From each attendant she takes in turn a golden goblet containing a libation of wine and milk and honey; and as she pours them into the altar for the dead, she and her women alternately chant a threnody for Orestes. They sing of the old dark story of Agamemnon’s house, from its beginning in the sin of Pelops down to what was for Iphigenia its last and worst enormity, the sacrifice at Aulis. And as their voices rise and fall in the long ceremonial, while Iphigenia is still upon her knees before the altar, there is a violent interruption. A herdsman bursts eagerly upon them, with news that shatters the mournful beauty of their rite.
“A ship hath passed the blue Symplêgades,
And here upon our coast two men are thrown,
Young, bold, good slaughter for the altar-stone
Of Artemis!“[[33]]
The priestess rises, impatient at this sudden recall to her hated duty, and the jarring note that has broken their obsequies. The man and his ugly zeal are a complete offence to her, and she answers him curtly. Who and what are these men he speaks of? At his reply, however, annoyance gives place to astonishment, curiosity, and a strange mingling of joy and pain. For he tells that the men are Greeks; and never yet, in all the dreary time of her captivity, has one of her countrymen landed upon these shores.
Once or twice, in her darkest hours, she had longed and prayed for such a day as this—for fate to send some Hellenic victim to her altar. She had thought she would be glad: that it would be a keen and satisfying pleasure to take a Greek life for all that the Greeks had made her suffer. But now that she stands face to face with her desire, there is a tumult of emotion within her in which bitterness hardly shares.
She questions the herdsman closely of the name and appearance of the strangers. One is called Pylades, he says; but the other’s name he did not catch. And at Iphigenia’s command, he goes over the whole story of their capture. He and his companions were washing their cattle in the sea, when one of them had spied two strangers sitting on the beach in a little bay. They were young, handsome and apparently noble; and there was something in their fine physique and sudden unaccountable appearance in that lonely spot which made one of his fellows cry out that they were gods. But another jeered and said most likely they were shipwrecked sailors who knew the custom of the country and were trying to escape it; and just at that moment a strange thing happened. One of the youths was suddenly seized with a fit of madness. They saw him spring from his seat and beat his head up and down, while he shrieked wildly to his comrade:
“Pylades,
Dost see her there?—And there.—Oh, no one sees!—