Iphigenia in Context
by David Stead

David Stead has been a school teacher and adult educator for thirty years. He currently divides his time between working in schools, establishing a Spanish department at Chapel Green Community College and writing and researching on his lifelong interests, which range from ancient history and literature to C S Forester and Captain Hornblower. He wrote Iphigenia in Context because the play addresses issues which are as relevant today as when they first motivated Euripides.

Iphigenia in context

A great interstate coalition is poised to destroy an outlaw, oriental city. Some see greed and calculation behind a dubious moral case, as politicians seek self-justification through “blood sacrifice”. Iphigenia is as topical today as when Euripides laid down his pen, over 24 centuries ago, just as his Athenian homeland was starting the last round of a disastrous 30-year war with Sparta, and now with Persia too.

Decades before, Sparta and Athens had inspired Greek resistance to Persian invasion, at the epic battles of Salamis, Thermopylae and Marathon (490-480 BCE). The joint victory had been celebrated in Athens by a great dramatist (Aeschylus, The Persians, 472 BCE). But the Spartan-Athenian alliance was so much of a mismatch that nothing but the invasion could have created it. And it could not last.

In the simplest terms, classical Greece was a hotchpotch of quarrelling city states, of which Sparta and Athens were the most important. Athens was democratic and expansionist. After the Persian Wars, she created a coalition of her own, involving the cities of the Aegean basin and the Black Sea approaches. Sparta was militarist, conservative and insular. She wished to maintain her traditional dominance over the Peloponnese, and feared that Athens might offer a more attractive prospect to her Peloponnesian allies, and rivals. And since the Persian Wars, Sparta had stagnated as Athenian power grew. Eventually, after a series of incidents, Sparta chose full-scale war to prevent Athens achieving parity with herself. But after 10 years (431-421 BCE), Athens was undefeated and Sparta temporarily exhausted. So Sparta had to stomach a peace treaty which recognised the Athenian coalition as an equal of her own Peloponnesian League.

The peace might never have lasted, even if Athens had not opted to support an attack on Sparta by neighbours and rivals. They were crushed; and a botched invasion of Sicily then increased Athenian isolation and vulnerability. Sparta resumed the initiative, with a real chance of decisive victory (418-414 BCE).

Athens could hold out as long as her navy kept control of the sea. So far, Sparta had relied on overwhelming strength on land. She now needed ships and rowers. Aid was available, at a political price, from the old enemy Persia. But it needed time to produce results. Athens could still fight, at first so effectively that Sparta made another peace offer, and the Athenians rejected it, believing that they could still win (414-410 BCE).

Euripides did not. He had once championed Athenian independence and democracy – Medea (431 BCE). When he perceived Athens too becoming aggressive and expansionist, he criticised – The Trojan Women (415 BCE).

If Aeschylus was the Shakespeare of his day, Euripides is something of a Marlowe. Disreputable, and too modern for his own good; sceptical, in what was still an age of belief, subversive, unpatriotic. Euripides never ignored an opportunity to say what Athenians did not wish to hear. Disregarded, he at first persisted. With Electra, the sequel to what happened at Aulis and Troy: Clytemnestra has avenged Iphigenia’s death with Agamemnon’s murder, whereupon the surviving children (Electra and Orestes) plot to murder her. And with the black comedy Iphigenia in Tauris: the heroine has been replaced on the altar by a deer, and whisked off to serve Artemis in a remote and barbarous country, where all castaways are sacrificed – as almost happens to Orestes, who has come to rescue her (414-412 BCE).

The Athenians could not bear the notion that they, and the rest of Greece, were now locked into a cycle of self-sustaining violence like that which destroyed the house of Agamemnon. They responded with mockery, slander, ridicule and hatred. In his late seventies, Euripides exiled himself to Macedon, where he died after writing his most uncompromisingly pessimistic work: The Bacchae. And Iphigenia in Aulis (408-406 BCE).

To tell the story of Iphigenia again, Euripides drew on several well-known previous versions.

One was in the Iliad, or Tale of Troy, composed 350 years before, but hugely popular. It opens in the 10th year of the Trojan War. Agamemnon has offended Apollo. When Calchas reveals this, Agamemnon berates him. When the hero Achilles takes the seer’s side, Agamemnon turns on him too. Achilles takes umbrage and, to placate him, Agamemnon offers him marriage with one of his daughters.

This story was soon conflated with a folk tale whose protagonist (Abraham or Agamemnon) must choose between conflicting claims of humanity and divinity, family and community. All Greece has rallied behind the brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus, to avenge the seduction of Menelaus’s wife Helen by Paris, Prince of Troy. But the Greek fleet is wind-bound at Aulis by Artemis, who demands the life of Agamemnon’s daughter.

Aeschylus (Agamemnon, 457 BCE) had dealt with these events. Aeschylus (now enjoying a posthumous revival as Euripides’s unpopularity grew) had Agamemnon required by Zeus, the chief god, to go to war, but obstructed by Artemis, who pities the Trojans. Agamemnon has Iphigenia sacrificed and so (as gods and audience know) condemns himself to death at his wife’s hand when he returns from the war.

Euripides does not dwell on the motives of gods. He stresses the human factor. The fleet is becalmed, the troops on the verge of mutiny. The notion that Artemis required blood sacrifice may well be concocted, to keep them in hand. Their superstitions are quite credible. The Athenians had lost their last chance to avoid encirclement in Sicily when an eclipse of the moon caused terror, the seers warned that the gods were against retreat, and the generals listened.

The motives of Euripides’s generals, Agamemnon and Menelaus, are unheroic and ambivalent. So are the roles of Clytemnestra, Achilles and even Iphigenia herself. But we must be careful. The play is riddled with deliberate ambiguities. If we think we have resolved them all, we are mistaken, unless Euripides has failed in his purpose!

Iphigenia, for instance, resorts to blatant jingoism against the foreign foe, and to a contemporary audience, Trojans and Persians are one and the same. But the fate Iphigenia wishes on Troy is the one Euripides fears for Athens.

What Euripides goes out of his way to say is that Agamemnon (like a contemporary Athenian general) has been elected to his command. He has canvassed extensively for it, he is vulnerable to swings in public opinion, and he risks being unseated by rivals with goals very different from his. These additions to the story show Euripides a true prophet.

The ink was barely dry upon his unfinished manuscript when the Athenians rallied for a final effort. Sparta and Persia were now working together with remorseless efficiency. But, miraculously, Athens won a crucial battle. Whereupon the victorious generals were haled before the people by political rivals, denounced for the heavy casualties incurred, and done to death. The rival faction now led Athens, to final defeat and Spartan occupation (405-404 BCE).

Euripides’s worst fears did not materialise. The Spartans calculated that a weakened and docile Athens would serve their purposes better than massacre and enslavement. After a few more years of upheaval, Athens regained independence. And Euripides’s son completed Iphigenia in Aulis, and brought it back, with The Bacchae, for performance there. For centuries now, the dramatist’s true worth would be appreciated, as it had never been in life.

But as it is today.

David Stead