Iphigenia

Iphigenia is a daughter of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and Clytemnestra. In the prologue of Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris she gives her own descent, from Tantalus through Pelops and Atreus. Her sister is Electra, and her brother is Orestes.

Homer never tells her story. When Agamemnon offers Achilles a bride in Homer's Iliad, he names three daughters at home: Chrysothemis, Laodice and Iphianassa. The Iliad says nothing of a sacrifice. Sophocles's Electra counts Iphianassa as a living sister, still at home in the palace.

Her story begins at Aulis, where the Greek fleet gathered for Troy and could not sail. In Aeschylus's Agamemnon, winds from the Strymon hold the ships in port while the stores run out. The seer Calchas names Artemis as the cause and proposes a remedy worse than the storm. Agamemnon weighs his child against his allies and chooses the war.

The chorus describes what followed. She is gagged so she cannot curse the house, and lifted over the altar like a young goat. Her saffron robe falls, and her eyes plead with each of the men around her. Then the chorus stops: "What happened next I did not see and do not tell."

Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis tells the same days from inside the camp. Agamemnon has written to his wife to send their daughter for a wedding to Achilles. The marriage is a pretence, known only to Calchas, Odysseus, Menelaus and himself. When Clytemnestra greets Achilles as her future son-in-law, he replies that he never courted her daughter. Angry that his name was used as bait, he vows that Agamemnon will not touch her.

Iphigenia settles it herself. She tells her mother she is resolved to die with honour. The fleet's passage and the fall of Troy depend on her, she says, and Achilles must not die fighting the army for her sake. The messenger's speech that closes the play says everyone heard the blow, but nobody saw her vanish. A great deer lay dying on the altar instead.

Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris makes the rescue the start of a second life. Artemis gave the Greeks a deer in her place and carried her through the air to the land of the Taurians. Apollodorus's Epitome calls them a Scythian people who murder strangers. There King Thoas rules, and Iphigenia serves as priestess in the goddess's temple. Every Greek who lands must be consecrated by her for sacrifice.

Years later her brother Orestes arrives with Pylades. Apollo has told him to fetch the goddess's wooden image, as the price of escaping the Furies. Iphigenia writes a letter to Orestes and gives it to Pylades to carry to Argos, and so learns who the prisoner is. She tells Thoas the strangers are polluted by a mother's murder and must be washed in the sea with the statue. Brother and sister sail away with the image. Athena then sends her to Brauron in Attica, to keep the keys of Artemis's shrine. She will be buried there, and women will dedicate to her the robes of mothers who died in childbirth.

The oldest surviving accounts already disagree on whether she died. Aeschylus's Agamemnon treats her as killed. Clytemnestra says her husband sacrificed his own child to charm the winds of Thrace. She even pictures Iphigenia meeting her father at the ford of sorrows and kissing him. In Sophocles's Electra, Clytemnestra speaks of her as "the dead girl". Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris, Apollodorus's Epitome and the ending of Iphigenia at Aulis put a deer on the altar in her place. Apollodorus adds that some said Artemis made her immortal. His translator J. G. Frazer notes that the lost epic Cypria, as summarized by Proclus, told the deer story too.

Pausanias's Description of Greece collects further versions. The Megarians showed a shrine of the heroine Iphigenia and said she died in Megara. Pausanias adds that Hesiod's Catalogue of Women made her become Hecate by the will of Artemis. He also reports Herodotus's account that the Taurians sacrificed castaways to a maiden they said was Iphigenia.

Why Artemis wanted her is disputed too. In Aeschylus's Agamemnon the goddess is angry at an omen: two eagles that tore apart a pregnant hare. In Sophocles's Electra, Agamemnon shot a stag in her grove and boasted about the kill. Apollodorus's Epitome gives a boast after shooting a deer, and adds that Atreus had withheld a golden lamb from her. Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris gives a vow instead. Agamemnon had promised Artemis the most beautiful thing born that year, and that was his daughter.

Her death drives the revenge that follows, but the sources weigh it differently. In Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Clytemnestra says her husband paid with his life for what he did to Iphigenia. In Sophocles's Electra she asks why Menelaus's two children did not die instead. Pindar's eleventh Pythian ode leaves the question open: was it Iphigenia's slaughter, or another man's bed?

The Roman poet Lucretius made her his first example of the crimes religion breeds. In the first book of On the Nature of Things he calls her Iphianassa. A father, he writes, felled his child on her bridal day to win fair winds for Troy.

Iphigenia has been a stage heroine since the seventeenth century. Jean Racine's tragedy Iphigénie (1674) spares her by bringing a second girl of the same name to the altar. Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote two operas about her: Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, first written in prose in 1779, gives Euripides's plot a new ending. His Iphigenia refuses to deceive Thoas and wins her freedom by telling him the truth.