1/ Ah, the beginning of it all! Menelaus and Agamemnon are on the way to Troy to retrieve Helen and sack Troy, but their ships are stuck, due to lack of winds. A prophet says Agamemnon has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis (which to me doesn’t make sense, because Helen is Menelaus’s wife and they have a daughter, hello?). The whole play is about the characters struggling with themselves and arguing with each other, and in the end, Iphigenia willingly goes to the altar, doing it for Greece.
I wish I could claim to have come up with it myself, but I’m stealing the idea from Tom (Wuthering Expectations) that this is the trolley problem: save Iphigenia, or kill her and save many? The irony of course is that Iphigenia is sacrificed, Agamemnon is later killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who is then killed in revenge by Orestes (and in Euripides’s play, Electra); perhaps we can also argue that the sacrifice of Iphigenia allows the Akhaians to travel to Troy and leads to all the deaths in the 10-year war.
But this is why I have a problem with the ending. In the Introduction of my copy, Philip Vellacott says that Euripides died before finishing the play and the ending was written by someone else. I know Euripides himself had written a play called Iphigenia in Tauris, but the irony is that Iphigenia chooses to sacrifice herself to help Greece only for her death to lead to so much suffering and deaths—where is the tragedy, and the irony, if she is replaced with a deer and just whisked off to Tauris? On a personal level, I don’t want young and innocent Iphigenia to die; but for the purpose of the drama—with the way things have been built up—she has to die, so the rescue at the end just feels farcical.
2/ As I wrote in the previous blog post, I may complain about the beginnings and/ or the endings in the plays of Euripides—this man is odd—but his middles are generally brilliant. The struggle in Agamemnon, the argument between him and Menelaus, the scene between Clytemnestra and Achilles (Akhilleus), Clytemnestra’s confrontation of her husband, the resolution of Iphigenia, etc—all these conflicts make for great drama—we just have one brilliant scene after another (until that farcical ending).
(I usually write Akhilleus, but I’m using the spellings in Philip Vellacott’s translation).
“MENELAUS […] Besides, compassion moves me for the unhappy girl,
Remembering she is of one blood with me, and faces
Death at an altar for the sake of my false wife.
What, after all, is Helen to her?”
(translated by Philip Vellacott)
The whole thing of course is ridiculous, just like the war(s) going on as Euripides was writing the play. I suppose Euripides is simply fascinated by all the reasoning—and sophistry—that leads to the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the Trojan War.
“CHORUS […] Where now can the clear face of goodness,
Where can virtue itself live by its own strength?—
When ruthless disregard holds power,
When men, forgetting they are mortal,
Tread down goodness and ignore it,
When lawlessness overrules law,
When the terror of God no longer draws men together
Trembling at the reward of wickedness?”
Euripides is clearly in a dark, bitter mood.
This is funny though:
“ACHILLES […] I’ve said all this, not out of eagerness to marry
Your daughter—thousands of girls pursue me all the time;
But King Agamemnon has insulted me.”
Duh.
3/ Let’s look at the moment Iphigenia decides to accept her face and sacrifice herself.
“IPHIGENIA […] The power of all Hellas now looks to me;
All lies in my hand—the sailing of the fleet, capture of Troy,
And the future safety of Greek wives from barbarous attacks;
No more forcible abductions from our happy homes, when once
Paris has been made to pay the price of death for Helen’s rape.
All this great deliverance I shall win by dying, and my name
Will be blessed and celebrated as one who set Hellas free…”
How selfless and noble for a young girl to sacrifice herself for Greece.
“IPHIGENIA […] And if Artemis has laid a claim
On my body, who am I, a mortal, to oppose a god?
This I cannot do. To Hellas, then, I dedicate myself.
Sacrifice me; take and plunder Troy. For me, your victory
Shall be children, marriage—for all time my glorious monument.
Greeks were born to rule barbarians, mother, not barbarians
To rule Greeks. They are slaves by nature; we have freedom in our blood.”
This is quite disturbing, yes? I don’t think this is me looking at it with modern eyes—Euripides has depicted the perspective, the suffering of the Trojans—he would find this problematic.
Having now read 13 of his plays, I still find Euripides strange and hard to grasp—I prefer Sophocles—but Euripides is always fascinating and thought-provoking, and often makes me feel uneasy.
