The years had passed wearily since Iphigenia first found herself a captive in Tauris. Completely shut off from the world by the sea which foamed round that desolate coast, no word ever came to her from her home in Argos; and she could make no sign to the friends who believed her dead long since. She hated this savage people, and Thoas their king, and the hideous sacrifices at which she had to perform the cleansing rite. Sometimes she would grow sick at their brutality, and wild with loneliness and longing to escape. Then sceptical thoughts would come about the deity who could accept such worship; and it would seem to her better to have died at Aulis than to have been saved for such slow misery. At other times she would brood over her short sweet girlhood and its bitter ending, gone irrevocably from the moment of her father’s fraud; and bitterness would overwhelm her against Agamemnon, and the Seer who counselled him, and the chieftains who persuaded him; but above all against Helen, for whose sake the war was made.
So youth stole away, taking with it, as Iphigenia sadly thought, all the high things that inspire a fair young soul—the shining ideal, the simple and ardent faith, the generous emotion that leaps to sympathy and service. And at the moment of the opening of the play, when the ship that bears Orestes is being run ashore at Tauris, Iphigenia stands before her temple feeling hard and hopeless, dispossessed of all that is dear in life, and with every illusion long since fled.
It is early morning, and Iphigenia has just emerged from the temple. There are a few lines of formal exposition: an involuntary cry of disgust at the blood-stained altar that is insulting the eye of day; and then a flow of troubled speech.
“Ah me!
But what dark dreams, thou clear and morning sky
I have to tell thee, can that bring them ease!“[[33]]
In the night that has just passed, she had dreamed of her home in Argos. She seemed to lie asleep there, with her maids around her, when suddenly an earthquake shook the palace; and running out of doors, she saw the great building reel and fall. Only one pillar remained; and as she watched it, she saw that brown hair waved about its head, and she heard it speak with a human voice. Then, in the strange confusion of dreams, she found herself fulfilling the office that she bears here in Tauris; and she washed the pillar clean for death, as it was her duty to wash the victims for the sacrifice.
With pathetic readiness, Iphigenia has accepted the dream as an evil omen. The pillar of her father’s house must mean his son Orestes, whom she left a child in Argos all those years ago. Those whom she cleanses are doomed to die. What can the dream mean, therefore, save that her brother is dead? The conviction is so strong upon her that she at once decides to prepare the funeral rite.
“Therefore to my dead brother will I pour
Such sacrifice, I on this bitter shore