The Bacchae and Other Plays by Euripides

Author:Euripides
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Bacchantes, Rhesus (Legendary Character), Orestes (Greek Mythology), General, Drama, Literary Criticism, Iphigenia (Greek Mythology)
ISBN: 9780141964119
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 1970-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

IPHIGENIA AT AULIS

PREFACE TO IPHIGENIA AT AULIS

The name of Iphigenia is absent from Homer. In one passage he mentions three daughters of Agamemnon as still alive and marriageable in the final phase of the Trojan war: Electra, Chrysothemis and Iphianassa. The last is sometimes identified with Iphigenia in later usage, but if that was Homer’s understanding, either he must be unaware of the tale that Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter at Aulis to gain a fair wind for the fleet, or he is silently rejecting it. It has often been argued that certain tales were objectionable in Homer’s eyes, and that he may have deliberately avoided stories involving kin-killing: in the Odyssey he does mention, but guardedly and in passing, the matricide of Orestes (cf. Preface to Orestes, p. 61). Other poets, however, were less squeamish or more sensational: the sacrifice of Iphigenia figured in an early Greek epic known as the Cypria, and is mentioned frequently in Attic tragedy: both Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote plays entitled Iphigenia, now lost, and the sacrifice is invoked as a major part of the indictment against Agamemnon by Clytemnestra in the Electra plays of both Sophocles and Euripides. Above all, the prophecy of Calchas and the horror of the child-killing were recounted in an unforgettable lyric passage of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.

So he was hard enough to sacrifice

his daughter, in aid of a war

to punish a woman

and as first-rites for the fleet to sail.

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