Iphigenia, the daughter Agamemnon sacrificed at Aulis

Iphigenia is the eldest daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, whom the Greek fleet, stranded at Aulis, must sacrifice to Artemis to obtain a wind. Her myth is first of all a problem of choice: a commander has to decide between his army and his child. It is also the least stable myth in the Greek repertoire, because the tradition never managed to agree on one elementary point — does the girl die or not?

Homer’s silence

The Iliad does not know Iphigenia. In Book 9, offering Achilles one of his daughters in marriage, Agamemnon names them: “Chrysothemis, Laodice and Iphianassa” (9.144-145). Three daughters, all alive, at Mycenae. The poem knows nothing of Aulis, nothing of the deer, nothing of the knife — and it could hardly have ignored them if the sacrifice had been part of the epic material as Homer received it.

Ancient readers tried to reconcile the two traditions by identifying Iphianassa with Iphigenia; that is what Lucretius does, calling her Iphianassa in the famous passage where he narrates the sacrifice. Sophocles, though, lists Iphianassa and Electra as two distinct sisters (Electra 157), which rules the equation out. The likeliest account is that Iphigenia came into the story from somewhere other than epic: from cult.

The offence and the demand

The narrative of the sacrifice was fixed by the Cypria, a lost poem of the Epic Cycle whose plot Proclus summarised. The fleet musters a second time at Aulis; Agamemnon shoots a deer and declares that even Artemis could not have done better. The offended goddess sends contrary winds. Calchas reveals the cause and the only remedy: sacrifice Iphigenia.

The girl could not be brought to Aulis and told why. So a wedding is invented: Iphigenia is summoned to marry Achilles, best of the Achaeans, without the hero himself being told. The detail is essential, and the tragedians worked it to the limit: the girl walks towards the altar believing she is walking to her wedding, and it is the bridal procession that brings her to the knife.

Aeschylus: the sacrifice completed

The chorus of the Agamemnon tells Aulis in its opening ode, and leaves no way out. Agamemnon deliberates aloud, then “puts on the yoke of necessity”; he orders his daughter seized and held head-down over the altar “like a young goat”. He has her mouth gagged so that no curse can leave the house. The saffron robe slips to the ground, and Iphigenia strikes each of her sacrificers with a look that begs for pity, “as in a painting”; the chorus remembers that she once sang the paean at her father’s feasts (184-249).

Then the chorus stops dead: “what came next I did not see, and I do not tell it”. Nothing in Aeschylus saves Iphigenia. Nothing could: it is that corpse that gives Clytemnestra her argument and the Oresteia its chain of blood.

Euripides: consent, and a deer

Iphigenia at Aulis, staged after Euripides’ death around 405 BC, puts the whole machinery of the lie on stage. Agamemnon writes a letter to cancel his daughter’s journey, Menelaus intercepts it, Clytemnestra arrives with the girl believing in the wedding, Achilles discovers that his name has been used and swears to defend her, the army clamours for the sacrifice.

The reversal comes from Iphigenia herself. Terrified and pleading at first, she changes her mind and publicly agrees to die: she offers her body to Greece, refuses to let Achilles die for her, says that one man is worth more than ten thousand women — and then, in a famous political outburst, that Greeks should rule barbarians and not the reverse (1394-1401). That consent is Euripides’ major invention: it turns the victim into an agent of her own sacrifice and shifts the moral question from the father to the daughter.

A messenger then reports that at the moment of the blow the girl vanished and a gasping deer lay on the altar in her place. The ending is suspect: scholars largely agree that the closing lines of the play are a post-Euripidean addition. The substitution itself, though, is old — the Cypria already knew it, and Hesiod offered a close variant in which a phantom of Iphimede is killed while the girl becomes “Artemis Einodia”, a power of the crossroads (fr. 23a MW). Stesichorus, more briefly, made her Hecate.

The priestess in the Tauric land

Iphigenia among the Taurians, a few years earlier, takes the substitution for granted. Iphigenia lives on the shore of the Black Sea, priestess of a bloodthirsty Artemis to whom the Taurians sacrifice every Greek the sea delivers to them. She is the one who consecrates the victims. Two strangers arrive: they are Orestes, her brother, and Pylades, sent by Apollo to fetch the goddess’s image and free Orestes from the Furies. The recognition turns on a letter Iphigenia dictates whose addressee is standing in front of her. The three escape with the wooden statue, and Athena appears to settle what follows.

What follows is an aetiology: the image is to be set up at Halae Araphenides in Attica, where the cult of Artemis Tauropolos will be founded, and where a few drops of human blood will be drawn in memory of the Tauric rite; Iphigenia herself is to be the goddess’s “key-bearer” at Brauron and to receive at her death the garments of women who died in childbirth (1446-1467). Herodotus, half a century earlier, already confirmed the Scythian cult: the Taurians sacrifice shipwrecked Greeks to a virgin goddess whom they themselves call Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon (4.103).

What the cult tells us about the myth

Iphigenia is one of the clearest cases in which cult explains legend. Her name works as an epithet of Artemis; several tombs of hers were shown — at Brauron, but also at Megara, where Pausanias reports that she died (1.43.1), and at Hermione (2.35.1) — and the sanctuary at Brauron hosted the arkteia, the rite of the “little bears” in which young Athenian girls served Artemis before marriage.

Hence the much-debated theory of an older divine figure, a local Artemis bearing the name Iphigeneia, whom epic tradition demoted to mortal status in order to fit her into the house of Atreus. It is not a certainty, but it accounts well for the oddity of the dossier: a character who dies and does not die, and whose death is never told twice the same way.

Legacy

No ancient sacrifice has been argued over more. Lucretius makes it the exhibit in his case against religion: he describes the girl lifted up by men’s hands, the fillet on her cheeks, the “blind” father at the altar, and closes with the most quoted line of his poem — “such are the crimes religion could prompt” (1.80-101).

The motif then runs through the European stage: Racine, whose Iphigénie (1674) replaces the deer with another girl to avoid the supernatural; Gluck, with two operas; and Goethe, whose Iphigenie auf Tauris turns the priestess into the figure of a humanity that refuses ritual killing.

Further reading

For the father who orders the sacrifice, see Agamemnon; for the mother who will make it the motive for a murder, Clytemnestra. For the hero whose name is borrowed to lure her to Aulis, see Achilles, and for the brother she finds again among the Taurians, Orestes. For the goddess who demands and then rescues, see Artemis, and for the expedition her blood sets in motion, the Trojan War.