Euripides also makes the barbarian Thoas, King of the Tauric Chersonese, gasp with horror when Iphigeneia, the priestess of Artemis, informs him of the arrival of the matricide Orestes. When Iphigeneia says[373]:
They came polluted with domestic blood,
he answers[374]:
O Phoebus! This hath no barbarian dared.
Euripides, then, did not believe that the conception of kin-slaying as a horrible and revolting act was an exclusively Grecian sentiment. When therefore in the Andromache he makes Hermione say[375]:
Such is the whole abhorred barbarian race:
The father with his daughter, the vile son
With his own mother, with her brother too
The sister sins; friends by their dearest friends