Iphigenia in Aulis

The fleet is already at Aulis, and it cannot leave. Aeschylus puts the harbour on the shore across from Chalcis, where the tides surge to and fro. Apollodorus's Epitome says this was the second gathering there. At the first, a serpent ate a nest of sparrows and turned to stone. Calchas read it as a sign that Troy would fall in ten years. The Greeks then landed in Mysia by mistake. They found the course to Troy only after Achilles healed Telephus, who had been wounded there.

Now the winds hold them. The chorus in Aeschylus's Agamemnon says the breezes from the Strymon bring harmful leisure, hunger and idle wandering. They spare neither ship nor cable, and they wither the flower of Argos. In Ovid's Metamorphoses some declare that Neptune is helping Troy because he built its walls. Calchas knows better.

Calchas names a different cause, and Agamemnon himself reports it in Euripides. Weatherbound at Aulis, the army asks the seer, who answers that they will sail and sack the Phrygian capital only if Iphigenia is sacrificed to Artemis. Agamemnon first orders the herald Talthybius to disband the whole army. His brother Menelaus then argues him round.

The sources disagree about what angered Artemis. Apollodorus says Agamemnon shot a deer and boasted that Artemis herself could not have done it better. He adds that Atreus never sacrificed the golden lamb to her. Aeschylus gives the chorus an omen instead: two eagles feeding on a pregnant hare. The chorus prays that Artemis will not raise adverse gales to hold the fleet back. The reasons vary. The demand does not.

In Euripides's play the plan needs a lie. Agamemnon writes to his wife, telling her to send their daughter to marry Achilles. He calls it, in his own words, a sham marriage for the maiden. Only four men in the army know the truth: Calchas, Odysseus, Menelaus and Agamemnon. Apollodorus keeps the trick but has Odysseus and Talthybius carry the request to Clytemnestra.

Agamemnon soon regrets it. In the play he sends a second letter forbidding the journey, entrusted to an old servant. Menelaus stops the man and takes the letter. He then confronts his brother over it. By then the first letter has done its work, and the girl is on the road to the camp.

Clytemnestra reaches the camp with her daughter and meets Achilles before she meets her husband. She offers him her hand as a prelude to a happy marriage. He recoils. He has never courted her daughter, he says, and the sons of Atreus never mentioned marriage to him. Both see that someone has made fools of them.

Then an old servant calls them back and tells her the truth. Her husband is about to offer their child to Artemis so the army can start for Troy and Menelaus can recover Helen. Clytemnestra kneels to Achilles. His name was the bait, she says, and he is bound to stand by it.

Achilles answers with anger and a promise. Her daughter, once called his bride, will not die by her father's hand, he says, because his name would be what killed her. He swears by Nereus that Agamemnon will not touch even her robe with a fingertip. Perseus's translation carries an editor's note doubting that this speech is all Euripides's own.

The promise is soon tested. Achilles comes back to report an uproar in the army. He was nearly stoned for trying to save her, he says, and his own Myrmidons turned on him first. They taunted him as a man enslaved by marriage. He tells Clytemnestra to keep hold of her daughter. Odysseus, he says, will lead the men who come for her, and he means to hold them back.

Iphigenia ends the argument herself. She does not want a man to die for her. Hellas looks to her, she tells her mother, and the passage over the sea and the fall of Troy depend on her. If Artemis has decided to take her body, she asks, how can a mortal thwart the goddess? Achilles calls it a noble resolve and says he still wishes he could have won her. He will place his arms by the altar and wait for her there. Dindorf thought the whole passage from line 1408 spurious, a view the Perseus notes record.

She then says her farewells. She tells Clytemnestra not to cut her hair or wear mourning and to rear Orestes to manhood. She asks her not to hate her father. Then she goes to the grove of Artemis.

What happens at the altar depends on who tells it. Aeschylus's chorus describes only the preparation. The men lay hold of her as if she were a young goat and lift her high above the altar. A gag holds back the shouted curse against her house. Then the chorus breaks off: "What happened next I did not see and do not tell." It adds that the art of Calchas was not unfulfilled.

Euripides's messenger gives Clytemnestra a fuller and stranger report. Iphigenia says she offers her body willingly for all Hellas, and asks that none of the Argives lay hands on her. Agamemnon hides his face in his robe. Calchas lays a sword in a golden basket and crowns her head. In the messenger's telling Achilles then takes the basket and lustral water and runs round the altar, praying to Artemis for safe sailing. The speech does not explain why he no longer resists.

Then, in the speech, comes the substitution. Everyone hears the sound of a blow, but no one sees where the maiden vanished. On the ground lies a deer of immense size, gasping out her life. Calchas says the goddess has put it before her altar in place of the girl. The fleet may sail. The messenger tells Clytemnestra that her daughter flew away to the gods and that this day has seen her "dead and living." Perseus prints this whole passage, from line 1578, in square brackets, because many scholars doubt it is Euripides's own.

Other accounts agree on the deer. Ovid says Diana spread a mist before their eyes and left a hind in the maiden's place. Apollodorus says Artemis carried her off to the Taurians and made her a priestess, though some said she made her immortal. J. G. Frazer's note adds that Dictys Cretensis has Achilles rescue her from the altar instead.