ing] depth’ (Grube).15 It is only in the last forty years, with the increasing significance of the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and gender studies for our understanding of Greek tragedy, that IA has been thoroughly reconsidered. The open-endedness of the play and the way it challenges generic and ethical boundaries account in no small part for a renewed scholarly interest in it. Is IA a melodrama, a romantic drama, or even a tragicomedy? Earlier scholarship on the play (e.g. Kitto, Grube, and Norwood) argued for one or the other of these options in an attempt to define the ways in which the play departs from the tragic norm and promotes excitement over reflection and a dialectic of pathos over the ethical dilemmas of ‘proper’ tragedy. Elements of the play which have often been discussed in this context include the sudden and arguably implausible changes of mind of the characters, the emphasis on social decorum, the display of physical and emotional suffering, the oscillation between moral certainties and utter despair, the pathos and sentimentality of many scenes, and the nostalgia for domestic and marital values. One problem with such discussions of the generic affinities of the play is that they have tended to valorize the word tragedy, assuming a pure tragic genre which never securely existed, and to deride the words comedy, romantic drama, and melodrama. This is problematic, not only because a rigid definition of tragedy is incompatible with the flexibility and diversity of the tragic art form in fifth-century Athens. A comparison between tragedy and such genres is also anachronistic. The concept of Euripidean comedy presupposes familiarity with Menander’s fourth-century comedy of manners that Euripides could not have known. Similarly, the words melodrama and tragicomedy refer to dramatic genres that emerged only in the modern world. For all their limitations, the early stages of the debate about the genre of IA also had a very welcome feature, namely that they focused attention on the wide-ranging and constantly changing tones and styles of the play. In the 1960s and 1970s, ironic readings of the play such as those by Vellacott and 116

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8. Reception Conacher shifted the debate in an interesting direction, emphasizing how a skilled dramatist can draw on different tones and styles to turn the abrupt changes and juxtapositions between them into a dramatic device for the promotion of a tragic vision. For instance, Agamemnon may behave in a melodramatic way when he considers himself crushed by external forces but his melodramatic attitude results in the very tragic undoing of his family and daughter. If ironic readings of the play have provided constructive ways of thinking about the generic identity of IA, the whole debate has moved in another important direction in recent decades. Scholars such as Michelini and Sorum have sought to widen the scope of discussion by focusing attention on Euripides’ polemical engagement with genres that he both knew and consciously drew on, namely epic poetry, lyric poetry, and earlier tragedy.16 Another influential approach to the play, which to some extent has emerged to counterbalance ancient and modern preoccupations with form and language, has centred on the historical context within which IA was produced. Such readings of the play have set out to examine its dramatic world by firmly locating it in the socio-political realities of the end of the fifth century. Two issues have received particular attention, the rhetoric of panhellenism and the world of Athenian politics and culture. A popular tendency among earlier readers of the play (Delebecque, Goossens, Pohlenz), which has recently been revived by Kovacs, was to argue for a ‘straight’ relationship between the play and its historical context.17 According to this view, IA was a patriotic piece, written in the court of a Macedonian king keen to stress the Greek origins of his family, as a celebration of Greek unity and of the individual’s self-sacrificial devotion to it. Dramatic characters, too, were often treated as thinly disguised portrayals of fifth-century personalities. Most notably, the general Agamemnon was seen as a mirror image of Alcibiades, the most famous and controversial Athenian of the time who managed to have himself elected general in 408 BC. It is probably not surprising that numerous scholars have resisted or sought to redefine the idea that the play mirrors the political stage in any straightforward way or 117

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis that it provides a thinly disguised allegory for historical individuals. If the play makes no explicit reference to the world outside the theatre, its engagement with this world must be more nuanced and critical than previously recognized. One of the effects of this cautious approach was to rehabilitate the idea of Euripides as a philosopher or ‘master of psychology’ (Snell, Wassermann, but also Reinhardt, Lesky, and Jaeger): in an age of political and moral crisis and transition, Euripides’ work provided a reflective examination of human nature and character ‘under the strain of extreme adversity, and with the impact of this human situation and reaction upon the thoughts and emotions of an audience conditioned for this kind of presentation by years of crisis’.18 The awareness of the complexities of the interaction between the play and its cultural context has more recently led to another methodological direction. Social practices, cultural institutions, and ideological formations on which the play draws to structure its conceptual universe have all become the object of intensive study. Sociological, anthropological, structuralist, and feminist approaches to the play have thrown into the limelight the transformations that religious practices such as marriage, death, and sacrifice rituals, and cultural polarities such as those between Greeks and barbarians, men and women, the individual and the collective, have undergone in IA. Since the 1970s, for instance, the play has been used as a case study for anthropological and feminist approaches to violence. Influential works by Foley, Loraux, and Rabinowitz have focused on the position of the female in the patriarchal world of the play, on how social order is secured through the exclusion and sacrifice of the feminine other, and on how the feminine becomes a vehicle for the celebration of the very order that leads to its destruction. In this interpretative model of the play, divine violence is nothing more than the ‘projection of human violence upon the gods’, and the exploitation of religious and ethical codes for political purposes.19 There is no consensus among these scholars on crucial questions such as whether Iphigenia’s appropriation of male, Greek values undermines or confirms their dominance in the play. However, whether or not 118

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8. Reception one agrees that the play challenges the prevailing social norms of its time, the level of sophistication of the debate provides valuable insights into the world of IA that ‘straight’ readings of the play inevitably miss.20 Performance history Although the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice remained popular throughout Greek and Roman iconography and literature, Euripides’ dramatic version provides what is arguably the most influential treatment of the story in the ancient world. IA was probably revived on the stage of the fourth and third centuries BC, and it certainly inspired both dramatists and artists. In the modern world, the play served as a model for one of the bestknown dramas of French neoclassical theatre, Jean Racine’s Iphigénie, as well as numerous operas. In the last century, IA has been performed throughout the world, from Finland to Nigeria, and from USA to Hungary, often by stage directors of international renown. Moreover the play has provided the subject matter for one of the most successful screen adaptations of Greek tragedy, the film Iphigenia by the film-director Michael Cacoyannis.21 The evidence for its popularity on the ancient stage and for its impact on tragedy and comedy as well as on iconography is diverse. In 342 BC the famous actor Neoptolemus won the first prize at the Great Dionysia with ‘Euripides’ Iphigenia’.22 We cannot tell whether this was IA or Iphigenia among the Taurians but it is conceivable that both the theme of panhellenism and the dramatic impact of what Aristotle perceived as inconsistency in the behaviour of Iphigenia may have appealed to fourth-century audiences. The evidence for the revival of IA, or at least the awareness that it is a play to be watched rather than a text to be read, is a little more solid in the second century. Six bowls dating to the first half of the century and found in Attica, Boeotia, and elsewhere, are decorated in relief with scenes from the play (see, for instance, Fig. 2), identifying both the characters that appear in them and, half of them, the play from which they come (the inscription ‘of Euripides’ Iphigenia’ 119

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Fig. 2. Scenes from Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, bowl relief, 300-250 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 31.11.2.

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8. Reception that features on them unambiguously refers to IA in this case). The bowls are not helpful on the question of how the play ended, but they raise interesting questions about other aspects of the text and its stage representation. For instance, in the pictorial scene illustrating Iphigenia’s supplication of her father (1211-52), both Agamemnon and Clytemnestra appear veiled, and Orestes features as a boy assuming a pose of supplication in support of his sister.23 In our text neither Agamemnon nor Clytemnestra is veiled in this scene, whereas Orestes is too young to actively assist Iphigenia in her supplication (he could even be represented by a doll, as argued in Chapter 7). It is difficult to tell whether the suppliant Orestes and the veiled Agamemnon and Clytemnestra reflect directorial decisions of the second century, or codify for the viewers of the bowls the dramatic force and pathos of a scene that the text, and perhaps the second-century stage, articulated differently.24 Another piece of evidence that suggests that the play was performed at least in part in, or after, the third century is a badly damaged papyrus fragment of the sung dialogue between Iphigenia and the Chorus at 1500-9 and of the choral section of 783-94 (in this order). This papyrus fragment (Pap. Leiden inv. P. 510) carries musical notations. In fact, it is one of the very few papyri that show with certainty that a tragic play could be copied for performance purposes rather than for reading and that such copies did not have to be of the complete play. The manner and venue of performances of this kind are difficult to guess, but a performance by individual recitalists, rather than a full chorus, perhaps at musical competitions in festivals, is not implausible.25 One may think of such practices as the equivalent of modern concert performances of opera highlights. Another interesting issue that the musical notations of the papyrus raise is that of the authorship of the score. Whether or not the score was the same as that composed by Euripides or, more likely, by the people involved in the first performance of the play, we cannot tell. However, using a score other than the original one, or an original score composed by someone other than Euripides, would not have necessarily prevented third121

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis century recitalists from identifying their performance as ‘Euripidean’. The impact of the play on the ancient stage can be traced in the work of both tragic and comic poets. The most famous of Euripides’ descendants is the Roman tragic poet Ennius. His play Iphigenia has survived in fragments but its close engagement with IA is clearly manifest in its allusions to and departures from it. The replacement of Euripides’ female chorus by a chorus of Greek soldiers, for instance, must have redefined the dynamics of the relation between the on-stage characters and the army, increasing the pathos of their confrontation while also reducing some of its ambiguities and ironies.26 Influences of IA can also be detected in post-Aristophanic comedy. Some similarities between IA and Menander’s Brothers were touched upon above, at the end of Chapter 7. The impact of IA can also be traced in the fourth-century poets of Middle Comedy Eubulus and Philetaerus, the third-century New Comedy poet Machon from Alexandria, and even the Roman comic poet Plautus.27 It is not only for linguistic effects that comic poets turned to Euripides’ play, but also for plot patterns as well as dramatic and characterization techniques. In the modern world, IA has been performed in the original, in translation and in adaptation for five centuries. The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford has collected information for well over 200 productions and adaptations of the play since the Renaissance, in forty countries and twenty languages (a selective list can be found below, under ‘Chronology’).28 The great majority of these productions come from the last hundred years. However, the early translation of the play into Latin in the 1500s and the previous familiarity with the myth through Ovid had an instrumental role in the rediscovery of IA as a piece for the theatre as early as the sixteenth century. There are two fundamental questions to which directors, actors, translators, and music composers have returned again and again over the last four centuries and on which the weight of their interpretation has been laid. First, what exactly happens to Iphigenia at the end of the play? Second, what emotions and thought processes are 122

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8. Reception displayed by the various characters before, during, and after the sacrifice? Broadly speaking, three interpretative directions have dominated performance responses to these questions. In the Christian tradition, the play has been allegorized as a piece about the capriciousness or benevolence of the invisible but omnipotent gods. In this tradition, the character of Iphigenia has functioned as the equivalent of sacrificial victims in the Bible such as Jephthah’s (nameless) daughter and Abraham’s son Isaac. In a philosophical tradition, IA has been rationalized as a dramatic piece about the power or failure of human beings to assume responsibility for their own destiny. The play has thus functioned as a vehicle for the articulation of the triumphs and failings of modern subjectivity. A third direction of interpretation has sought to politicize IA. In this interpretative tradition, the play has functioned either as a piece of patriotism and nationalistic propaganda or as an anti-war and liberal piece. Needless to say, these three interpretative tendencies are not static or totally distinct; nor are they the exclusive prerogative of the stage, informing, as they have often done, literary, artistic and scholarly approaches to the play as well.29 Perhaps the most famous of the modern adaptations of IA is Racine’s Iphigénie, which was first performed on 18 August 1674. Racine’s play was performed in an open-air theatre in the gardens of the French palace in Versailles that was set up especially for the play, as part of the celebrations for a military victory by Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’. As the playwright explains in the prologue, his Iphigénie is a close adaptation of Euripides’ original. The plot, the characters, and the division of the episodes all follow the ancient play closely. A significant departure from Euripides’ play, though, is the introduction of the figure of Eriphile, an unlikeable character, daughter of Helen, and Iphigenia’s cousin and rival for the heart of the hero Achilles. The introduction of this figure enables Racine to give the play a new resolution. In this version, the prophet Calchas proclaims that it is not Iphigenia who must die, but Eriphile, the illegitimate child of Helen’s affair with Theseus, and unwelcome competitor for Iphigenia’s bridegroom. If 123

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis Euripides raises questions over the plausibility of the myth that wants Iphigenia to be replaced by a deer, Racine chooses to rationalize it. The sacrifice of the innocent virgin is now replaced by the deserved death of a woman who not only resembles Iphigenia but is also her opposite, having sinned socially and sexually. Racine revisits the open-ended and morally disturbing conclusion of Euripides’ play and restores the religious framework of the myth by reshaping the function and meaning of the sacrifice (cf. Fig. 3).30

Fig. 3. The final scene of Jean Racine’s Iphigénie, etching by François Chauveau, frontispiece in the second volume of the collected edition of Racine’s Oeuvres, 1676.

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8. Reception Performed in the aftermath of a victorious war and in the context of a festival meant to celebrate the power of monarchy, Racine’s Iphigénie turned Euripides’ play into an example of divine benevolence and a paradigm of social justice and moral order. The impact that Racine’s play had on the fortunes of Euripides’ play in the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century is hard to overestimate. Racine’s play energized the ancient text with modern meaning. For more than a hundred years, playwrights, and, with the emergence of opera, librettists and composers, followed Racine’s example in dramatizing Iphigenia’s tragic fate and above all her miraculous, last-minute replacement by the jealous Eriphile. Perhaps the best-known example of Racine’s legacy is the operatic adaptation of Iphigénie by the Austrian composer Christoph Willibald Gluck. Gluck’s opera was first performed in Paris in 1774, on the centenary of Racine’s play, under the patronage of none other than Marie Antoinette, the French queen who was later to be executed as one of the victims of the French revolution. From Racine to Gluck, from Louis XIV to Marie Antoinette, the sacrifice of Iphigenia displayed the drama of fate and destiny, but more importantly the power of benevolent deities to overcome necessity and to rewrite history.31 One of the most interesting institutional contexts within which IA has been revived on the modern stage is that of amateur school and university theatre. IA was one of the plays to be performed in colleges of sixteenth-century London and Strasburg as well as in American colleges and Greek schools in the first half of the twentieth century. One can only guess what ethical, moral, or political messages the young audiences of the play were invited to draw from the morally turbulent world of the play. Another important institutional context for the revival of IA has been the professional stage. Professional or semiprofessional companies have performed IA both on its own and together with other plays such as Iphigenia among the Taurians, Agamemnon or Oresteia (but never, to my knowledge, with Bacchae, with which it was first performed). Together with Iphigenia among the Taurians, the play has often been performed in a double bill representing Iphigenia’s 125

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis transformation from an innocent victim to a bitter sacrificial priestess, for instance in Joanne’s Akalaitis’ The Iphigenia Cycle (1997). Together with Agamemnon, as, for instance, in the 1930 production at the Syracuse festival in Italy, it has been produced

Fig. 4. Iphigenia (Nirupama Nityanandan) and Clytemnestra (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha), photograph from the stage production of Les Atrides (Part I: Iphigénie à Aulis), directed by Arianne Mnouchkine, Paris, 1990-3.

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8. Reception as a lesson about the rise and fall of a military leader and father. Together with the three plays of the Oresteia trilogy, most notably in Arianne Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides (1990-3; see Fig. 4), it has been performed as a prologue to the vicious circle of violence dramatized by Aeschylus’ trilogy, highlighting Clytemnestra’s motherhood and Agamemnon’s guilt. On its own or in larger spectacles such as Molly Smith’s Agamemnon and his Daughters (2001) or John Barton’s Tantalus (2000), IA has also been used to exemplify the tragic fate of the family of Atreus or to explore the reasons for which a war begins, including the noble ideals but also the ignoble realities of military conflict. As Gamel points out, Iphigenia’s now infamous assertion that ‘it is better for one man to see the light of day than a thousand women’ (1394) has often been cut in recent productions of the play.32 It is particularly since the late 1960s that IA has been persistently interpreted as an anti-war and/or feminist play, used to expose the moral corruption and inherent contradictions of politics and patriarchal ideology. One of the best examples of this type of reading of the play is Cacoyannis’ film Iphigenia, released in the aftermath of both the war in Vietnam and the cultural counter-revolution of 1968. In Cacoyannis’ reading of Euripides, Iphigenia does not escape the sacrifice. There is no god from the machine here to intervene and change the fate of the young virgin. Iphigenia is slaughtered to satisfy the bloodthirsty Greek army and its ambitious leaders. With Cacoyannis, Euripides’ play becomes a celebration of female resistance against male oppression and a warning that violence can only generate more violence (cf. Fig. 5). The film closes with a long shot of Clytemnestra, who has tried in vain to save her daughter, looking with hatred at the departing Greek army. Her gaze prepares for the revenge she is going to exact on Agamemnon when the war in Troy is over. From mater dolorosa Clytemnestra is transformed into an avenging spirit, setting the pattern for the spectator’s emotional response to the film as a whole. Whether or not the promise of personal revenge provides a satisfactory closure to the collective and political drama of victimhood is an important question that the film leaves open.33 127

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Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis

Fig. 5. Iphigenia (Tatiana Papamoschou) and Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), still from the film Iphigenia, directed by Michael Cacoyannis, Greece, 1977.

Produced at a time when feminism and sociological and anthropological theories of ritual and sacrifice became prevalent, Cacoyannis’ Iphigenia is widely recognized as one of the most successful films of Greek tragedy ever made. It is not acci128

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8. Reception dental that the film was conceived and gestated in the same climate as some of the most influential recent critical studies of IA such as those by Foley and Loraux. Nor should it come as a surprise that today, a generation after Foley’s and Cacoyannis’ pioneering readings of the play, their views still resonate in our responses towards Euripides’ play both in the classroom and on the professional stage. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the play’s relevance for the modern world is more pertinent than ever. In the last few years, IA has been the subject of numerous critically acclaimed stage productions and adaptations including those by Marina Carr, Colin Teevan, Katie Mitchell, and Edna O’Brien (see ‘Chronology’ below). The myth of Iphigenia has also inspired novelists such as Manfred Brinkmann and Barry Unsworth.34 Politics and morality, war and patriotism, heroism and self-sacrifice, law and order (social, cosmic, or otherwise), have made IA a powerful medium for the articulation of contemporary anxieties and concerns regarding the power of rhetoric and the use of violence against innocent victims. It seems that there is still much to be learned from our engagement with the play about the hotly debated and contested issues of our time.

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Notes

1. Summary of the Play For full titles and details of cited works, see the Bibliography. 1. See Ch. 8, under ‘The text and its history’, with bibliography. 2. See Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 232-3, with further bibliography. 3. See Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 318-19, with further bibliography. 4. See further Ch. 3, under ‘The Chorus’. On the interpretative and textual problems of 590-606 see Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 376-9.

2. Myth 1. West, Greek Epic Fragments, pp. 66-80; Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, pp. 33-52. 2. West, Greek Epic Fragments, pp. 142-6. 3. Fr. 23, Fragmenta Hesiodea, edited by R. Markelbach & M.L. West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 4. Campbell, Greek Lyric, vol. III, pp. 126-32. 5. Unfortunately it is not known whether the ode was composed before or after Aeschylus’ Oresteia: possible dates include 474 and 454 BC. For a summary of the debate, see Robbins, ‘Pindar’s Oresteia and the Tragedians’. 6. See Radt, TrGF: Aeschylus, pp. 115 and 213-14. For a translation of fragments and testimonia see Smyth, Aeschylus, p. 411; cf. pp. 409, 462, 498-9. 7. See Radt, TrGF: Sophocles, pp. 270-4; Pearson, Fragments of Sophocles, vol. I, pp. 218-23. For a translation, see Lloyd-Jones, Sophocles, Vol. 3: Fragments, pp. 138-41. 8. Lloyd-Jones, Sophocles, Vol. 3: Fragments, pp. 138-9. 9. On the similarities between Iphigenia and Polyxena in iconography, see, for instance, Mossman, Wild Justice, pp. 254-63. On the similarities between the sacrifice of Iphigenia in the epilogue of IA and

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Notes to pages 26-35 the sacrifice of Polyxena in Euripides’ Hecuba, see Ch. 8, under ‘The text and its history’. On other sacrificial victims in Euripides see Ch. 5, under ‘Human sacrifice’. 10. Bain, Actors and Audience, pp. 11-12. On the dramatic function of the writing tablet in IA see further Ch. 7, under ‘Props’. 11. On IA as a rewriting of the Iliad, see Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, pp. 316-20; Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning’, pp. 539-42; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 79-80; Arrowsmith in Merwin & Dimock, Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis, pp. ix-xii. 12. On the entry-song of the Chorus and its relation to Homer’s poetry, see Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, p. 46; Zeitlin, ‘The Artful Eye’, pp. 166-9; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, pp. 87-8; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 79-80. 13. Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, p. 46, with bibliography in n. 28. On the differences between Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and other epic poems, see Griffin, ‘The Epic Cycle’. 14. On IA and Oresteia, see Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 24 n. 4; Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning’, pp. 536-7; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, pp. 1-4; Aelion, Euripide, héritier d’Eschyle, pp. 95-109; Eisner, ‘Euripides’ Use of Myth’, p. 161; Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides, p. 143. 15. On the relation between the plot and the world of myth, see especially Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’; Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning’. On the more general issue of the attitude of Euripides towards myth, see also Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition; Eisner, ‘Euripides’ Use of Myth’; and Whitman, Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth.

3. Characters 1. For statistics about the number of lines spoken per character in the extant tragedies and comedies of fifth-century Athens, see Walton (editor), Living Greek Theatre (for IA see p. 162). 2. Cf. Conacher, Euripidean Drama, pp. 249-50; Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, pp. 362-3. 3. Schenker, ‘Dissolving Differences’, pp. 648. 4. For the different methodological and theoretical models that inform our understanding of characterization in Greek tragedy, see a very useful collection of articles in Pelling, Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature. On characterization in IA, see especially Gibert, Change of Mind; Griffin, ‘Characterization in Euripides’; Lawrence, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’; Chant, ‘Role Inversion’. 5. As Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 462 n. 82 points out, ‘[h]is insistence that he has no choice contrasts with the clear choice of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Agamemnon 211-17)’. 6. Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 179.

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Notes to pages 35-40 7. On the character of Agamemnon, see further Goodkin, The Tragic Middle, pp. 112-15; Griffin, ‘Characterization in Euripides’, pp. 140-5; Ryzman, ‘The Reversal of Agamemnon and Menelaus’; Castellani, ‘Warlords and Women’, pp. 4-7; Vellacott, Ironic Drama, pp. 219-22; Grube, Drama of Euripides, especially pp. 425-6; Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, pp. 247-52 and 260-2; Blaiklock, The Male Characters of Euripides, pp. 115-17; Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis’; Bonnard, ‘Iphigénie à Aulis’, pp. 90-1. 8. Conacher, Euripidean Drama, p. 254 n. 12. On the withdrawal of Odysseus into the background of the plot, see further below, under ‘Off-stage characters’. 9. Conacher, Euripidean Drama, p. 258. 10. On Menelaus in the play see Schenker, ‘Dissolving Differences’, p. 648; Gibert, Change of Mind, p. 203; Ryzman, ‘The Reversal of Agamemnon and Menelaus’; Vellacott, Ironic Drama, p. 219; Cavander, Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, p. 8; Grube, Drama of Euripides, p. 424. 11. On this issue, see further Ch. 8, under ‘Performance history’. On the character of Clytemnestra, see Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, pp. 48-50; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, p. 32; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 72-3; Castellani, ‘Warlords and Women’, pp. 4-7; Aelion, Euripide, héritier d’Eschyle, vol. 2, pp. 311-15; Redfield, ‘Notes on the Greek Wedding’, p. 189; Vellacott, Ironic Drama, pp. 46-8; Conacher, Euripidean Drama, p. 259; Grube, Drama of Euripides, pp. 428-35. 12. See Ch. 2, under ‘Tragedy’. 13. See Ch. 2, under ‘Tragedy’. 14. See further Ch. 5, under ‘Human sacrifice’. 15. See further Ch. 5, under ‘Supplication’, and Ch. 7, under ‘Actors and acting’. 16. Cf. Ch. 2, under ‘Tradition(s) and innovation’. 17. Gibert, Change of Mind, pp. 234-5; Mellert-Hoffmann, Untersuchungen, pp. 74-90. 18. Siegel, ‘Self-delusion and the Volte-face of Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’; similarly O’Connor-Visser, Aspects of Human Sacrifice, p. 123 speaks of ‘intoxication’. 19. Gibert, Change of Mind, pp. 236-7; Harder, ‘Iphigeneia: naïef, narcotisch of normal?’. 20. Gibert, Change of Mind, pp. 232-4 and 237-3; Sansone, ‘Iphigenia Changes her Mind’; Smith, ‘Iphigeneia in Love’. 21. Rivier, Essai sur la tragique d’Euripide, p. 68, Pohlenz, Die griechische Tragödie, p. 464, and Bonnard, ‘Iphigénie à Aulis: tragique et poésie’, pp. 91-2 argue that ‘Iphigenia’s heroism lies in her self-sacrificing acceptance of Agamemnon’s account on the matter’ (Conacher, Euripidean Drama, p. 261 n. 21) even if Agamemnon’s new motives cannot be accepted. 22. On Achilles’ response to Iphigenia’s speech, see further

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Notes to pages 41-43 Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy, pp. 108-11 and 134-5. On human sacrifice in ancient Greece and on the similarities and differences between Iphigenia and other sacrificial victims in Euripides, see Ch. 5, under ‘Human sacrifice’. On the character of Iphigenia, see the overview of modern readings in Gibert, Change of Mind, pp. 202-54. See also Miller, ‘Teaching Euripides, Teaching Mythology’, especially pp. 114-16; Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, pp. 38-54; Sansone, ‘Iphigenia Changes her Mind’; Lawrence, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’; Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, pp. 31-48; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 65-105; Snell, ‘From Tragedy to Philosophy’; Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, pp. 361-4; Siegel, ‘Self-delusion and the Volte-face of Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’; Smith, ‘Iphigeneia in Love’. 23. On Achilles see further Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy, pp. 84-143; Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, pp. 47-8; Goodkin, The Tragic Middle, pp. 116-19; Sansone, ‘Iphigenia Changes her Mind’, pp. 163-6; Griffin, ‘Characterization in Euripides’, pp. 146-7; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, especially pp. 56-71; King, Achilles, pp. 94-104; Ritchie ‘Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis 919-74’; Vellacott, Ironic Drama, pp. 426; Cavander, Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, p. 8, Conacher, Euripidean Drama, pp. 259-60, Grube, Drama of Euripides, pp. 430-1; Blaiklock, The Male Characters of Euripides, pp. 117-18. 24. On the cult of Artemis in Aulis, see further Ch. 5. On the geography of the play, see Ch. 7, under ‘Setting’. 25. See further Ch. 8, under ‘Performance history’. 26. See Ch. 1 n. 4 above. 27. Scholars who attribute these lines to the (principal) Chorus, argue for the Chorus’ excitement or naivety: see, e.g., Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 463 n. 92. Examples of secondary choruses in Greek tragedy are collected and discussed in Taplin, Stagecraft of Aeschylus, pp. 235-7. On the Chorus of the play in general, see further Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, pp. 45-6; Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning’, pp. 532-6; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, pp. 44, 878; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 78-84; Parry, The Lyric Poems of Greek Tragedy, pp. 186-90. See also Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, pp. 105-12 and Zeitlin, ‘The Artful Eye’, on the entry-song, Stinton, Euripides and the Judgment of Paris, pp. 26-7 on the first song, and Walsh, ‘Iphigenia in Aulis: Third Stasimon’, on the third song. On the music and choreography of the choral songs see Ch. 7, under ‘Song and dance’. 28. The debate over the authorship of the two characters (see Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 79-87 and 318-19) does not diminish their significance to the plot. 29. ‘[T]he Old Slave … torn between two loyalties, decides for humanity against deception and cruelty. … [T]he slaves in Euripides … are loyal, honest, brave, sympathetic, shrewd …; … their behaviour

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Notes to pages 43-53 and moral judgement are clearly on a higher level than that of most of the free men and women.’ Vellacott, Ironic Drama, p. 219. For a concise discussion of the various functions of slaves in Greek tragedy, see Hall, ‘The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy’, pp. 113-18; Ebbott, ‘Marginal Figures’, pp. 368-70; Gregory, ‘Euripidean Tragedy’, pp. 264-5. On other anonymous old men playing equally significant roles, see Electra 487-692 and Ion 735-858 and 923-1047. 30. On the function of comic elements in IA, see further Ch. 7. 31. On off-stage characters in other Euripidean plays, see De Jong, ‘Three Off-Stage Characters in Euripides’. 32. On the hostile depiction of Odysseus on the democratic stage of late fifth-century Athens, see Worman, ‘Odysseus Panourgos’; Stanford, ‘The Ulysses Theme’, pp. 102-17. 33. ‘There is indeed a driving force behind what happens, but it only becomes evident later in the play: the mutinous army’, Vellacott, Ironic Drama, p. 174. 34. On the similarities between the two plays and Aeschylus’ now lost Myrmidons, see Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy, pp. 119-20 and 148-50. 35. On Odysseus, Calchas, and the army, see also Ch. 6.

4. Themes and Issues 1. On modesty, shame, and honour, see Cairns, Aidos, pp. 282-4 and 309-14; Foley, Ritual Irony, p. 80. 2. See Conacher, Euripides and the Sophists and Allan, ‘Euripides and the Sophists’, both with further bibliography. 3. See also Ch. 7. 4. On metatheatre and role-play in the work of Euripides, see the influential work by Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae; Zeitlin, Playing the Other, and ‘The Closet of Masks’; Foley, Ritual Irony, especially pp. 205-58. 5. Foley, Ritual Irony, p. 94; Dubois, Sowing the Body, pp. 162-4; see also Ch. 3 under ‘Agamemnon’. 6. On role-playing in relation to Achilles, Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra, see further Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy, pp. 84-113. 7. Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, pp. 126 and 127. 8. Goodkin, The Tragic Middle, p. 117. 9. On the position of women in fifth-century Athens and tragedy, including Euripides, see Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy; Zeitlin, Playing the Other, pp. 341-74. For concise overviews see also Blondell et al., Women on the Edge, pp. 48-64 and 80-3; Hall, ‘The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy’, pp. 103-10. On gender and especially feminist readings of IA see, among others, Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’; Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, pp. 305-28;

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Notes to pages 53-63 Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, pp. 38-54; Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, pp. 37-44; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 65-105. See also Ch. 8, under ‘Critical views’. 10. See, for instance, Goldhill, ‘The Language of Tragedy’. 11. See Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ, pp. 38-40 and 107; Goff, The Noose of Words, pp. 95-104; Dubois, Sowing the Body, pp. 130-66, especially 162-4. 12. See Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City, and, on tragedy, Belfiore, Murder Among Friends. 13. For a more detailed discussion of the theme of friendship in IA, see McDonald, ‘Iphigenia’s Philia’. 14. On the interrelations between madness and desire in the play, see especially Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, pp. 51-4. On desire as beneficial and destructive agent, see Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, p. 51; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, p. 35; Foley, Ritual Irony, p. 77; Smith, ‘Iphigeneia in Love’, pp. 179-80; Cavander, Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, pp. 10-11; Conacher, Euripidean Drama, pp. 255-6. On Bacchae, see also Ch. 7, under ‘The trilogy’. 15. For discussions of the themes of freedom, necessity and fortune in the play, see Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, p. 19 n. 8; Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, pp. 361-4; Vellacott, Ironic Drama, p. 221. On the workings of fortune in Euripides, see Gianopoulou, ‘Divine Agency and Tyche in Euripides’ Ion’, and on fate, see Blondell et al., Women on the Edge, pp. 15-19. 16. Cavander, Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, pp. 7-8. 17. For a discussion of the use of ancestors in the play see Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning’, pp. 536-40; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia, p. 101. See also Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 461 n. 77 on Pelops and Atreus; Morwood, Euripides, pp. 200 and 210, notes on lines 504 and 1457, on Tantalus and Atreus respectively. 18. See further Ch. 3, under ‘The Chorus’.

5. Religion 1. On the relation between the religion of tragedy and the lived religion of fifth-century Athens, and especially the debate regarding the extent to which the questioning of religion by tragedy is subversive, see, for instance, Mastronarde, ‘The Gods’; Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion, and ‘Tragedy and Religion’; Parker, ‘Gods Cruel and Kind’. 2. See, for instance, Cropp, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, pp. 4356; Lyons, Gender and Immortality, pp. 137-57; Lloyd-Jones, ‘Artemis and Iphigenia’. 3. Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 454. 4. See, e.g., Goodkin, The Tragic Middle, p. 116; Luschnig, Tragic

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Notes to pages 65-75 Aporia, p. 19 n. 2 and pp. 35-6 n. 5; Vellacott, Ironic Drama, pp. 42-4 and 74. 5. For a more detailed discussion of the epilogue, see Ch. 8, under ‘The text and its history’. 6. On the role of gods from the machine in Euripides, see Mastronarde, ‘The Gods’; Dunn, Tragedy’s End, especially pp. 26-44. 7. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, pp. 107-15; Henrichs, ‘Human Sacrifice in Greek Religion’, pp. 223-4. 8. Wilkins, ‘The State and the Individual’, pp. 180 and 186-7. On the ritual killing of young women as a prelude to war, see Burkert, Homo Necans, p. 65. 9. See Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 99-100, who draws on René Girard’s concept of ‘sacrificial crisis’. On the more general character and function of ritual killing, see Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 1-82. 10. See further Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 55-66. 11. On the ritual exchange of human and animal sacrifice in tragedy see, among others, Henrichs, ‘Drama and “Dromena”’ and Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, pp. 31-48. 12. See further Osborne, ‘Women and Sacrifice in Classical Greece’, p. 396. 13. On death rituals in fifth-century Athens, see Garland, The Greek Way of Death. On wedding rituals, see Oakley & Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens; Leduc, ‘Marriage in Ancient Greece’; Redfield, ‘Notes on the Greek Wedding’. 14. See Rehm, Marriage to Death; Seaford, ‘The Tragic Wedding’. 15. Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 465 n. 100. 16. On this song, see further Ch. 7, under ‘Song and Dance’. 17. For a brief summary of the debate, see Gibert, Change of Mind, pp. 243-4. 18. For a masterly treatment of supplication in Greek literature and culture, see Gould, Myth, Ritual, Memory and Exchange, pp. 22-77. 19. On the role of Orestes in the play, see further Ch. 7, under ‘Mute persons’. 20. See Gould, Myth, Ritual, Memory and Exchange, pp. 22-77, especially 42-51.

6. Politics 1. See, for instance, Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece and Powell, Athens and Sparta. 2. For an overview of the debate in connection with Euripides, see Michelini, ‘Modern Views of Euripides’ and ‘Euripides: Conformist, Deviant or Neo-conservative?’. 3. Kovacs, Euripides, Vol. VI, p. 163. 4. See further Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, with bibliography.

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Notes to pages 75-80 5. See, for instance, Cavander, Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, pp. 910 and 15; Dimock in Merwin & Dimock, Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis, pp. 4-5; and more recently the reviews of Kovacs, Euripides, Vol. VI, by Anhalt and Mastronarde. On the relation between the dramatic reality of IA and the historical reality of the Peloponnesian War see, among others, Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, pp. 317-20. See also Ch. 8, under ‘Critical views’. 6. See Loraux, The Invention of Athens, especially pp. 42-56. 7. See Goldhill, ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, with further bibliography. 8. On self-sacrifice in the rest of Euripides’ work, see Ch. 5, under ‘Human sacrifice’. 9. On the opposition between Greeks and barbarians, see Hall, Hellenicity, especially Ch. 6; Hall, ‘The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy’ and Inventing the Barbarian; Cartledge, The Greeks, pp. 36-62. 10. On the reception of this line in Aristotle and in modern productions of the play, see Ch. 8, under ‘Critical views’. 11. See further Hall, Hellenicity, pp. 205-20 and Flower, ‘From Simonides to Isocrates’. 12. Discussion in Flower, ‘From Simonides to Isocrates’, especially pp. 89-93. For a connection between the panhellenic rhetoric in IA and Gorgias’ proposal of a panhellenic crusade against the Persians, see Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, pp. 54-6; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 1012; Dimock in Merwin & Dimock, Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis, pp. 4-5. 13. On panhellenism in the play, see especially Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, pp. 54-6; Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 92-102; Jouan, Euripide, Vol. VII, Iphigénie à Aulis, pp. 41-3. 14. On the audience of the dramatic festivals, see Goldhill, ‘The Audience of Athenian Tragedy’; Sommerstein, ‘The Theatre Audience, the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus’; Csapo and Slater, Context of Ancient Drama, pp. 286-305. 15. Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, p. 54. 16. Two of the scholars who find Agamemnon’s argument unfounded are Siegel, ‘Agamemnon in Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis’, pp. 263-4 and Page, Actors’ Interpolations in Greek Tragedy, p. 157. On the fate of allied cities which revolted, see, most famously, the debate regarding Mytilene in Thucydides, 3.37-50. 17. Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis’, pp. 1823. On the role of fortune in IA, see also Ch. 4, under ‘Rhetoric’. 18. Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 462 n. 83. On the power of demagogues over mass audiences, see Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, especially pp. 91-4 and 122-4. On the role of Odysseus, see also Ch. 3, under ‘Off-stage characters’. 19. Xenophon, Hellenica 1.6.24. On the Athenian generals in

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Notes to pages 80-89 Arginusae and the Agamemnon of IA, see Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis’, pp. 176-7. 20. Carter, The Quiet Athenian. 21. The search for role models and authority figures is a popular theme in Athenian drama, especially in the last two decades of the fifth century: Griffith, ‘Authority Figures’; Strauss, Fathers and Sons in Athens. 22. See further Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, p. 347 on 520f.

7. Performance 1. If Euripides died in Macedon (see n. 2), the text of the play reached Athens before 405: see Hooker, ‘The Composition of the Frogs’ and Stockert, Iphigenie in Aulis, p. 63. 2. Euripides’ self-imposed exile and death in Macedon are not as certain as it is generally assumed: given that Aristophanes makes no mention of them in his Frogs, they may well be the product of ancient biographical fiction: Scullion, ‘Euripides and Macedon, or the Silence of the Frogs’; Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets, pp. 103-4. 3. Kannicht, TrGF: Euripides, pp. 101-4; Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets, pp. 88-104, 163-9. 4. On Macedon as a cultural centre at the end of the fifth century, see Revermann, ‘Euripides, Tragedy and Macedon’, with further bibliography. 5. Revermann, ‘Euripides, Tragedy and Macedon’, pp. 462-5, with further bibliography. 6. Allan, The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy, pp. 149-60. 7. The ancient note can be found in Diggle, Euripides Fabulae: Tomus III, p. 290. 8. Dodds, Euripides’ Bacchae, pp. xxv-xxxviii. 9. For reconstructions of the play, see Kannicht, TrGF: Euripides, p. 211; Jouan & van Looy, Euripide, Tome 8, pp. 98-100; Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides, pp. 265-8. 10. On the sanctuary of Artemis in Aulis, see Schachter, Cults of Boiotia, pp. 94-8. On Hesiod crossing over to Chalcis, see his Works and Days, 651-5. 11. Strabo 9.2.3. 12. The story is in Pausanias 3.9.1. 13. See further examples in Hornblower & Spawforth (editors), Oxford Classical Dictionary, under the entry ‘Aulis’. 14. Cf. Ch. 3, under ‘The Chorus’. For other examples of religious sightseeing in tragedy, see Lee, Euripides’ Ion, p. 177. 15. On the Greek army, see also Chs 3 and 6.

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Notes to pages 90-101 16. Damen, ‘Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy’, especially pp. 326 and 330, followed by Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 322. 17. On the vocal tone as a factor in differentiating actors, see the bibliography in Damen, ‘Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy’, p. 318 n. 12 18. Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, p. 249. 19. Iakov, ‘Skenothetika provlemata sto archaio drama’, p. 89. 20. Mastronarde, Contact and Discontinuity, p. 24. 21. Quotation from Morwood, Euripides, p. 212 on line 1626. On this last scene of the play, see further Ch. 8, under ‘The text and its history’. 22. See Halleran, Stagecraft in Euripides, pp. 20-4 on the rule of announced entrances, and pp. 40-2 on the entrance of the ‘wrong’ person. 23. The unannounced arrival of the messenger in the middle of a line is rather exceptional in fifth-century drama and perhaps a later addition but certainly well suited to the rest of the scene. Other examples can be found in Sansone, ‘Iphigenia Changes her Mind’, p. 162 n. 10. 24. Halleran, Stagecraft in Euripides, p. 41. 25. On the possibility that the stage building had more than one door, see Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 155 and 446. 26. Taplin, Stagecraft of Aeschylus, pp. 70-9. 27. Mastronarde, Contact and Discontinuity, p. 32. 28. On the musical innovations of late Euripides, see Csapo, ‘Later Euripidean Music’, with further bibliography. On the choreography of the Chorus’ entry-song, see Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, pp. 105-12. 29. Stinton, Euripides and the Judgment of Paris, pp. 29-34 (quotation from 29). 30. On this paean, see Gibert, Change of Mind, p. 253, Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 610-21; Foley, Ritual Irony, p. 76. 31. Csapo, ‘Later Euripidean Music’, p. 419. 32. Gibert, Change of Mind, p. 253 n. 107. 33. On children in Greek tragedy, see Griffiths, Trailing Clouds of Glory; Sifakis, ‘Children in Greek Tragedy’. 34. See further Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy, p. 86. 35. Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action, p. 95. 36. Svendsen, ‘The Letter Device in Euripides and Shakespeare’, especially pp. 84-5. 37. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 42. On the structural similarities between the tablet and the female body, both to be inscribed on and possessed, see also Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 455 n. 22; Lewis, News and Society in the Greek Polis, pp. 142-52; Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ, p. 111; Dubois, Sowing the Body, pp. 130-66. Cf. Baum, ‘Iphigenia Obscene’.

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Notes to pages 102-110 38. Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy, pp. 120-8. 39. On IA and Menander’s Brothers, see Grant, ‘The Beginning of Menander, ADELFOI B’, p. 348. 40. On the exploration of the comic potential of IA in modern adaptations of the play, see, for instance, Katsaitis’ Iphigenia en Lixourio (1720), Despréaux’s Momie (1778), Dupérier de Larsan’s Iphigénie en Périgord (?1786), and Dennery’s Le Sacrifice d’Iphigénie (1861). 41. On the ordinariness of the characters and the extraordinary situation they are in, see Norwood, Greek Tragedy, p. 287. 42. On comic elements in the play, see Michelini, ‘Expansion of Myth’, pp. 44-5; Stockert, ‘Eine Komödienszene’; Conacher, Euripidean Drama, p. 259; Murray, Euripides and his Age, p. 87; Grube, Drama of Euripides, p. 422; Norwood, Greek Tragedy, pp. 2889. On comedy elsewhere in Euripides, see Gregory, ‘Comic Elements in Euripides’; Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia; Knox, Word and Action, pp. 250-74.

8. Reception 1. On Erasmus’ translation of IA and its qualities, see Rummel, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics, pp. 28-47. 2. For introductions into the history of the text of Euripides’ plays in antiquity and in medieval times, see Diggle, Textual Tradition; Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, pp. 201-8; Barrett, Euripides’ Hippolytos, pp. 4584. On IA, see also Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 64-6. 3. Mastronarde, Euripides’ Phoenissae, pp. 39-49. 4. See Ch. 3, under ‘The Chorus’. 5. On the interpretative questions and methodological preoccupations which have informed editions and studies of the play since the eighteenth century, see the detailed analysis of Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis. 6. For contrasting views, see Bain, ‘The Prologues of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis’ and Knox, Word and Action, pp. 275-94. For further discussion and bibliography, see Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, pp. 66-79. On Musgrave’s reading of the play and the prologue in 1762 and its impact on later scholarship, see Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis, especially pp. 63-64, 75-81. 7. See further Knox, Word and Action, pp. 275-94. On the false expectations the prologue raises and their impact on the portrayal of Achilles, see Michelakis, Achilles in Greek Tragedy, pp. 92-5 and 12930. On misdirection in Euripides, see the examples collected in Mastronarde, Euripides’ Phoenissae, p. 150 n. 1. 8. History of Animals 7.39. 9. See, for instance, Dionysus’ divine appearance at the end of Bacchae. The external evidence for interpolation is discussed at length

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Notes to pages 110-121 by Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, esp. p. 86; see also Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis index, under ‘Aelian’. 10. West, ‘Tragica V’, p. 76. 11. Euripides, Hecuba, 518-82. For a list of parallels see Cecchi, ‘L’esodo dell’ Ifigenia in Aulide di Euripide’, p. 81. 12. Pliny, Natural History, 35.73; Cicero, Brutus, 28.70; Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 2.13.13. On Timanthes’ painting, see Kahil, ‘Iphigeneia’, p. 710 no. 4, with sources and bibliography, and Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, p. 625 note on lines 1549f., with further bibliography. On the reception of the painting, see Montagu, ‘Interpretations of Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia’. 13. See Funke, ‘Euripides’. 14. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 12.27-34; Cicero, Orator, 22.74, De Officiis 3.25; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 1.84-100. The relevant sources are collected and discussed in Jocelyn, Tragedies of Ennius, pp. 318-42 in his commentary of the fragments of Ennius’ Iphigenia; Croisille, ‘Le sacrifice d’Iphigénie’. 15. Kitto, Greek Tragedy, p. 362; Grube, Drama of Euripides, p. 421. 16. See further Chs 2 and 3. On Euripides’ tragedy and the issue of genre, see an excellent introduction in Mastronarde, ‘Euripidean Tragedy and Genre’. 17. Kovacs, Euripides, Vol. VI, and ‘Toward a Reconstruction of the Iphigenia Aulidensis’; Delebecque, ‘Alcibiade au théâtre d’Athènes’; Goossens, Euripide et Athènes, pp. 673-721; Pohlenz, Die griechische Tragödie, pp. 466-7; Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis’. 18. Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis’, pp. 1789. See also Reinhardt, ‘The Intellectual Crisis in Euripides’; Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, especially pp. 385-93; Snell, ‘From Tragedy to Philosophy’; Jaeger, Paideia, pp. 329-54. On the relation between the play and its historical and political context see further Ch. 6. 19. Foley, Ritual Irony, p. 100. 20. On the relation between the play and its social, cultural, and ideological context, see especially Chs 4 and 5. 21. For bibliography on IA in the performing arts, see the relevant section in the ‘Guide to Further Reading’ below. 22. Csapo & Slater, Context of Ancient Drama, p. 229; PickardCambridge, Dramatic Festivals of Athens, p. 100. 23. The illustration is reproduced in Kahil, ‘Iphigeneia’, p. 712, no. 8; Small, Parallel Worlds, p. 83. 24. On the scenes from the play depicted on these bowls, see Small, Parallel Worlds, pp. 82 and 86-90; Kahil, ‘Iphigeneia’, pp. 711-13, with illustrations and further bibliography. 25. For a transcription of the fragments and further discussion, see

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Notes to pages 122-129 Pöhlman & West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music, pp. 18-21; West, Ancient Greek Music, pp. 278, 286-7, 376. 26. See Aretz, Die Opferung der Iphigeneia in Aulis, pp. 231-88; Jocelyn, Tragedies of Ennius, pp. 318-42. 27. The relevant references are collected in Jocelyn, Tragedies of Ennius, p. 319 n. 2. See also Sansone, ‘Iphigenia Changes her Mind’, pp. 163-4 n. 13; Grant, ‘The Beginning of Menander, ADELFOI B’, p. 348. 28. The database of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama can be accessed online at http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/database. 29. See further Hall, ‘Iphigenia and her Mother at Aulis’, and Gliksohn, Iphigénie. 30. For a translation in English of Racine’s Iphigénie, see Cairncross, Racine. For a comparison with Euripides, see Aretz, Die Opferung der Iphigeneia in Aulis, pp. 289-356 and Goodkin, The Tragic Middle, pp. 112-36, both with further bibliography. 31. See further Cumming, ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’, and Hayes, ‘Iphigénie en Aulide’. 32. Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, p. 476 n. 204, following Bly, The Production Notebooks, pp. 55-6. 33. On Cacoyannis’ film adaptation of IA, see Torrance, ‘Resonances of Religion’, especially pp. 43-8; McDonald, ‘Moving Icons’, ‘Cacoyannis’ and Euripides’ Iphigenia’, and Euripides in Cinema, pp. 129-91; McDonald & MacKinnon, ‘Cacoyannis vs. Euripides’; McDonald & Winkler, ‘Interview with Michael Cacoyannis’; MacKinnon, Greek Tragedy into Film, pp. 85-91; Knox, Word and Action, pp. 351-4. 34. See Hall, ‘Iphigenia and her Mother at Aulis’.

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Guide to Further Reading This guide aims to be as comprehensive as space allows, but it focuses primarily on publications in English. More detailed bibliography on individual issues and themes can be found in the endnotes to the relevant chapters. Full details can be found in the Bibliography. Euripides and Greek tragedy For concise overviews of Euripides’ work, see Gregory, ‘Euripidean Tragedy’, in Gregory (editor), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 251-70; Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London & New York: Routledge, 1999); and Collard, Euripides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). See also Barlow’s general introduction to the Aris & Phillips Greek Drama series (reprinted at the beginning of all volumes devoted to Euripides’ plays) and Hall in Morwood, Euripides: Iphigenia among the Taurians, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. ix-xxxix, especially pp. ix-xvi and xxvii-xxxix. For more detailed analysis of different aspects of Euripides’ work, see Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), and the articles in Mossman (editor), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Euripides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Mitchell-Boyask (editor), Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2002); and Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000). For readings of Euripides’ plays with emphasis on issues of plot, characterization, and modern criticism, see also Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Vellacott, Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’ Method and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967); and Grube, Drama of Euripides (London: Methuen, 1961). On Euripides’ use of myth, see especially Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition; Eisner, ‘Euripides’ Use of Myth’, Arethusa 12

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Guide to Further Reading (1979), pp. 153-74; and Whitman, Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). On Euripides and women, see Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996); Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), as well as many of the contributions in Mossman (editor), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Euripides; Mitchell-Boyask (editor), Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides; Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century; and Powell (editor), Euripides, Women and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1990). On Greek tragedy as a whole, see Gregory (editor), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) and Easterling (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), with contributions which examine different aspects of tragedy as an art form and as a cultural institution, including issues of language, politics, and religion, and provide an overview of the reception history and of modern critical approaches to the genre. Two introductions that focus on issues of performance and literary criticism are those by Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992). Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry, provides one of the best overviews of the extant plays and a good presentation of issues in literary criticism.

Critical editions, translations, commentaries In the last twenty years, there have been five, markedly different, critical editions of IA. Those by Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOEB, 2002), Diggle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), and Günther (Leipzig: Teubner, 1988) are more ‘sceptical’ in that they suspect larger passages of having been interpolated. Those by Jouan (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983) and Stockert (Vienna: Die Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992) are more ‘conservative’, in that they are reluctant to accept widespread interpolations. Most recent translators of the play into English follow Diggle’s text but they do not always agree with his views on widespread interpolations. Among the English translations of the play, those by Rudall (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), Taylor (in Walton (editor), Euripides Plays, Volume 2: Cyclops, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis and Trojan

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Guide to Further Reading Women, London: Methuen, 1991), Richardson (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988) and Merwin & Dimock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), are lively and imaginative, and seek to reproduce some of the poetic effects of the original. Because of their artistic merits they have been used extensively for stage productions of the play. Literal, prose translations, which set out to convey the diction and/or word order of the Greek with clarity and precision but often at the expense of vividness, include those by Walker (in Grene & Lattimore (editors), The Complete Greek Tragedies. Euripides, vol. 4, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) and more recently those by Morwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Gamel (in Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, London & New York: Routledge, 1999), and Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOEB, 2002), which are also accompanied by useful introduction and comments. Unfortunately there is no recent commentary on the play in English. The two English commentaries by Headlam (Cambridge: University Press, 1889) and England (London: Macmillan, 1891) are outdated, though they are still useful for linguistic and metrical points. Helpful on linguistic issues is also the commentary on selected scenes by Kennedy (London: Macmillan, 1891). The most important modern commentary of the play, in two volumes, is by Stockert (Vienna: Die Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992) in German. The French commentary by Jouan (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983) and the Italian by Turato (Venice: Letteratura universale Marsilio, 2001) are also useful. A commentary in English with introduction and translation is in preparation by Chris Collard and is due to appear in the Aris & Phillips Greek Drama series.

Myth On Iphigenia in early and classical Greek literature and art, see Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, two vols (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), index under ‘Iphigenia’; Woodford, The Trojan War in Ancient Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993) chapter 2; Kahil, ‘Iphigeneia. I. Époque grecque’, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. V (1990), pp. 706-19; and Krauskopf, ‘Iphigenia (in Etruria)’, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. V (1990), pp. 729-34. Proclus’ summary of the lost epic poem Cypria can be found in West, Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOEB, 2003), pp. 66-80; it is discussed in Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle (London: Bristol

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Guide to Further Reading Classical Press, 1989), pp. 33-52. The fragments of Aeschylus’ Iphigenia are collected in Radt, TrGF: Aeschylus, vol. 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), pp. 115 and 213-14 and translated in Smyth, Aeschylus, p. 411; cf. pp. 409, 462, 498-9. The fragments of Sophocles’ Iphigenia can be found in Radt, TrGF: Sophocles, vol. 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), pp. 270-4 and Pearson, Fragments of Sophocles, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. 218-23, and have been translated in Lloyd-Jones, Sophocles, Vol. 3: Fragments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOEB, 1996), pp. 138-41. On the larger myth of the Trojan War in Euripides, see Stinton, Euripides and the Judgment of Paris (London: Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1965). On the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Euripides and earlier authors and/or the mythological tradition as a whole, see Gibert, Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1995), pp. 208-10; Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’, American Journal of Philology 113 (1992), pp. 527-42; Stockert, Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, vols I-II (Vienna: Die Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992), pp. 50-62; Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), pp. 250-3; and Hulton, ‘Euripides and the Iphigenia Legend’, Mnemosyne 15 (1962), pp. 364-8. On IA as a rewriting of the Iliad, see Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis ’ in Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 316-20. On IA and its reworking of the Oresteia, see especially Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning’, pp. 530 and 538; Luschnig, Tragic Aporia: A Study of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (Berwick, Victoria: Aureal, 1988), pp. 1-4; Eisner, ‘Euripides’ Use of Myth’, Arethusa 12 (1979), p. 161; and Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 143.

Characters and themes Luschnig, Tragic Aporia: A Study of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (Berwick, Victoria: Aureal, 1988) is the only book-length study of the play in English and provides a detailed reading of various aspects of the play and of individual scenes with useful insights. For other influential readings of the play, see Michelini, ‘The Expansion of Myth in Late Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis’, in Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000), pp. 41-57; Gibert, Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1995); Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice and Meaning in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’, American Journal of Philology 113 (1992), pp. 527-42; Foley, Ritual

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Guide to Further Reading Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 65-105; Snell, ‘From Tragedy to Philosophy: Iphigenia in Aulis’, reprinted in Segal (editor), Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 396-405 and 451; Lesky, Greek Tragic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 354-64; Vellacott, Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’ Method and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 42-9, 173-7, 201-4, 219-22; and Ferguson, ‘Iphigeneia at Aulis’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 99 (1968), pp. 157-63. For brief but useful introductions to the play, see also Dimock in Merwin & Dimock, Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 3-21; Cavander, Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis: A Translation with Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 1-15; and more recently Hall in Morwood, Euripides: Iphigenia among the Taurians, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xxii-xxv and Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’ in Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 305-28. For a general introduction to issues of characterization in Greek tragedy, see the articles collected in Pelling (editor), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). On characterization in IA and the debate between formalist and psychological approaches, see especially Griffin, ‘Characterization in Euripides: Hippolytus and Iphigeneia in Aulis’, in Pelling (editor), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, pp.128-47; Lawrence, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis: Characterization and Psychology in Euripides’, Ramus 17 (1988), pp. 91-109; Chant, ‘Role Inversion and its Function in the Iphigenia at Aulis’, Ramus 15 (1986), pp. 83-92; and, for a very useful overview, Gibert, Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy. For bibliography on individual characters and themes, see the notes to the relevant chapters above.

Religion For anthropological and structuralist approaches to animal and human sacrifice in ancient Greece see Peirce, ‘Death, Revelry, and Thysia’, Classical Antiquity 24 (1993), pp. 219-66; Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1991); Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 1-82; and Henrichs ‘Human Sacrifice in Greek Religion: Three Case Studies’, in Reverdin & Rudhardt (editors), Le sacrifice dans l’antiquité (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1981), pp.195-235. On human sacrifice in Euripides, and especially in IA, see Henrichs, ‘Drama and “Dromena”: Bloodshed, Violence, and Sacrificial

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Guide to Further Reading Metaphor in Euripides’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000), pp. 173-88; Kron, ‘Patriotic Heroes’, in Hägg (editor), Ancient Greek Hero Cult: Proceedings of the Fifth International Seminar on Ancient Greek Cult (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 1999), pp. 61-83; Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 31-66; Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 31-48; O’Connor-Visser, Aspects of Human Sacrifice in the Tragedies of Euripides (Amsterdam: B.R. Gruner, 1987); and Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). On the use of the gods in Greek tragedy, see Mastronarde, ‘The Gods’ in Gregory (editor), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 321-32. On marriage and funeral rites in fifthcentury Athens, see Rehm, Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 11-42; Oakley & Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Leduc, ‘Marriage in Ancient Greece’, in Pantel (editor), A History of Women in the West. Volume 1: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 233-95; and Redfield, ‘Notes on the Greek Wedding’, Arethusa 15 (1982), pp. 181201. On the conflation of the rituals of death and marriage in tragedy, see Seaford, ‘The Structural Problems of Marriage in Euripides’, in Powell (editor), Euripides, Women and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 151-76, and ‘The Tragic Wedding’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987), pp. 106-30; Rehm, Marriage to Death; and, specifically on IA, Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, in Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 56-7 and 309; Gibert, Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1995), pp. 240-4; Seaford, ‘The Tragic Wedding’, pp. 108-10; and Foley, Ritual Irony, pp. 84-92.

Politics On the politics of late fifth-century Athens and the role of demagogues and mass audiences, see Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 104-55. On the ideal and reality of panhellenism at the end of the fifth century and in the course of the fourth, see Flower, ‘From Simonides to Isocrates: The Fifth-Century Origins of Fourth-Century Panhellenism’, Classical Antiquity 19 (2000), pp. 65-101; Michelini, ‘The Expansion of Myth in Late Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis’, in

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Guide to Further Reading Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000), pp. 4157; Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), especially pp. 92-102; and Merwin & Dimock, Euripides: Iphigeneia at Aulis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). On self-sacrifice, especially of young women, and patriotism in Greek literature, see Kron ‘Patriotic Heroes’, in Hägg (editor), Ancient Greek Hero Cult: Proceedings of the Fifth International Seminar on Ancient Greek Cult (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 1999), pp. 61-83. On connections between IA and the Peloponnesian war, see Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’ in Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 317-20; Ferguson, ‘Iphigeneia at Aulis’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 99 (1968), pp. 157-63; Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis: A Man in an Age of Crisis’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 80 (1949), pp. 174-86. On the relation between Greeks and barbarians at the end of the fifth century, see Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 22-3 and the chapter by Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis’, at pp. 313-14; Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek SelfDefinition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Performance Issues of Euripidean performance are discussed by Halleran, Stagecraft in Euripides (London: Croom Helm, 1985) and ‘Euripidean Stagecraft’, in Mitchell-Boyask (editor), Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides, pp. 85-102; and Kaimio, Physical Contact in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Stage Conventions (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1988). On the more general issue of Greek tragedy and theatrical production, see, among others, the seminal work of Taplin, Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) and Greek Tragedy in Action (London: Routledge, 1978), as well as Davidson, ‘Theatrical Production’, in Gregory (editor), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 194-211; Rehm, The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) and Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992); Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge:

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Guide to Further Reading Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mastronarde, Contact and Discontinuity: Some Conventions of Speech and Action on the Greek Tragic Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and Bain, Actors and Audience: A Study of Asides and Related Conventions in Greek Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). On the dramatic and institutional context within which tragedies were performed, see Csapo & Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), and PickardCambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). On comic elements in Euripides, see especially Knox, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 250-74; Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia: Studien zu komischen Elementen in der griechischen Tragödien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982); and Gregory, ‘Comic Elements in Euripides’, in Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000), pp. 59-74. On the relation between Euripides and Menander, see also Grant, ‘The Beginning of Menander, ADELFOI B’, Classical Quarterly 30 (1980), pp. 341-55.

Reception Page’s very influential study, Actors’ Interpolations in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), has set the ground for all recent work on the text of IA. All modern editions of the play are indebted to it, even if their views on interpolations and their editorial principles differ significantly. On the textual difficulties of the prologue, see also Ferrari, ‘Osservazioni sulla parodo dell’ Ifigenia in Aulide di Euripide (vv. 231-302)’, Eikasmos 1 (1990), pp. 101-9; Mizen, ‘The Iphigenia at Aulis: the Prologue Anapaests’, Illinois Classical Studies 5 (1980), pp. 15-43; Knox, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University, 1979), pp. 275-94; Bain, ‘The Prologues of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis’, Classical Quarterly 27 (1977), pp. 10-26; and Willink, ‘The Prologue of Iphigenia at Aulis’, Classical Quarterly 21 (1971), pp. 343-64. On the epilogue, see West, ‘Tragica V’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 28 (1981), pp. 61-78. For a full list of passages of contested authorship listed chronologically according to the scholars who first expressed doubts about them, see Diggle, Euripides Fabulae: Tomus III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 423-5. Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), provides a detailed analysis of the methodological assumptions and

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Guide to Further Reading practices of selected critical editions and studies of IA over the last two and a half centuries. On issues of editorial principles, see also Diggle, Euripidea: Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), and Wilkins, ‘Review of Jouan, Euripide, Vol. VII, Iphigénie à Aulis’, Classical Review 35 (1985), pp. 252-3; and for a concise introduction to issues of interpolation in Greek tragedy and especially in Euripides, see Mastronarde, Euripides’ Phoenissae: Edited with Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 3949. Excellent overviews of Euripidean scholarship are provided by Gregory, ‘Euripidean Tragedy’ in Gregory (editor), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 251-70; Mossman, ‘Introduction: Euripides in the Twenty-First Century’, in Mossman (editor), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Euripides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1-15; Michelini, ‘Modern Views of Euripides’, in Mitchell-Boyask (editor), Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides (New York: The Modern Language Association of America), pp. 51-9, and Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 3-51; and Goldhill, ‘Modern Critical Approaches to Greek Tragedy’, in Easterling (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 324-47. The ancient vase paintings and wall paintings that depict the sacrifice of Iphigenia have been collected and discussed by Kahil, ‘Iphigeneia. I. Époque grecque’, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. V (1990), pp. 706-19, and Krauskopf, ‘Iphigenia (in Etruria)’, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. V (1990), pp. 729-34. On the Iphigenia of Ennius and its sources of influence, see Aretz, Die Opferung der Iphigeneia in Aulis: Die Rezeption des Mythos in antiken und modernen Dramen (Stuttgart & Leipzig: Teubner, 1999), pp. 231-88, and Jocelyn, The Tragedies of Ennius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 318-42. On the reception of the sacrifice of Iphigenia in modern literature and the performing, visual, and plastic arts (theatre, opera, ballet, music, as well as painting and sculpture), see the sources collected in Reid, Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 599-605. See also Gliksohn, Iphigénie: de la gréce antique à l’Europe des lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), with a list of modern adaptations and translations of Euripides’ IA and Iphigenia among the Taurians at 228-32, as well as Michelakis, ‘Reception, Performance, and the Sacrifice of Iphigenia’, in Martindale & Thomas (editors), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 216-26); Hall, ‘Iphigenia and her Mother at Aulis: A Study in the Revival of a

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Guide to Further Reading Euripidean Classic’, in Dillon & Wilmer (editors), Rebel Women: Staging Greek Drama Today (London: Methuen, 2005); and Aretz, Die Opferung der Iphigeneia in Aulis. On the reception of Iphigenia in music and opera, see also Poduska, ‘Classical Myth in Music: A Selective List’, Classical World 92 (1999), pp. 229-30; the chapters by Cumming, ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’ and Hayes, ‘Iphigénie en Aulide’, in Sadie (editor), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 815-16 and 816-19 respectively; and Zinar, ‘The Use of Greek Tragedy in the History of Opera’, Current Musicology 12 (1971), pp. 80-95, pp. 83-5 and 90-1. On the reception of IA on the American stage, see Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theatre, 18821994 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 89-95 and Pluggé, History of Greek Play Production in American Colleges and Universities from 1881 to 1936 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1938), index, under ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’. On the British stage, see Hall & Macintosh, Hellas Rehearsed: Greek Tragedy and the British Stage 1660-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), index, under ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’.

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Bibliography R. Aelion, Euripide, héritier d’Eschyle, two vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983). W. Allan, The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ——— ‘Euripides and the Sophists: Society and the Theatre of War’, in Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre, pp. 145-56. E.K. Anhalt, ‘Review of Kovacs, Euripides, Vol. VI’, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 23 December (2003). S. Aretz, Die Opferung der Iphigeneia in Aulis: Die Rezeption des Mythos in antiken und modernen Dramen (Stuttgart & Leipzig: Teubner, 1999). D. Bain, Actors and Audience: A Study of Asides and Related Conventions in Greek Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). ——— ‘The Prologues of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis’, Classical Quarterly 27 (1977), pp. 10-26. W.S. Barrett, Euripides’ Hippolytos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). R.K. Baum, ‘Iphigenia Obscene: The (Dis)Appearance from Aulis’, in S. Patsalidis & E. Sakellaridou (editors), (Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 1999), pp. 385-403. E.S. Belfiore, Murder Among Friends: Violations of Philia in Greek Tragedy (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). E.M. Blaiklock, The Male Characters of Euripides: A Study in Realism (Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1952). R. Blondell et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London & New York: Routledge, 1999). M. Bly, The Production Notebooks: Theatre in Process, vol. 1 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996). A. Bonnard, ‘Iphigénie à Aulis: tragique et poésie’, Museum Helveticum 2 (1945), pp. 87-107. W. Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). ——— Greek Religion, originally published in German in 1977 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985).

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Bibliography J. Cairncross, Racine: Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). D.L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). D.A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, vol. III: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOEB, 1991). L.B. Carter, The Quiet Athenian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). P. Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). V. Castellani, ‘Warlords and Women in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’, in J. Redmond (editor), Drama, Sex and Politics, Themes in Drama 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1-10. K. Cavander, Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis: A Translation with Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973). S. Cecchi, ‘L’esodo dell’ Ifigenia in Aulide di Euripide’, Rivista di Studi Classici 8 (1960), pp. 69-87. D. Chant, ‘Role Inversion and its Function in the Iphigenia at Aulis’, Ramus 15 (1986), pp. 83-92. C. Collard, Euripides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). D.J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967). ——— Euripides and the Sophists (London: Duckworth, 1998). J.M. Croisille, ‘Le sacrifice d’Iphigénie dans l’art romain et la literature latine’, Latomus 22 (1963), pp. 209-25. M.J. Cropp, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2000). M. Cropp, K. Lee & D. Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000). E. Csapo, ‘Later Euripidean Music’, in Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre, pp. 399-426. E. Csapo & W.J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). J.E. Cumming, ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’, in Sadie (editor), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 815-16. M. Damen, ‘Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy’, Theatre Journal 41 (1989), pp. 316-40. J. Davidson, ‘Theatrical Production’, in Gregory (editor), Companion to Greek Tragedy, pp. 194-211. J.K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978). M. Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1989). I.J.F. De Jong, ‘Three Off-Stage Characters in Euripides’, originally

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Bibliography published in 1990, reprinted in Mossman (editor), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Euripides, pp. 369-89. E. Delebeque, ‘Alcibiade au théâtre d’Athènes à la fin de la guerre du Péloponnèse’, Dioniso 41 (1967), pp. 354-62. J. Diggle, The Textual Tradition of Euripides’ Orestes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). ——— Euripides Fabulae: Tomus III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). ——— Euripidea: Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). E.R. Dodds, Euripides’ Bacchae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). P. DuBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). F.M. Dunn, Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). P.E. Easterling (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). M. Ebbott, ‘Marginal Figures’, in Gregory (editor), Companion to Greek Tragedy, pp. 366-76. R. Eisner, ‘Euripides’ Use of Myth’, Arethusa 12 (1979), pp. 153-74. E.B. England, The Iphigeneia at Aulis of Euripides (London: Macmillan, 1891). J. Ferguson, ‘Iphigeneia at Aulis’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 99 (1968), pp. 157-63. R. Ferrari, ‘Osservazioni sulla parodo dell’ Ifigenia in Aulide di Euripide (vv. 231-302)’, Eikasmos 1 (1990), pp. 101-9. M.A. Flower, ‘From Simonides to Isocrates: The Fifth-Century Origins of Fourth-Century Panhellenism’, Classical Antiquity 19 (2000), pp. 65-101. H.P. Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). ——— Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). H. Funke, ‘Euripides’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 8-9 (1965/6), pp. 223-79. M.-K. Gamel, ‘Iphigenia at Aulis: Translated and with an Introduction’, in Blondell et al., Women on the Edge, pp. 303-89. T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, two vols (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). R. Garland, The Greek Way of Death (London: Duckworth, 1985). V. Gianopoulou, ‘Divine Agency and Tyche in Euripides’ Ion: Ambiguity and Shifting Perspectives’, in Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre, pp. 257-71. J. Gibert, Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1995).

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Bibliography J.-M. Gliksohn, Iphigénie: de la gréce antique à l’Europe des lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985). B. Goff, The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence and Language in Euripides’ Hippolytus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). S. Goldhill, ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, in J.J. Winkler & F.I. Zeitlin (editors), Nothing to Do With Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 97-129. ——— ‘The Audience of Athenian Tragedy’, in Easterling (editor), Cambridge Companion, pp. 54-68. ——— ‘The Language of Tragedy: Rhetoric and Communication’, in Easterling (editor), Cambridge Companion, pp. 127-50. ———, ‘Modern Critical Approaches to Greek Tragedy’, in Easterling (editor), Cambridge Companion, pp. 324-47. R.E. Goodkin, The Tragic Middle: Racine, Aristotle, Euripides (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). R. Goossens, Euripide et Athènes (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1962). J.P. Gould, Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). J.N. Grant, ‘The Beginning of Menander, ADELFOI B’, Classical Quarterly 30 (1980), pp. 341-55. J. Gregory, ‘Comic Elements in Euripides’, in Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre, pp. 59-74. ——— ‘Euripidean Tragedy’, in Gregory (editor), Companion to Greek Tragedy, pp. 251-70. ——— (editor), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). J. Griffin, ‘The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977), pp. 39-53, reprinted in D.L. Cairns (editor), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 365-84. ——— ‘Characterization in Euripides: Hippolytus and Iphigeneia in Aulis’, in Pelling (editor), Characterization and Individuality, pp.128-47. M. Griffith, ‘Authority Figures’, in Gregory (editor), Companion to Greek Tragedy, pp. 333-51. E.M. Griffiths, Trailing Clouds of Glory: A Study of Child Figures in Greek Tragedy, Ph.D. thesis (University of Bristol, 1999). G.M.A. Grube, The Drama of Euripides, originally published in 1941 (London: Methuen, 1961). H.C. Günther, Euripides: Iphigenia Aulidensis (Leipzig: Teubner, 1988). S.A. Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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Bibliography E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). ——— (1997) ‘The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy’, in Easterling (editor), Cambridge Companion, pp. 93-126. ——— ‘Iphigenia and her Mother at Aulis: A Study in the Revival of a Euripidean Classic’, in J. Dillon & S.E. Wilmer (editors), Rebel Women: Staging Greek Drama Today (London: Methuen, 2005), pp. 3-41. E. Hall & F. Macintosh, Hellas Rehearsed: Greek Tragedy and the British Stage 1660-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). J.M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). M.R. Halleran, Stagecraft in Euripides (London: Croom Helm, 1985). ——— ‘Euripidean Stagecraft’, in Mitchell-Boyask (editor), Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides, pp. 85-102. M.A. Harder, ‘Iphigeneia: naïef, narcotisch of normal?’, Lampas 19 (1986), pp. 21-33. K.V. Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theatre, 1882-1994 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995). J. Hayes, ‘Iphigénie en Aulide’, in Sadie (editor), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 816-19. C. Headlam, The Iphigeneia at Aulis of Euripides: With Introduction and Notes, originally published in 1889 (Cambridge: University Press, 1896). A. Henrichs, ‘Human Sacrifice in Greek Religion: Three Case Studies’, in O. Reverdin & J. Rudhardt (editors), Le sacrifice dans l’antiquité (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1981), pp.195-235. ——— ‘Drama and “Dromena”: Bloodshed, Violence, and Sacrificial Metaphor in Euripides’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000), pp. 173-88. G. Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). J.T. Hooker, ‘The Composition of the Frogs’, Hermes 108 (1980), pp. 169-82. S. Hornblower & A. Spawforth (editors), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). D.D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1991). A.O. Hulton, ‘Euripides and the Iphigenia Legend’, Mnemosyne 15 (1962), pp. 364-8. D. Iakov, ‘Skenothetika provlemata sto archaio drama [Problems of Stagecraft in Ancient Drama]’, in E. Patrikiou (editor), Okto dokimia gia to archaio drama [Eight Essays on Ancient Drama] (Athens: Daidalos, 2003), pp. 79-92.

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Bibliography E.A.M.E. O’Connor-Visser, Aspects of Human Sacrifice in the Tragedies of Euripides (Amsterdam: B.R. Gruner, 1987). R. Osborne, ‘Women and Sacrifice in Classical Greece’, Classical Quarterly 43 (1993), pp. 392-405. D. Page, Actors’ Interpolations in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). R. Parker, ‘Gods Cruel and Kind: Tragedy and Civic Theology’, in Pelling (editor), Greek Tragedy and the Historian, pp. 143-60. H. Parry, The Lyric Poems of Greek Tragedy (Toronto: Stevens, 1978). A.C. Pearson, The Fragments of Sophocles, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917). S. Peirce, ‘Death, Revelry, and Thysia’, Classical Antiquity 24 (1993), pp. 219-66. C. Pelling (editor), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). C. Pelling (editor), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). A.W. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). D.E. Pluggé, History of Greek Play Production in American Colleges and Universities from 1881 to 1936 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1938). D.M. Poduska, ‘Classical Myth in Music: A Selective List’, Classical World 92 (1999), pp. 195-276. M. Pohlenz, Die griechische Tragödie (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1954). E. Pöhlman & M.L. West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music: The Extant Melodies and Fragments Edited and Transcribed with Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). A. Powell, Athens and Sparta: Constructing Greek Political and Social History from 478 BC (London: Routledge, 1988). ——— (editor), Euripides, Women and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1990). N.S. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). S. Radt, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta: Sophocles, vol. 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977). ——— Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta: Aeschylus, vol. 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985). J. Redfield, ‘Notes on the Greek Wedding’, Arethusa 15 (1982), pp. 181201. J.D. Reid, Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). R. Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992). ——— Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral

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Bibliography Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). ——— The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). K. Reinhardt, ‘The Intellectual Crisis in Euripides’, originally published in German in 1960, reprinted in Mossman (editor), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Euripides, pp. 369-89. M. Revermann, ‘Euripides, Tragedy and Macedon: Some Conditions of Reception’, in Cropp, Lee & Sansone (editors), Euripides and Tragic Theatre, pp. 451-67. D. & S. Richardson, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis: Adapted for the Modern Stage (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988). W. Ritchie, ‘Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis 919-74’, in R.D. Dawe, J. Diggle & P.E. Easterling (editors), Dionysiaca: Nine Studies in Greek Poetry (Cambridge: The Editors, 1978), pp. 179-203. A. Rivier, Essai sur la tragique d’Euripide (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1975). E. Robbins, ‘Pindar’s Oresteia and the Tragedians’, in M.J. Cropp et al. (editors), Greek Tragedy and its Legacy: Essays Presented to D. J. Conacher (Calgary: The University of Calgary Press, 1986), pp. 111. N. Rudall, Iphigenia in Aulis: In a New Translation (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997). E. Rummel, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). M. Ryzman, ‘The Reversal of Agamemnon and Menelaus in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’, Emerita 57 (1989), pp. 111-18. S. Sadie (editor), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1992). ——— (editor), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 2001). D. Sansone, ‘Iphigenia Changes her Mind’, Illinois Classical Studies 16 (1991), pp. 161-72. S. Schachter, Cults of Boiotia. Volume 1: Acheloos to Hera, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 38.1 (London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, 1981). D.J. Schenker, ‘Dissolving Differences: Character Overlap and Audience Response’, Mnemosyne 52 (1999), pp. 641-57. S. Scullion, ‘Euripides and Macedon, or the Silence of the Frogs’, Classical Quarterly 53 (2003), pp. 389-400. R. Seaford, ‘The Tragic Wedding’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987), pp. 106-30. ——— ‘The Structural Problems of Marriage in Euripides’, in Powell (editor), Euripides, Women and Sexuality, pp. 151-76. B. Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia: Studien zu komischen

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Bibliography Elementen in der griechischen Tragödien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). C.P. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae, originally published in 1982 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). H. Siegel, ‘Self-delusion and the Volte-face of Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’, Hermes 108 (1980), pp. 300-21. ———, ‘Agamemnon in Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis’, Hermes 109 (1981), pp. 257-65. G.M. Sifakis, ‘Children in Greek Tragedy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 26 (1979), pp. 67-80. J.P. Small, The Parallel Worlds of Classical Art and Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). W.D. Smith, ‘Iphigeneia in Love’, in G.W. Bowersock & W. Burkert (editors), Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to B.M.W. Knox (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979), pp. 173-80. H.W. Smyth, Aeschylus, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOEB, 1971). B. Snell, ‘From Tragedy to Philosophy: Iphigenia in Aulis’, originally published in German in 1928, reprinted in E. Segal (editor), Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 396-405 and 451. A.H. Sommerstein, ‘The Theatre Audience, the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus’, in Pelling (editor), Greek Tragedy and the Historian, pp. 63-79. C.E. Sorum, ‘Myth, Choice, and Meaning in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis’, American Journal of Philology 113 (1992), pp. 527-42. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Tragedy and Religion: Constructs and Readings’, in Pelling (editor), Greek Tragedy and the Historian, pp. 161-86. ——— Tragedy and Athenian Religion (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003). W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968). D. Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). T.C.W. Stinton, Euripides and the Judgment of Paris (London: Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1965). W. Stockert, ‘Eine Komödienszene in Euripides’ aulischer Iphigenie’, Wiener Studien 16 (1982), pp. 71-8. ——— Euripides, Iphigenie in Aulis, vols I-II (Vienna: Die Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992). B.S. Strauss, Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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Bibliography J.T. Svendsen, ‘The Letter Device in Euripides and Shakespeare’, in K.V. Hartigan (editor), Legacy of Thespis: Drama Past and Present, University of Florida Comparative Drama (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 75-88. O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). ——— Greek Tragedy in Action (London: Routledge, 1978). D. Taylor [translation of Iphigenia at Aulis] in J.M. Walton (editor), Euripides Plays, Volume 2: Cyclops, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis and Trojan Women (London: Methuen, 1991), pp. 103-76. I. Torrance, ‘Resonances of Religion in Cacoyannis’ Euripides’, in J. Dillon & S.E. Wilmer (editors), Rebel Women: Staging Greek Drama Today (London: Methuen, 2005), pp. 42-64. F. Turato, Euripide, Ifigenia in Aulide (Venice: Letteratura universale Marsilio, 2001). P. Vellacott, Euripides: Orestes and Other Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). ——— Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’ Method and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). C.R. Walker, ‘Iphigenia in Aulis: Translated and with an Introduction’, in D. Grene & R. Lattimore (editors), The Complete Greek Tragedies. Euripides, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). J.M. Walton (editor), Living Greek Theatre: A Handbook of Classical Performance and Modern Production (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). G.B. Walsh, ‘Iphigenia in Aulis: Third Stasimon’, Classical Philology 69 (1971), pp. 241-8. F.W. Wassermann, ‘Agamemnon in the Iphigenia at Aulis: A Man in an Age of Crisis’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 80 (1949), pp. 174-86. T.B.L. Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides (London: Methuen, 1967). M.L. West, ‘Tragica V’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 28 (1981), pp. 61-78. ——— Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). ——— Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, LOEB, 2003). C.H. Whitman, Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). D. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ——— Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). J. Wilkins, ‘Review of Jouan, Euripide, Vol. VII, Iphigénie à Aulis’ Classical Review 35 (1985), pp. 252-3.

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Bibliography ——— ‘The State and the Individual: Euripides’ Plays of Voluntary Self-Sacrifice’, in Powell (editor), Euripides, Women and Sexuality, pp. 177-94. C.W. Willink, ‘The Prologue of Iphigenia at Aulis’ Classical Quarterly 21 (1971), pp. 343-64. M.M. Winkler (editor), Classics and the Cinema (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991). S. Woodford, The Trojan War in Ancient Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). N. Worman, ‘Odysseus Panourgos: The Liar’s Style in Tragedy and Oratory’, Helios 26 (1999), pp. 35-68. F.I. Zeitlin, ‘The Closet of Masks: Role-Playing and Myth-Making in the Orestes of Euripides’, Ramus 9 (1980), pp. 51-77, reprinted in Mossman (editor), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Euripides, pp. 309-41. ——— ‘The Artful Eye: Vision, Ekphrasis and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre’, in S. Goldhill & R. Osborne (editors), Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 138-96. ——— Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). R. Zinar, ‘The Use of Greek Tragedy in the History of Opera’, Current Musicology 12 (1971), pp. 80-95.

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Chronology The following list of poems, plays, and stage productions and adaptations is selective. Not all of them are discussed in the text. Unless otherwise stated, dates are those of composition or first performance. Further adaptations and productions of IA can be found in Reid, Classical Mythology in the Arts, pp. 599605. See also Poduska, ‘Classical Myth in Music: A Selective List’, pp. 229-30; Cumming, ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’; Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, pp. 89-95; Walton (editor), Living Greek Theatre; Gliksohn, Iphigénie, pp. 228-32; Zinar, ‘The Use of Greek Tragedy in the History of Opera’, pp. 83-5 and 90-1; Pluggé, History of Greek Play Production, index, under ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’. BC

750-675: Iliad and Odyssey by Homer c. 610-552: Oresteia by Stesichorus c. 6th cent.: Cypria, Sack of Troy, Hesiod’s (?) Catalogue of Women 474 or 454: Pythian 11 by Pindar 458: Oresteia by Aeschylus c. 413: Iphigenia among the Taurians by Euripides 405: Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides late 5th or early 4th cent.: painting of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes c. 220-170: Iphigenia by Ennius AD

1503: first printed edition of IA by Aldus Manutius in Venice 1506: translation of IA into Latin by Desiderius Erasmus in Paris c.1550-5: The Tragedie of Iphigeneia, first English translation of IA by Lady Jane Lumley (first published in 1909) 1555: Mordopffer der göttin Diane, mit der jungkfraw Ephigenie (Murderous Sacrifice to the Goddess Diana, with Iphigenia the Virgin) stage adaptation by Hans Sachs, first performed in Nuremberg 1640: Iphigénie, stage adaptation by Jean Rotrou

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Chronology 1674: Iphigénie en Aulide, stage adaptation by Jean Racine, first performed in Versailles 1699: Achilles or Iphigenia at Aulis, stage adaptation by Abel Boyer, first performed in London 1713: Ifigenia in Aulide, aria composed by Domenico Scarlatti, first performed in Rome 1714: The Victim, stage adaptation by Charles Johnson 1718: Ifigenia in Aulide, opera composed by Antonio Caldara, first performed in Vienna 1720: Ifigenia en Lixourio-, tragicomedy by Petros Katsaitis, first performed in Zante 1735: Ifigenia in Aulide, opera composed by Nicolo Porpora, first performed in London 1774: Iphigénie in Aulide, opera composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck, first performed in Paris 1778: Momie, parody of Gluck’s opera Iphigénie in Aulide by JeanÉtienne Despréaux, first performed in Choisy 1779: Ifigenia in Aulide, opera composed by Martín y Soler, first performed in Naples 1781-3: translation of IA into English by Robert Potter ?1786: Iphigénie en Périgord, parody of Gluck’s opera Iphigénie in Aulide by Henri Dupérier de Larsan 1787: Ifigenia in Aulide, opera composed by Nicolo Zingarelli, first performed in Milan 1788: translation of IA into German by Friedrich Schiller 1788: Ifigenia in Aulide, opera composed by Luigi Cherubini, first performed in Turin 1793: Iphiginia in Aulide or Sacrifice of Iphiginia, ballet choreographed by Jean-Georges Naverre, first performed in London 1804: Ifigenia in Aulide, opera composed by Vittorio Trento, first performed in Naples 1846: Iphigenia in Aulis, stage adaptation by John William Calcraft, first performed in Dublin 1861: Le Sacrifice d’Iphigénie, comedy by Adolphe Philippe Dennery 1915: Iphigenia at Aulis, stage production with Margaret Anglin as Iphigenia, first performed at the University of California at Berkeley 1930: Ifigenia in Aulide performed together with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, stage production by the National Institute of Ancient Drama, in Syracuse, Italy 1943: Iphigenie in Aulis, part I of Die Atriden tetralogy by Gerhardt Hauptmann, first performed in Berlin in 1947 1950: Ifigenia, radio opera composed by Ildebrando Pizzetti, first performed on radio in Turin 1957: Iphigenia at Aulis, stage production by the National Theatre of Greece, first performed in Epidaurus

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Chronology 1967: Iphigenia in Aulis, stage production directed by Michael Cacoyannis in New York 1968: Iphigenia at Aulis, stage production directed by Dimitris Rondiris, first performed in Epidaurus 1976: Iphigenia, film directed by Michael Cacoyannis 1990-3: Les Atrides (IA as prequel to Aeschylus’ Oresteia), stage production directed by Arianne Mnouchkine in Paris 1997: The Iphigenia Cycle (Euripides’ IA and Iphigenia among the Taurians), stage production directed by Joanne Akalaitis, first performed in Chicago 1999: Iphigenia and Other Daughters (Euripides’ IA and Iphigenia among the Taurians and Sophocles’ Electra), stage adaptation by Ellen McLaughlin, first performed in Washington 2000: Tantalus (IA included in cycle of ten plays based on the legends of the Trojan War), stage adaptation by John Barton, first performed in Denver 2000: Iphigenie in Petto, novel by Manfred Brinkmann 2001: Iph, stage adaptation by Colin Teevan, first broadcast on British radio 2001: Agamemnon and His Daughters (based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra, IA and Iphigenia among the Taurians), stage production directed by Molly Smith in Washington 2002: Ariel, stage adaptation by Marina Carr, first performed in Dublin 2002: The Songs of the Kings, novel by Barry Unsworth 2003: Iphigenia at Aulis, stage adaptation by Edna O’Brien, first performed in Sheffield

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Index Numbers in bold denote principal discussion. Modern scholars and directors are included only when their works are discussed in the text. Achilles: and Agamemnon 12, 16-17, 27, 40, 51-2, 56, 76, 78, 89, 90, 102; and Clytemnestra 16-17, 19, 36, 40, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 58, 65, 72, 93, 103; and Iphigenia 19, 29, 38-41, 4950, 51-2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 101, 123-4; and Pentheus in Bacchae 86, 90; and the army 45-6, 52, 53, 56, 57, 78; and the Chorus 12, 17, 42; character of 34, 40-1, 112; his name and body 51-2, 55; see also characters and characterization; entrances and exits; heroism; Homer; masks; patronymics and matronymics; Sack of Troy; silences, Sophocles’ Iphigenia; stage props acting and actors: distribution of roles 89-90; movements and gestures 903; see also entrances and exits; masks; silences; song and dance; stage props; tears action, plans of 16, 29, 31, 33, 38, 4950, 55, 58, 96-7, 101-2, 109; see also falsehood; role-playing Aeschylus: Iphigenia 23-4, 148; Oresteia 23, 25, 26, 28-9, 34, 36, 37, 44, 63, 68, 95, 115, 125, 126, 127; Palamedes 24; Telephus 24 Agamemnon: Agesilaos as 87-8; and Artemis 62-4, 110; and Clytemnestra 15, 17-18, 19, 28-9, 33, 36-7, 45, 47, 48, 52-4, 56, 58-9, 63-4, 65, 68, 90, 93-4, 127; and Iphigenia 15, 18, 26, 28, 33, 37-8, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 70, 72, 91, 93-4, 96, 100; and late fifth-century politics 34, 52-3, 78, 79, 80, 117-18; and Menelaus 13-14, 33, 34, 35-6, 45, 47, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 90, 93; and the army 33, 34, 45, 56, 76, 78; as a father 21, 33-4, 49, 52, 80, 86, 87, 91-2, 93-4, 111-12, 127; as a leader 34-5, 50, 80, 93, 127; as playwright 34, 50; character of 33-5, 57, 64,

101, 109-10, 111-12, 117; see also Achilles; acting and actors; action; Aeschylus’ Oresteia; characters and characterization; Euripides’ Electra and Orestes; Homer; iconography; letters; masks; Old servant; patronymics and matronymics; silences; Sophocles’ Ajax, Electra, and Iphigenia; stage props; tears Akalaitis, J. 126, 171 Alcibiades 117 ancestors 14, 16, 58-9, 84 Archelaus 83, 84 Aristophanes: 80, 103; Acharnians 99; Clouds 102; Frogs 73-4, 84, 85, 98, 139 n.2; Lysistrata 57; Women at the Thesmophoria 99 Aristotle: on Euripides’ tragic choruses 41; on Greeks and barbarians 115; on Iphigenia and the play 31-2, 105, 112, 114-15, 119 armour, of Achilles: see stage props army: and Greece 77-8; and Iphigenia 19, 38, 50; and late fifth-century politics 78-80; as bystanders 14, 20, 70, 91, 112-13; character and function of 44-6, 122; fighting for justice and freedom 13, 19, 38, 79; glamorized by the Chorus 12-13, 41, 42, 79, 89; impatient 16, 38-9, 64; overwhelmed by desire for the expedition 18, 56, 64; ruthless and greedy 14, 18, 19, 27, 49, 52, 53, 55, 57, 64, 76, 127 Artemis 11, 12, 47, 61-6, 110, 112; and Iphigenia 19-20, 37, 51, 61-6, 71, 70, 78, 98; and the myth of Iphigenia before the play 21, 22, 23, 26, 37, 44, 68; cults of 37, 41, 61-3, 87, 88; see also Calchas; gods; religion Aulis 11, 13, 22, 24, 26, 36-7, 41, 62, 87-8 barbarians: see Greeks and barbarians Barton, J. 127, 171 Brauron 62, 84

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Index Cacoyannis, M. 119, 127-9, 171 Calchas 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 26, 33, 44-6, 61, 63, 64, 81, 112, 123 camp, military, at Aulis 11, 12, 14, 24, 36-7, 41, 44-5, 48, 89, 96, 100 carriage 15, 43, 95-6, 99, 103 Chalcis 12, 41, 88 change of mind 12, 13, 26-7, 32, 35, 38, 45, 54, 56, 59, 90, 112, 113, 114-15, 116 characters and characterization 31-46, 148-9; and the epilogue 111-13; number of lines spoken per character 31; off-stage characters 44-6; see also acting and actors; Aristotle; interpolations Chorus: character and function of 28, 41-3, 59, 88, 122; entry song of 1213, 27, 40, 42, 44, 48, 78, 89, 94, 97; first song of 14, 28, 41, 48, 52, 97; second song of 15-16, 41, 42, 121; secondary chorus of men from Argos 15, 42-3, 107; sing with Iphigenia 19-20, 38, 42, 51, 64, 98, 121; third song of 17, 28, 41, 42, 97; see also Achilles; army; acting and actors Cicero, 92, 114 Clytemnestra: and Agave in Bacchae 86; and Iphigenia 19-20, 32, 36-7, 38, 49, 54, 56, 96-7, 98, 127; as playwright and actor 50, 58, 72; character of 31, 36-7, 65, 113, 127; elsewhere in Euripides 24-5, 29, 95; in Aeschylus 23, 24-5, 28-9; in Pindar 23; in Sophocles 24-5, 26; preoccupied with decorum 36, 48, 49, 52-3, 89, 90, 102-3; see also Achilles; acting and actors; Agamemnon; characters and characterization; entrances and exits; iconography; masks; Orestes; patronymics and matronymics; silences; supplication; tears comedy 43-4, 74, 99, 101, 102-3, 116, 122, 141 n.40, 152 Conacher, D.J. 116-17 Cypria 21-2, 23, 24, 26, 28, 68, 147-8 dating of the play 83 death: idealization of 66-7, 75-6; ritual and imagery 51, 61, 62-3, 68, 70-1, 86, 96-7, 97-8, 102, 118, 150; see also sacrifice deception 23, 24, 25, 33, 39, 51, 54, 76, 87; see also falsehood decorum 14, 16, 40, 48-9, 57, 96, 103, 116 demagogues 45, 80, 150

Ennius: Iphigenia 42, 122, 153, 169 entrances and exits: 29, 43-4, 94-7, 98, 99, 102 epic poetry: 21-3, 26, 27, 28, 77, 94, 117; see also Cypria, Hesiod, Homer, Sack of Troy Eriphile 123-5 Eubulus 122 Euripides: attitudes towards war 73-81, 117-18, 123, 127; attitudes towards myth 26-9; biography of 83-5, 139 n.2; use of ritual 66-72; Andromache 35, 76, 84, 100; Alcmaeon of Corinth 85, 86-7, 90; Archelaus 84; Bacchae 9, 41, 57, 63, 65, 81, 83, 85-6, 87, 90, 115, 125; Children of Heracles 67; Electra 24-5, 36, 95, 171; Hecuba 26, 44, 45, 67, 76, 89, 106, 111; Helen 76; Hippolytus 9, 54-5, 65; Iphigenia Among the Taurians 63; Medea 9, 31, 100; Orestes 24-5, 29, 36, 45, 83, 85, 97, 106; Phoenician Women 27, 29, 67, 98, 107; Telephus 99; Trojan Women 35, 76, 89, 98 falsehood 28, 44, 48, 49, 54-5, 70, 80 Foley, H.P. 118, 129 freedom 18, 19, 21, 23, 38, 43, 48, 57-8, 59, 76, 77 friendship 17, 27, 40, 55-6, 59 garland, of Iphigenia: see stage props gender 9, 48, 52-3, 76, 77, 86, 118-19, 127-9 genre: see comedy; epic poetry; lyric poetry; melodrama gestures: see acting and actors Gluck, C.W. 125, 170 gods 13, 14, 17, 33, 44, 47, 56, 58, 60-6, 68-9, 70, 72, 81, 110, 112, 118, 1235, 127, 150; see also Artemis; Calchas; prophets Greece, personified 13, 18, 19, 20, 51, 56, 57, 77-8 Greeks and barbarians 13, 57, 74-6, 115, 118, 151 Grube, G.M.A. 116 Helen 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 35, 42, 56, 64, 68, 76, 77-8, 123; and Iphigenia 14, 18, 51 heroism 9, 27, 29, 38-41, 50-2, 55, 96-7, 102, 113, 118-19, 129 Hesiod 87; Catalogue of Women 22, 169 history 73-81, 117-18; see also performance; textual history

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Index Homer 21, 27; Iliad 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 34, 38, 40-1, 75, 77, 89, 102, 148, 169; Odyssey 21, 22, 77, 169 iconography: and the play 91-2; inspired by the play 119-21; the sacrifice of Iphigenia in 26, 111, 153; see also Timanthes interpolations 11, 12, 13, 20, 37, 43, 65-6, 105-14, 146, 152-3; and characterization 111-13; epilogue 20, 37, 43, 65-6, 110-14; prologue 11, 108-10 Iphigenia: passim; and Orestes 17, 72, 100, 121; and other sacrificial victims 22, 25-6, 66-71; and Pentheus in Bacchae 86; and Polyxena 22, 25-6; as playwright and actor 49, 50, 51, 54; character of 31, 32, 37-41, 45, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 112; in cult 61-3, 84; in literature 21-9; her name and body 51, 55; on stage and screen 23-9, 119-29; singing 1819, 19-20, 97-8; see also Achilles; acting and actors; Agamemnon; Aristotle; army; characters and characterization; Chorus; Clytemnestra; entrances and exits; Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians; gender; Helen; heroism; iconography; masks; monody; patriotism; patronymics and matronymics; sacrifice; silences; song and dance; stage props; supplication; tears irrationality 27, 38, 56-7, 64, 75, 78, 79; see also reason Isaac 123 Jephthah’s daughter 123 Kitto, H.D.F. 116 Kovacs, D. 107, 117, 146 Lesky, A. 118 letters, Agamemnon’s, dramatic function of 12, 26, 29, 33, 44, 49, 50, 54; see also stage props Loraux, N. 118, 129 Lucretius 114 lyric poetry 22-3, 28, 117; see also Chorus; Pindar; song and dance; Stesichorus Macaria 67 Macedon 83-4, 117 Machon 122 marriage, of Iphigenia and Achilles 12, 14, 16, 19, 42, 43, 51, 52, 55-6, 68,

70-1, 93, 98, 102, 118; in epic and lyric poetry and in tragedy 21-9; see also ritual; sacrifice masks 100-1; and eye-contact 90-1; and facial expressions 91; see also acting and actors; tears melodrama 116-17 memory 25, 36, 59, 100 Menander 102-3, 116, 122; Brothers 103; see also comedy Menelaus: character of 11-12, 18, 26, 356, 43, 44, 48, 50, 54, 64, 76, 78, 80, 92, 94, 95, 109, 112; see also Agamemnon; acting and actors; characters and characterization; entrances and exits; masks; patronymics and matronymics; stage props Michelini, A.N. 117 Mnouchkine, A. 127, 171 monody 18-19, 19-20, 38, 90, 97-8 moral values 14, 22, 27, 42, 44, 48-9, 51, 52-3, 59, 63, 65, 67, 72, 74, 75-6, 80, 115, 116, 118-19, 124, 126, 129 mute persons 19, 43, 89, 95, 96, 98-100, 101; see also Orestes myth, of the sacrifice of Iphigenia 21-9, 147-8; and late fifth-century politics 73-81; attitudes of the play towards 26-9, 33-41, 47, 50, 59, 68, 69, 71, 113; elsewhere in literature and tragedy 21-6; impact of the play on 114-29; see also iconography naming 16, 40, 51-2, 55, 56, 58-9, 93, 96; see also Achilles; Iphigenia necessity 14, 33, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57-8, 63, 125 Nereus 58 Norwood, G. 116 Odysseus 12, 14, 18, 25, 26, 33, 34, 446, 47, 64; and late fifth-century demagogues 80; elsewhere in tragedy 24, 26, 44 Old servant: character of 11-12, 13, 16, 27, 43-4, 101; and comedy 43-4, 102; his life envied by Agamemnon 50, 80; see also acting and actors; entrances and exits opera 121, 125, 153-4, 170 Orestes 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24, 28, 29, 36, 43, 56, 96, 99-100, 121 Ovid 114, 122 Page, D. 108, 152 panhellenism 35, 38, 74, 76-8, 79, 84,

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Index 86, 115, 117, 119, 150-1; see also army; Greece; history; politics Paris 11, 14, 18, 28, 41-2, 56, 68 patriotism: of Iphigenia 38-9, 67, 112; in ancient and modern readings of the play 74-6, 84, 113, 114, 115, 11718, 123, 129; see also self-sacrifice Peleus 16, 28, 42, 58, 64 Peloponnesian war 44, 73-80, 151 Pelops 58 performance 82-103; and history of the play 106-11, 118-29 persuasion 24, 29, 50, 53-4, 55, 59, 72, 86 Philetaerus 122 Pindar 23, 28; Pythian 11 23 Plautus 122 Plutarch 114 politics: of the late fifth century and the play 56, 73-81, 83, 84, 150-1; political readings of the play 105, 114, 117-18, 127, 129; see also Agamemnon; army; Greece; history; Odysseus; panhellenism; Peloponnesian War Polyxena 22, 25-6, 67, 111 prophets and prophecies 14, 15, 16, 18, 26, 43, 44, 74, 81, 90; see also Calchas Rabinowitz, N.S. 118 Racine, J. 118, 122-5, 170 reason 13, 17, 18, 56-7, 59; see also irrationality Reinhardt, K. 118 religion: and modern readings of the play 118-19, 123-5; and politics 44, 78; of the late fifth century and the play 6172, 149-50; see also Artemis; Calchas; gods; prophets; ritual; sacrifice rhetoric 36, 38, 39, 53-9, 71-2, 74, 77-8, 104, 114, 117, 129 ritual 61-72, 84, 118-19, 128-9, 149-50; of marriage and death 16, 19-20, 701; see also sacrifice; stage props; supplication role-playing 34, 39, 48-53, 58, 70, 96; see also acting and actors; action; Agamemnon; Clytemnestra; Iphigenia Sack of Troy 22, 25-6 sacrifice, of Iphigenia: passim, 37-40, 66-8, 72, 149-50; and animal sacrifice 16, 68-9, 72; and wedding rituals 70-1; as self-sacrifice 74-6, 105, 151; in ancient and modern readings of the play, 110-29; in epic and lyric poetry 21-3, 25-6, 150; in

tragedy 23-6, 150; see also iconography; patriotism; ritual setting, of the play 11, 27, 85, 87-9; of Sophocles’ Iphigenia 24 shame 14, 48, 51, 52, 94, 96; lack of 356, 90 silences 18, 20, 93-4, 96 slavery 56, 76, 87, 115; see also Old servant Smith, M. 127, 171 song and dance 97-8; see also Chorus; monody sophists 40, 48, 77 Sophocles: Ajax 34, 35, 45, 89, 99; Antigone 71, 81, 109, 115; Electra 24-5, 36, 171; Iphigenia 24, 36, 148; Oedipus the King 26; Philoctetes 24, 44 Sorum, C.E. 117 stage building 11, 88-9, 94 stage props 101-2; Agamemnon’s writing tablet 11, 12, 13, 92, 94, 101, 102; Achilles’ armour 12, 19, 99, 101-2; Iphigenia’s garland 71, 102; Menelaus’ sceptre 101; carriage 95-6; see also masks; Orestes staging: see acting and actors; characters and characterization; entrances and exits; masks; monody; mute persons; performance; setting; song and dance; stage props Stesichorus: Oresteia 22-3 Stobaeus 114 supplication 71-2; Clytemnestra’s 16, 36, 49, 55, 65, 72, 93, 100; Iphigenia’s 16, 18, 38, 50, 51, 56, 72, 91, 94, 100, 121 tears 32, 38, 50, 90-1, 92, 93, 96 textual history, of the play 105-14, 1523; see also interpolations Thetis 16, 28, 42, 58, 65 Timanthes 91-2, 110; see also iconography Tyndareus 11, 58 veil, characters covered with 70, 91, 93, 96, 121 Vellacott, P. 116-17 war: see army; heroism; history; panhellenism; patriotism; Peloponnesian war; sacrifice wedding: see marriage; ritual writing tablet, of Agamemnon: see letters, stage props

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