This eBook was produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
GILBERT MURRAY, LL.D., D. Litt.
The Iphigenia in Tauris is not in the modern sense a tragedy; itis a romantic play, beginning in a tragic atmosphere and movingthrough perils and escapes to a happy end. To the archaeologistthe cause of this lies in the ritual on which the play is based.All Greek tragedies that we know have as their nucleus somethingwhich the Greeks called an Aition—a cause or origin. They allexplain some ritual or observance or commemorate some great event.Nearly all, as a matter of fact, have for this Aition a TombRitual, as, for instance, the Hippolytus has the worship paid bythe Trozenian Maidens at that hero's grave. The use of this TombRitual may well explain both the intense shadow of death thatnormally hangs over the Greek tragedies, and also perhaps thefeeling of the Fatality, which is, rightly or wrongly, supposed tobe prominent in them. For if you are actually engaged incommemorating your hero's funeral, it follows that all through thestory, however bright his prospects may seem, you feel that he isbound to die; he cannot escape. A good many tragedies, however,are built not on Tomb Rituals but on other sacred Aitia: on thefoundation of a city, like the Aetnae, the ritual of the torch-race, like the Prometheus; on some great legendary succouring ofthe oppressed, like the Suppliant Women of Aeschylus andEuripides. And the rite on which the Iphigenia is based isessentially one in which a man is brought to the verge of deathbut just does not die.
The rite is explained in 11. 1450 ff. of the play. On a certainfestival at Halae in Attica a human victim was led to the altar ofArtemis Tauropolos, touched on the throat with a sword and thenset free: very much what happened to Orestes among the Tauri, andexactly what happened to Iphigenia at Aulis. Both legends havedoubtless grown out of the same ritual.
Like all the great Greek legends, the Iphigenia myths take manyvarying forms. They are all of them, in their essence, conjecturalrestorations, by poets or other 'wise men,' of supposed earlyhistory. According to the present play, Agamemnon, when just aboutto sail with all the powers of Greece against Troy, was bound byweather at Aulis. The medicine-man Calchas explained that Artemisdemanded the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, who was then athome with her mother, Clytemnestra. Odysseus and Agamemnon sentfor the maiden on the pretext that she was to be married to thefamous young hero, Achilles; she was brought to Aulis andtreacherously slaughtered—or, at least, so people thought.
There is a subject for tragedy there; and it was brilliantlytreated in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, which was probably leftunfinished at his death. But our play chooses a later moment ofthe story.
In reality Artemis at the last moment saved Iphigenia, rapt heraway from mortal eyes and set her down in the land of the Tauri tobe her priestess. (In Tauris is only the Latin for "among theTauri.") These Tauri possessed an image of Artemis which hadfallen from heaven, and kept up a savage rite of sacrificing to itall strangers who were cast on their shores. Iphigenia, obedientto her goddess, and held by "the spell of the altar," had toconsecrate the victims as they went in to be slain. So far onlybarbarian stranger