The ‘Iphigenia in Aulide’ and ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’
A comparison of these two dramas reveals at first sight a rather obvious inconsistency. The Aulid play centres round Agamemnon’s sacrificial slaying of his daughter at Aulis, while in the Tauric play the victim reappears as a priestess of Artemis amongst the Tauri! It is generally maintained that the last scene of the Aulid play, which describes the substitution of a stag for the maiden by a miraculous intervention, is not the work of Euripides. But in the Orestes Apollo intervenes to preserve the life of Helen, though he can do so only by deifying her! In the Aulid play, also, Iphigeneia is said to have been saved from death by deification.[130] In the Tauric drama, however, the daughter of Agamemnon has once more assumed a mortal form and appears as a priestess of Artemis among the Tauri. Nowhere else in Euripides can we find such a magical atmosphere. If the human Iphigeneia was really saved, would we not expect that her father and her mother should have been informed of her deliverance? But they both believe that she is dead.[131] The plea which Clytaemnestra advances in the Electra of Euripides,[132] namely that the death of Agamemnon was a revenge for the death of her daughter, is based upon the reality of her death. Hence we think that Euripides reproduced both these legends of Iphigeneia simply because of their human interest and dramatic merit, without any special concern for their consistency. It is clear that Euripides did not invent the Aulid story, since it is found in Aeschylus[133] and in an epic poem,[134] entitled the Cypria, of post-Homeric date. The Tauric story is not found in any previous author, but we do not think that it was invented by Euripides. Both legends suggest a similar source. Two hundred years before Euripides[134] it was said that Iphigeneia was made immortal by Artemis, who brought her from Aulis to the Tauri, and substituted for her a stag-victim. As soon as Iphigeneia became a goddess she could, like other goddesses, be easily transferred from place to place by a simple transference of images. Herodotus says[135] that the goddess to whom the Tauri sacrificed was Iphigeneia the daughter of Agamemnon. The word ‘Iphigeneia’ was apparently a cultus epithet of Artemis[136] which signified her connexion with fertility and her influence on the birth of men and animals. The real as distinct from the legendary deification of Iphigeneia was therefore due to the abstraction and personification of a cultus epithet. The existence of a temple of Artemis-Iphigeneia at Aulis, whence Agamemnon sailed to Troy, and the similarity of the name Iphigeneia with Iphianassa (the Homeric name for a daughter of Agamemnon), led to a belief in the deification of Iphianassa at Aulis. Moreover, the survival at Halae, in Attica, in historical times of a mock ritual of human sacrifice to Artemis induced the further idea that Iphianassa had been deified through sacrifice at Aulis. The existence at Halae of a statue of Artemis believed to have been brought from the Tauric land, and the existence there of a temple to ‘the maiden’ at which real rites of human sacrifice were enacted, explain the origin of the Tauric belief which is referred to by Herodotus. Iphianassa, identified with Iphigeneia, becomes a goddess among the Tauri, and Iphigeneia is worshipped as the daughter of Agamemnon! The final transition to the stage in which Iphigeneia returns to life as a priestess of Artemis at Tauri is explained by reference to the ancient tendency to identify the priest with the god and by the ritual of resurrection or re-birth which is found in ancient fertility-religion. England[137] thinks that this stage was probably pre-Euripidean but that the story of Orestes’ visit to the Tauri was invented by Euripides. We do not think that even this story was of Euripidean origin. It belongs rather, we think, to the legends of the wandering of Orestes, which conceived him as guilty of extenuated or quasi-involuntary matricide which was ultimately ‘forgiven.’ When Iphigeneia was conceived as a priestess of Artemis and at the same time as the sister of Orestes, the evolution of a story which described Orestes’ visit to the Tauri does not, we think, require the genius of Euripides. Again, the inconsistencies of this story with the Aulid story which he has dramatised, with arguments which he introduces in the Electra[138] and with other legends of Orestes, such as the Arcadian legend, and, moreover, the insult to Apollo, the degradation of Athene, and the exaltation of Artemis which this story involves—all suggest a local origin for the story and the inspiration of theocratic legend-makers rather than the invention of a dramatist.
In the Iphigenia in Aulide the sacrifice of Iphigeneia is condemned as murder not only by Clytaemnestra[139] but also by Achilles,[140] whose promised marriage with Iphigeneia was the bait by which legend lured her from her Argive home. This view, we have said,[141] belongs to an age which has rejected human sacrifice and which interprets all the traditional systems of blood-vengeance as unrestricted hereditary vendetta. It belongs therefore to the border-line between the Dark Ages of Greece and the civilised historical era. From the legal point of view Clytaemnestra’s plea has no validity; we see in it rather a counterpart to the plea of justification which Orestes based on the command of Apollo. If Orestes claims the command of Apollo as a justification and if this claim is disputed, then the command of Artemis to Agamemnon may also be impugned. Artemis has the same right to obedience as Apollo has. If the Furies of the dead Clytaemnestra rejected the Apolline oracle, it was natural that the living Clytaemnestra should have repudiated the justice of the decree of Artemis at Aulis.
The Iphigenia in Tauris merits special consideration from our present point of view. As the general dénouement of the plot is sufficiently familiar, we shall proceed in medias res. We may confine our comments to the speech delivered by Orestes to Iphigeneia after their mutual recognition. Omitting for the moment Orestes’ reference to the Athenian custom of using separate drinking-cups on the Libation-day of the Anthesteria festival, we will give first Orestes’ description of his trial at Athens and of its immediate sequel. It will be noted that he has already served a period of exile before he reaches Athens and that the verdict of the Areopagus is not accepted by all the Erinnyes. We have suggested[142] that the Erinnyes symbolise in this legend the attitude of the relatives of the slain and that the Areopagus acts as a court of reconciliation rather than as an ordinary homicide court. We have seen that the relatives had always a theoretical right to refuse to accept ‘appeasement’ in cases of involuntary homicide, according to the Draconian law, ἁπάντας ἢ τὸν κωλύοντα κρατεῖν: ‘let all be appeased or let one objector hold the field.’[143] We cannot suppose that the Erinnyes of Clytaemnestra in this play assume the same attitude to Orestes as they assume in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, for in Aeschylus the conversion of the Erinnyes signifies acceptance of the plea of justifiable matricide. Neither is their attitude to be compared to that of the Erinnyes of the Argive scene in the Orestes, for there they conceive Orestes as guilty of wilful matricide. Their attitude here is rather that of the ‘second Attic legend,’ in which Orestes is conceived as a matricide of partial guilt—his crime being conceived as extenuated by Apollo’s command. According to this assumption we can explain the conflict of opinion which characterises the Erinnyes. It is derived from a legendary conception of the Erinnyes as the symbols of the relatives of the slain Clytaemnestra who are presumed to have refused ‘appeasement’ and to have resisted the verdict of the Areopagus, which was conceived as a court of reconciliation rather than as a high State court adjudicating with full authority on questions of guilt or innocence. Orestes says:
When vengeance from my hands o’ertook
My mother’s deed—foul deed which let me pass
In silence—by the Furies’ fierce assaults
To flight I was impelled: to Athens then
Apollo sent me, that, my cause there heard,
I might appease the vengeful powers whose names