Iphigenia

The sacrifice at Aulis

Iphigenia was a daughter of Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek fleet that sailed against Troy, and of his wife Clytemnestra. The fleet gathered at Aulis but could not sail without a sacrifice. Agamemnon was the one who had to give his daughter to the goddess Artemis. The ancient plays do not agree on whether the goddess took her life.

In Agamemnon, a play by Aeschylus, winds blowing the wrong way hold the ships at Aulis. Calchas, a seer who reads the will of the gods, declares that Artemis demands Agamemnon’s daughter. Agamemnon weighs the wrong of killing his child against the failure of the expedition. Then he orders the sacrifice.

The chorus, the group of singers who comment on the action, remembers the scene. Iphigenia is lifted above the altar, her robes falling around her. Her mouth is held shut so that she cannot curse her family. Aeschylus gives no deer, no disappearance and no rescue. In his play her death is part of the violence that comes home with Agamemnon from Troy, and it gives Clytemnestra a grievance against him.

The deer in her place

The playwright Euripides gives her another fate in Iphigenia among the Taurians. Iphigenia herself tells the story. At the moment of the sacrifice, Artemis put a deer in her place and carried her away. The goddess made her a priestess among the Taurians, a people in a distant land. Agamemnon believes the blade killed his daughter. She lives on, and her family does not know it.

These two versions cannot be joined into one life. Aeschylus needs her death, because its cost to the family leads to the murder of Agamemnon. Euripides needs her alive, so that the aftermath of Aulis can meet her brother Orestes once he has avenged their father.

Orestes among the Taurians

Among the Taurians, Iphigenia leads the rites in which strangers are prepared for sacrifice to Artemis. Orestes arrives with his companion Pylades. An oracle, a message from a god, has ordered him to take the goddess’s image, her sacred statue. Brother and sister do not recognise each other at first.

A letter brings them together. Iphigenia asks one of the captives to carry a message to Orestes. When she reads it aloud, the stranger in front of her says he is her brother. They plan their escape together. Orestes must take the image, and Iphigenia must leave the priesthood forced on her after Aulis.

The Taurians chase them until the goddess Athena steps in. She orders the image taken to Halai in Attica, the land around Athens, where a sanctuary, a place sacred to a god, will receive it. Iphigenia is to serve Artemis at nearby Brauron and to be buried there after her death. Euripides does not send her home to Mycenae. He gives her a last home on Greek ground instead.

What Brauron keeps

Brauron lies in Attica, within the Athens destination. Its sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia, Artemis as she was honoured at Brauron, had a long life as a sacred place. Its remains and the finds in the site museum show worship, buildings and gifts to the goddess. They cannot show that Iphigenia was a real priestess.

The Greek traveller Pausanias records a story that Iphigenia landed at Brauron carrying the wooden image of Artemis from the Taurians. He also doubts that the statue shown there was that original image, and he reports other places that claimed it. Even in his day a visitor could tell a place’s story apart from certainty about the object on display.

That doubt sits beside the firm instruction in Euripides’ play. The play gives Iphigenia a priesthood, a grave and a memory in worship at Brauron. The site keeps the worship in the same place, but it does not prove her life story. Her story stays between two altars. At Aulis one play gives her no escape. At Brauron another gives her a life after the sacrifice.