Journal Prompt, Why?
"If asked why, why do you want to kill her,
what, pray, will your answer be?
Or must I say it for you?
To get Helen back for Menelaus." (Clytemnestra to Agamemnon, Iphigenia at Aulis p. 259)
Is Clytemnestra, are you quite satisfied with the response, "To get Helen back for Menelaus"? Does that answer the question, Why does Iphigenia have to die? Why does Iphigenia consent to die? Look over what Iphigenia has to say, pp. 266-268 ("A single man is worthier / to look upon the light than ten thousand women" p. 267). Does that answer the question?
Text Access
Euripides. Alcestis. Trans. Paul Roche. 10 Plays. New York: Signet Classic, 1998. 1-43. (Available via bookstore.)
Background
Playwright and play
Euripides
Born ca. 484 BCE in Athens; died 406 in Macedonia, the youngest of the three great tragedians of Athens. His plays often feature exciting plots, suspense, psychological depth. Some of his plays are disturbing, even "anti-tragic," in their over-all shape and implications. Many of his tragedies center around the sufferings — and crimes — of female characters (Medea, etc.). In his lifetime he was the least successful of the three greats, but after his death, his tragedies were by far the most read.
Iphigenia at Aulis
We think it was first produced posthumously by Euripides' son in 405 in Athens at the Great Dionysia.
Setting
Place: Aulis, a town in Greece (in Boeotia, not too far from Athens) with a capacious harbor. The Greek fleet has gathered there before setting off to Troy.
Time: Just before the start of the Trojan war.
Characters
- Agamemnon, commander of the Greeks, and brother of Menelaus. (The two of them are "Atreids," i.e., sons of Atreus)
- (Old) Retainer. A retainer is a servant or attendant, and the (Old) Retainer in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis is a slave who has been in Clytemnestra's service for many years. Currently, though, he is serving Agamemnon at Aulis
- Chorus of women of Chalcis, a city on the nearby island of Euboea. They've come to see the ships, etc.
- Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother and Helen's rightful husband. Menelaus wants to retrieve Helen, his bride, from Paris, the Trojan prince who seduced (abducted?) her
- Messenger
- Chorus of Argive men (i.e., men from Argos, home of Agamemnon)
- Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife
- Iphigenia, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's eldest child
- Achilles, the greatest warrior among the Greeks. He hails from Phthia in Thessaly in northern Greece, and commands a contingent of Myrmidons. His father is Peleus and his mother the sea-goddess Thetis, a Nereid (i.e., a daughter of the sea-god, Nereus)
- Second Messenger
Situation
Paris, son of Priam and a prince of Troy (in modern Turkey), has absconded with the beautiful Helen, wife of Menelaus. He actually won her in a contest: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, unable to agree on who was the most beautiful among them, came to Paris as he was herding flocks on the slopes of Mount Ida, near Troy. Each tried to influence the "Judgment of Paris" with a gift; Aphrodite offered the herdsman the most beautiful woman in the world if he chose her. So he did, with disastrous results.
Now that Paris has gone to Greece and stolen Helen (the most beautiful woman in the world) from Menelaus, all the men who ever sought her hand in marriage have banded together to get her back. They and others (e.g., Achilles) have come with their ships and armies from all over Greece, assembling at Aulis, but the goddess Artemis has caused ill winds to detain the flotilla. Why? As Calchas the seer explains, this goddess requires that Agamemnon sacrifice his beloved daughter Iphigenia; only then will favoring winds arise.
The Greeks are VERY restless: something must be done before they all disband. So Agamemnon resorts to the ruse of writing a letter to his wife, Clytemnestra, asking her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis; Agamemnon claims to intend to give Iphigenia to Achilles in marriage.
But, as the drama begins, Agamemnon regrets his actions: he wants to send Clytemnestra another letter telling her and Iphigenia not to come.
- TAKE NOTE: It will be important to keep in mind three things, and to ignore, as too many students fail to do, misleading online cheat sheets about the play: (1) That this version of the myth, like the one in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, says nothing explicit about what motivates Artemis' seeming determination to detain the Greeks at Aulis: no mention of Agamemnon killing a sacred deer (as in the Epic Cycle, Sophocles Electra), no portent of eagles slaying a pregnant hare (as in Aeschylus' Agamemnon). It will, then, not do to read such details into a text that shows no sign of interest in them. (2) That no where does the text state that Iphigenia dies to save Greece from Troy. Mention is made of punishing Troy, of teaching Troy a lesson, for Paris' abducting Helen (the war is to be a "remedy against any barbarian carrying off our women from a happy home"). But Troy here has no plans to conquer Greece — none that we're told about. In fact, there is deep concern that if Iphigenia isn't sacrificed, if the Greeks don't make it to Troy, they'll turn their rapacious fury against Greece itself. (3) The ending is difficult to reconstruct due to the highly corrupt character of the text. The last-minute deer-substitution thing does happen in certain versions of the story, but its presence here is arguably due to post-Euripidean messing with the text — see following.
State of Text, Ending
This play is considered to be among the worst preserved tragedies that we have from ancient Greece. (Keep in mind that the preservation of ancient texts almost always involved copying and recopying, with lots of opportunity for intentional and unintentional alteration — the technical term is "corruption" — to happen.) Euripides clearly left the play unfinished at this death. His son or nephew, Euripides the Younger, who produced it with three other of the playwright's plays, including Bacchae, probably in 405 BCE, completed the unfinished text, possibly/probably not always in a manner that reflected the original playwright's intentions. Then, in later centuries, others added to the play, but also cut lines. The prologue is a mess; the happy ending, with Iphigenia rescued by Artemis, is from late antiquity and probably misrepresents Euripides' original intention to let Antigone die.
At the same time, this has to be the most, or among the most, compellingly emotional of all surviving ancient Greek plays. Clytemnestra's rage, Iphigenia's transformation from naïf to a kind of patriotic martyr resigned to her destiny (sorry, Bonnie Honig!), Agamemnon's and Menelaus' vacillations and, ultimately, their surrender to the will of the mob — all of that is guaranteed, I suspect, to arouse pity and fear and to provoke thought and discussion.