Iphigenia

• 1. Introduction

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  Iphigenia told the assembled Greek army: "In peace and in good heart I offer you my throat." Those words belong to Euripides, but the story they capture predates any surviving text. She was the eldest daughter of King Agamemnon of Mycenae and Queen Clytemnestra. She arrived at the bay of Aulis believing she was about to marry the hero Achilles. Her father had killed a deer in a grove sacred to the goddess Artemis, and Artemis retaliated by stilling every wind at Aulis. The fleet could not reach Troy. A seer named one price: Agamemnon must kill his own daughter. Whether Iphigenia died at that altar, or what became of her after, is a question her myth never settled.

• 2. A Name Before Agamemnon

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  "Iphigenia" means "strong-born," or in a related reading, "she who causes the birth of strong offspring." The mythologist Kerenyi was careful to note that not every ancient poet treated this name as identical with an older variant, Iphianassa. But Kerenyi argued that both names at root addressed "the same divine being, who had not belonged from all time to the family of Agamemnon." Homer's Iliad lists Iphianassa as one of Agamemnon's three daughters, named at lines 145 and 287 of book nine. The fragmentary Hesiodic epic Catalogue of Women calls the sacrificed daughter Iphimede, not Iphigenia. Some poets proposed a different parentage altogether. Pausanias records several who described Iphigenia as the daughter of Helen by Theseus, raised by Clytemnestra as her own. In the Hesiodic tradition, Artemis made this rescued figure an immortal companion under the title Artemis Enodia, meaning "Artemis of the Roads." Pausanias, writing centuries later, interpreted this immortalized Iphigenia as the goddess Hecate. Antoninus Liberalis placed her on the island of Leuke, wedded to the immortalized Achilles under the name Orsilochia. Her close identification with Artemis has led some scholars to propose she was originally a hunting goddess whose cult the Olympian Artemis later absorbed.

• 3. The Choice at Aulis

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  It was Menelaus who forced Agamemnon's hand. After the seer Calchas named the price of fair winds, Agamemnon at first refused. Menelaus insisted it was Agamemnon's duty to do all he could to aid the Greeks, and the fleet commander eventually relented. He sent word to Clytemnestra that Iphigenia was to marry Achilles. He immediately regretted this and tried to send a second message countermanding the first. Menelaus intercepted that second letter. When Clytemnestra arrived at Aulis with Iphigenia and the infant Orestes, Achilles himself was confused: he had known nothing of any marriage. The deception unraveled as mother and daughter gradually learned the truth. Achilles, furious that his name had been used as a lure, vowed to defend Iphigenia. But the Greek army, having learned of Calchas's prophecy, now demanded the sacrifice and threatened to kill Agamemnon if he refused.

  "I give my body, freely on behalf of my country, for all the land of Greece," Iphigenia told the assembly. She asked only that no man lay his hands upon her: she was walking to the altar of her own will. She reasoned that a mortal could not stand against the will of a goddess, and that dying for Greece was a form of honor. Euripides records that everyone who heard her speak stood in wonder at her courage.

  Agamemnon turned his head to one side and wept, covering his eyes with his robe as she approached the altar. Calchas took a sharp knife from its sheath and placed it in a basket studded with gold. Achilles, son of Peleus, circled the altar and sprinkled holy water, praying to Artemis. The knife fell. Everyone heard the sound, but when they looked, the girl was gone. A full-grown deer lay on the ground, gasping, its blood dripping from the altar. Calchas announced that Artemis had accepted "this mountain deer" in place of the girl and ordered the army to the ships.

  The lost epic Cypria, which survives only in a summary by the scholar Proclus, reported that Artemis had transported Iphigenia to Tauris. There, the goddess had made her immortal.

• 4. Priestess at the World's Edge

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  The Taurians, who lived on a peninsula facing the Euxine Sea, had a custom of sacrificing every Greek stranger who arrived to Artemis. Iphigenia had been installed as Artemis's priestess at her temple there, and it fell to her to perform these killings. Her situation changed when two men were captured and brought before her. One of them was her brother Orestes, though she did not know it: she had believed him dead.

  Orestes had killed his own mother and her lover as revenge for Agamemnon's murder. Apollo, seeking to free him from the Erinyes who now hunted him, had sent him to Tauris with a specific task. He was to steal the xoanon of Artemis, a carved wooden cult image believed to have fallen from heaven, and carry it to Athens. Orestes arrived with his companion Pylades, son of Strophius and intimate friend of Orestes. The two were captured immediately. Iphigenia came to prepare the sacrifice. She and Orestes exchanged words without either recognizing the other. She learned from him, without knowing his identity, that her brother was still alive.

  Iphigenia offered to release him if he would carry a letter from her back to Greece. Orestes refused and insisted Pylades take the letter while he remained to die. Pylades yielded, and when the letter was read aloud, brother and sister recognized each other. All three escaped, taking the xoanon with them, and Athena guided them safely home.

  Athena then issued specific instructions for each of them. Orestes was to take the xoanon to the town of Halae and build a temple for Artemis Tauropolos there. At the annual festival at Halae, a single drop of blood would be drawn from a man's throat to commemorate Orestes's own near-sacrifice. Iphigenia was sent to the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, to serve as priestess until her death. The Spartans disputed the xoanon's resting place, claiming they had carried it to Laconia, where the goddess was venerated as Artemis Orthia.

• 5. Ritual and Memory

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  In the second and first centuries BC, Etruscan craftsmen in Perusia returned repeatedly to one subject for their cremation urns: the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Their most common scene placed her as a small child, held over the altar by Odysseus. Agamemnon performed the aparchai, the opening sacrificial rites, while Clytemnestra and Achilles each pleaded for the girl's life. This rendering was closest to the version of the myth the Romans knew.

  The Spartans chose a different form of commemoration. Rather than sacrifice virgins, they had a male victim whipped before a sacred image of Artemis. The Taurians, by contrast, continued to perform actual sacrifices of bulls and virgins in the goddess's honor.

  At the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, young girls shed saffron robes and acted as she-bears as part of the cult. One origin story for this ritual described a different moment at Aulis: an unwilling Iphigenia, gagged, was seized for sacrifice. She shrugged out of her robes and reached toward the crowd in a wordless plea for mercy. Artemis, moved by this gesture, rescued her on the spot.

  Lucretius used the story in his philosophical poem De rerum natura to open an attack on religion. He described a father "making his child a sacrificial beast" on what was supposed to be her wedding day. His conclusion: "such are the crimes to which Religion leads."

• 6. Stages and Screens

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  Aeschylus placed the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the center of his Oresteia. In the first play, Agamemnon, the killing at Aulis gave Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus their stated justification for murdering the returning king. Two plays by Euripides gave the story its full dramatic shape in the fifth century BC. Jean Racine restaged it for the French classical stage in his Iphigenie en Aulide. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe brought the Tauris story to the German stage in his Iphigenie auf Tauris. John Barton adapted and directed Iphigenia at Aulis for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980 as the first play in The Greeks trilogy.

  Christoph Willibald Gluck composed two operas from the myth: Iphigenie en Aulide and Iphigenie en Tauride. Niccolo Piccinni, Tommaso Traetta, and the collaboration of Henri Desmarets and Andre Campra each produced separate versions of the Tauris story. Pascal Bentoiu composed an opera on the sacrifice in 1968.

  Michael Cacoyannis made the myth into a Greek film in 1977. Yorgos Lanthimos transposed it to modern America in his 2017 film The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Ismail Kadare, Barry Unsworth, Doris Gates, and Rachel Swirsky have each returned to the story in novels and short fiction. The Roman poet Ennius was among the first to bring the story into Latin verse. Ovid included her transformation in books twelve and thirteen of his Metamorphoses. The opera composed by Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding, staged in 2021, arrived more than two thousand years after Euripides.