INTRODUCTION

Yet the Athenian playwright Euripides left behind him some of the most astonishing expressions of human passion and compassion ever set into dramatic form. His plays express a range of hope, terror, bliss, unmatched in classical drama. Of these, none, surely, displays more range than the relentless bloodletting of the saga of the House of Atreus and the Trojan War, which Euripides treats with characteristic balance in two of his masterworks, Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris.

Composed out of sequence and more than a decade apart, the plays offer the mature vision of a playwright at the height of his powers, framing the cataclysmic violence of a family's destruction and ultimate redemption. These two plays, and the stories they retell, offer much insight into the lost world of ancient Greek thought that was the crucible for so much of our modern civilization. They teach us much about ourselves as individuals and as social and political creatures. And they confront us with a host of questions, not least of which have to do with the very structure and form of the story itself.

Drawn by these fissures and challenged by so much obscurity, translator Nicholas Rudall and director JoAnne Akalaitis have teamed with a remarkable combination of designers and performers to cast new light on the two plays together. A new translation and vibrant, contemporary staging will explore the stark realities and mythic poetry of these texts in one remarkable theatrical event.

Characteristically, Euripides in these works reflects on the vulnerable position of women in a world of male violence; questions the value of war and patriotism against the simple virtues of family and love; and describes with lyric beauty and simple humor the fears and aspirations of legendary characters, who become suddenly as recognizably human as our own family. Choosing as his subject the violent and primitive horror of human sacrifice--and, worst of all, the sacrifice of one's own child--Euripides created a pair of dramas that are at once intensely political and agonizingly personal. They offer some of the most memorable scenes of loss and reunion ever composed. They offer genuine psychological insight into characters and events long hardened into tradition, and make us see them as new. They touch on some of the most complex and delicate ethical problems faced by any society, including the ever-fraught conflict between private and public interest.

BIOGRAPHY OF EURIPIDES

The lifetime of Greek playwright Euripides spanned perhaps the most momentous period in the heyday of classical Greece. Within years of his birth, his native Athens was burned to the groun--only to recover and lead the allied armies of the Greeks in a stunning upset over invading Persian armies. Two years after his death in exile, Athens finally capitulated to rival Sparta after the long and destructive Peloponnesian Wars. In the intervening decades, freed of the yoke of subjection to the Persian Empire, the cities of the Hellenic world developed a flourishing culture of artistic, political, intellectual, and military accomplishment that rivalled any ever known. At the heart of this explosion of creative and cultural brilliance stood Athens: city of Pericles, Sophocles, Plato, Aeschylus, Socrates, Protagoras, Thucydides; birthplace of democracy, champion of virtue, and defender of individual liberty (though later to become an imperial tyranny--isolated, feared, alone). Indeed, the poetic drama developed during this fifth-century blossoming should more properly be called "Athenian" than "Greek," for its practitioners were first and foremost products of that city, its institutions and aspirations.

Of all the thinkers and artists Athens produced in her near century of greatness, only Socrates was more reviled and mocked in his day than was Euripides. Yet very little is known of the life of this most modern of misfits, one of the dominant artists of Western literature. What remains consists largely of legend or jokes, for Euripides defied all expectations with the skepticism, irony, realism, and innovation of his plays. In them, he examines such issues as religion, justice, or morality not with generalities but through specific, individual cases of passion (lust, hate, revenge) or in terms of specific social dilemmas (unjust wars, political reform). His characters display flaws unexpected in tragic heroes or, worse, in gods. His plays focus often on the lives and feelings of women, who were deemed inferior beings in ancient Greek society. He challenged the unquestioned nationalism of a state at war for its life--none of which endeared him among Athenians. As one result, Euripides was the object of constant derision in the writing of his contemporaries, as well as in the tales of his fellow citizens: Aristophanes even put him on trial in one of his comedies. Much of this material was taken up by later historians and perpetuated as fact.

Separating myth from reality in the life of Euripides is nearly impossible, but certain elements are reasonably certain, while others are more than likely. He seems to have been born on the Athenian island of Salamis--by some accounts, on the day of the greatest naval victory in Athenian history (in the bay at Salamis in 480 B.C.), when Aeschylus served in the infantry and Sophocles danced in the victory celebrations. Another account places his birth in the more believable 484 B.C., a few years before the battle. His father was Mnesarchus, of good family; his mother--notwithstanding an incredible profusion of jokes popularly claiming she was a green-grocer--seems to have been of similarly wealthy background. Indeed, it would have been almost unheard of for a dramatic poet to be of other than prosperous descent; by financial necessity and cultural practice, playwrights came from the ranks of the educated and elite.

Whatever his parentage, records show that Euripides was first chosen to compose a chorus in 465 B.C., when the author was nineteen--a significant recognition of his literary abilities. After this auspicious start, it was ten years before one of his plays won first prize in dramatic competition. The victory of Peliades in 455 B.C. would, remarkably, be one of only five times a play of Euripides' was chosen by the judges--the last time, posthumously, for the Bacchae. One of the principal sources of the judges' displeasure with Euripides seems to have been the skepticism and irony of his work. This had its origin, most historians and critics accept, in the poet's early training with, and exposure to, the thriving school of the Sophists.

Distinguished in their day from the Philosophers and later from the Socratics, the Sophists derived their name from their avowed search for sophia, or wisdom. Over the course of Euripides' lifetime, they were an increasingly influential and important group. As teachers and as writers it was their instruction and discoveries--or the reactions to them--that shaped the intellectual climate in which Euripides lived, thought, and wrote.

As a young man, the playwright studied with the Sophists; as an adult, he was an intellectual companion of such noted Sophists as the scientist Anaxagoras, the rhetorician Protagoras, Prodicus the grammarian, the theoretician Diogenes of Apollonia, and others. Each one was a teacher and thinker deeply invested in scientific, linguistic, and philosophical inquiry. While the aim of the Sophists was avowedly to train young men to think and to become good public citizens, they also challenged students and others to question, observe, and analyze the world and mankind's place in it. In response to contemporary developments in logic and metaphysics, Sophists despaired of knowledge and rejected notions of absolute Truth, advocating instead practical excellence in understanding and deep skepticism in observation.

Led by such methods of inquiry, Anaxagoras discovered that the moon reflected the sun's light, and was led thence to the cause of eclipses; he argued that the sun was not a god but a vast hot mass of rock, larger than the Peloponnesian peninsula; he derived a rudimentary form of atomic theory, and disproved the notion of air as empty space. He also advised the city's leaders and engaged in vigorous debate about the nature and justice of judicial punishment. Similarly, his fellow-Sophist Protagoras formulated new rules of grammar and rhetoric that helped teach people how to think and reason; he also articulated the first theory of democracy. Prodicus used literary subjects to teach ethics and morality as well as grammar.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of Sophistical thought came in Protagoras' treatise Truth, in which he concluded that, as all things in the physical universe are in flux, and our experience and sensations are subjective, then "Man is the measure of all things, of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that is not." There can be no objective truth. This ultimately struck not only at the dogma of the Philosophers (Plato in particular would lash out in reaction at the Sophists) but at the foundations of Greek religious belief. Skepticism begat agnosticism begat atheism, or so feared the State. This fear was not misplaced, for in a later work Protagoras frankly stated "About the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they are or are not. For there are many hindrances to knowledge--the darkness of the subject and the shortness of man's life." These and other writings were read aloud at Euripides' house before they were publicly burned and the aging Protagoras banished from Athens. Anaxagoras too was compelled to flee, accused of impiety.

The skeptical spirit of inquiry and relativism Euripides learned from his Sophist teachers would inspire and shape not just his outlook on life but the shape and content of each of his plays. Yet his education incorporated far more than this solitary influence. In keeping with his broadly humanistic schooling, the young Euripides was trained too as a singer and dancer, performing in several festivals of Apollo. He may have studied music more extensively, and is said to have spent time as a painter in his twenties.

In addition to his intellectual training, Euripides began mandatory military service on coming of age in 466 B.C. This would have taken him beyond the immediate vicinity of Athens into wider realms of Attica and perhaps beyond. While an armed truce still obtained between Athens and Sparta at this point, there were plenty of small-scale raids, incursions, and policing actions to keep soldiers busy. Yet it seems to have been athletic pursuits rather than the practice of arms that captured the attention and energy of the young Euripides. Several times he is recorded as winning prizes at athletic competitions at various festivals.

Whether Euripides needed his martial or pugilistic skills later is the subject of speculation and legend but not verifiable fact. He is said to have married twice (simultaneously in some accounts); in each marriage, according to later commentators, he suffered terribly from the infidelity and harsh tongue of his wives. No evidence supports these claims, however--though he is known to have been married at least once, and is said to have grown close to his father-in-law. Whatever his matrimonial experience, Euripides did have at least one son, known as Euripides the Younger. If not prolific in his offspring, he left no doubt as to his artistic productivity, leaving behind roughly 100 plays (of which 19 have survived).

Unlike his contemporary Sophocles, or most of the city's elite, Euripides never served actively in civic affairs, as soldier or statesman. Instead, he preferred to teach, scourge, and if possible change his community by means of the often scathing commentary in his plays. Indeed, despite the paucity of records in general, Euripides appears with remarkable scarcity in historical or documentary references. Most direct mentions of him are to his dramatic writing and appear as ridicule in the comedies of Aristophanes. He was rumored to have sought solitude for his writing in a cave on Salamis; for centuries this was accepted as truth, until more recent historians cast doubt on the detail, claiming it merely reflected the intensely private author's habit of using a country estate for his creative endeavors. However, a recent archaeological discovery chronicled in the New York Times notes that a pottery shard bearing Euripides' name was found in a cave in the region of Salamis, lending rather more credence to the idea of his solitary retreats.

In 430 B.C., when Euripides was fifty, the growing hostility between Athens and Sparta finally exploded into open war, swiftly engulfing the allies of each and most of the rest of Greece. Never again would he see his country at peace, nor respected as the defender of liberty. As the war dragged on and opportunities for honorable peace slipped away, Euripides' critiques grew more pointed, his disillusionment with Athenian nationalism and seemingly suicidal militarism more bitter. In play after play, from Andromache to The Suppliants, but most of all in such works as the agonizing Trojan Women, Euripides argues forcefully against war and its inhumanity. While never advocating enemy Sparta over his native Athens, the plays provide a constant source of criticism, questioning not only the motives but the justice and validity of the war. His experience of his country at war caused Euripides' faith in men and gods to reach new lows: Aristophanes could be sure of winning popular support by accusing Euripides of atheism, though the reference may have been rooted in the facts of a real prosecution for impiety; details are lost and the dramatist was acquitted.

Other trials, real and figurative, beset the aging poet. A wealthy citizen, Hygiainon, is reported to have sued Euripides for hoarding money instead of spending it on public service. During the trial, Euripides' accuser even quoted some of the playwright's own verses against him. He was also attacked with frequency and virulence by his fellow citizens. One of the early accounts of his life, by Philodemus, suggests that he endured a public reversal at this time and that the Athenians "rejoiced" at his suffering. The city's grudging annoyance at this theatrical gadfly seems to have festered gradually into open hostility.

At length, the increasingly embittered Euripides took the most drastic possible course. Sometime after the production of Orestes in 408 B.C., he sought voluntary self-exile in Macedonia, in the kingdom of Archelaus in the rugged north of Greece--far from his beloved city and the civilized urbanity of the south. It may well have been that the open critique of Athenian politics offered in Orestes proved too blatant, too much at last for the already tested patience of his now-hostile countrymen.

To be forced from one's city, one's homeland, one's birthplace in that time was the harshest penalty reserved for the vilest offenses. To leave Athens, seen as the mother of arts and center of cultivated life, was an unimaginable loss. To flee when the city stood in mortal peril must have seemed the height of cowardice. Yet leave the dramatist did. Such exile was a practical necessity in the case of a critical provacatuer like Euripides: barely a few years later, Athens rid itself more harshly of another such barbed commentator, when Socrates was executed for corrupting the city's youth with his skepticism.

In the last few years of his life, Euripides seems to have enjoyed a luxurious and productive phase as the welcome guest of King Archelaus. Removed as Macedon may have been, the king was an eager patron of the humanities and had attracted to his court notable painters, poets, and other artists. Under these conditions, and perhaps reflecting from afar on the tribulations of his homeland, Euripides produced some of his most brilliantly crafted and searingly felt works. While at Archelaus' court, he wrote the Bacchae--which still stands as the monument to his towering genius--and Iphigenia at Aulis, in which he explored the antecedents to the Trojan War and the bloody family saga he had closed in his earlier Iphigenia in Tauris.

Euripides may have become unpopular in Athens, but he was celebrated by other Greeks. In addition to the hero's welcome accorded him in Macedonia, the fame and appreciation he won among Greeks in general preserved the lives of thousands of his ungrateful countrymen. For (legend has it) when 7,000 Athenians were captured and enslaved after their spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to invade Syracuse, those who could recite choruses from Euripides were spared--even given their freedom. The other cities of Greece were only too eager to demonstrate their superiority to the Athenians by honoring Euripides the outcast.

Within two years of his departure, Athens received word of the death of Euripides. Rival tragedian Sophocles, then over 90, proudly put himself and his chorus in mourning. The tale of Euripides end that reached Athens sometime around March of 406 B.C. was a strange and horrible one, oddly suited to the circumstances. As told, the report held that the old poet interceded on behalf of some villagers who had killed one of Archelaus' hunting dogs. Soon after, sitting alone in the woods, the solitary playwright was torn to pieces by hounds--offspring of the unavenged canine.

However Euripides died, his final plays were eagerly gathered together and posthumously produced. In a minor gesture of redemption for past wrongs, the judges at the City Dionysia awarded first prize to the Bacchae. In the centuries that followed his death, Euripides' reputation continued to thrive and to flourish. As if awakening too late to realize what they had lost, the Athenians treasured his memory and celebrated his plays. Actors performed them on tours in the provinces to great acclaim, spreading further his fame and popularity. As time went on, scribes and monks making anthologies of ancient texts gave Euripides pride of place.

In more recent times, the multi-faceted poet has come to be seen as the father of psychological drama. Playwrights since have looked to his unerring sense of individual motivation, his fascination with the workings of human passions, and his unsentimental vision of mankind's solitude and suffering. While the varied poetry of the plays themselves provides surely the most fitting monument to the life and work of this pioneering dramatist, the historian and chronicler Thucydides aptly eulogized him:

All Greece is headstone to Euripides;
His bones let Macedon his death place claim;
Athens his home, the very Greece of Greece--
The world his plays delighted owns his fame.

CHRONOLOGY OF EXTANT WORKS

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Performed in the fifth century in Athens, Euripides' plays about Iphigenia and her unfortunate family history are set against the backdrop of a more primitive, pre-historical Greek age. This meant the Homeric age of legend, in which larger-than-life heroes and gods lived, loved, lusted, and labored for mastery in a semi-barbarous world. According to these familiar tales, two children of the accursed Atreus (whose bloody family saga is told below in Sources) had become kings of important Greek city states: Agamemnon in Mycenae and Menelaos in Sparta. After a long courtship of all the eligible nobles in Greece, Menelaos had won the hand of Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. At his wedding, all the other suitors had to form an alliance, swearing to unite in defense of Menelaos' right to Helen.

Far across the Mediterranean to the East, on the coast of modern-day Turkey, a Trojan youth named Paris spent his days herding sheep and goats on Mount Ida. There he was chosen to settle a bitter dispute among three of the principal goddesses--Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite--concerning their relative beauties. For the goddess of discord, angry at being left out of Olympian feasts, had given them a golden apple to be awarded to the fairest among them.

Bribed by each of the goddesses, Paris ultimately chose Aphrodite (goddess of love) and her offer of marriage to the most beautiful woman on earth. Awarding the triumphant deity the golden apple, Paris sailed for Sparta, where he abducted Helen (whose complicity was endlessly debated in variations on the story). With her abduction, Menelaos summoned his former rivals to observe the terms of their vow. From all over Greece, these heroes were bound by oath to join him in raiding Troy--to avenge his honor, punish the Trojans, and ensure the freedom of the Greeks. Led by Menelaos' brother, Agamemnon, the allied armies set sail from Aulis in a massive flotilla bound for Troy. Before they could leave, however, the gods had demanded a horrific toll: unless Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, there would be no wind and no war.

Once at Troy, they remained for ten years of fruitless siege warfare, often squabbling amongst themselves. At length, the cunning of Odysseus and the aid of a few gods favorable to the Greeks accomplished the destruction of Troy, and the Greeks sailed home. On his return to Mycenae, Agamemnon was murdered in his bath by his vengeful wife and her lover--who were in turn murdered by her son, Orestes. For this crime of matricide, Orestes was pursued by the Furies and driven, mad and wandering, across the earth. At length, he came to Athens, where he was judged by order of Athena and pardoned (creating, according to legend, that city's custom of trial by jury).

The Golden Age of Athens

Historians and archaeologists have long-since confirmed the outlines of the mythic Trojan War. There was a city called Troy, or Ilium, where the legend reports it. There was a war between the Greeks and the Trojans, in which Troy was destroyed. More than likely the actual conflict was over trading rights and control of key shipping passage, but these more mundane facts did not concern Euripides or his audience. They did not look to the myths for historical accuracy.

Where Euripides did reflect reality was in his constant, often unsettling, critical allusion to the prevailing circumstance of his adult lifetime. This was the long, destructive, ultimately unsuccessful war between Athens and Sparta. However, before Athens forced her citizens, colonies, and allies into a costly conflict with fellow Greeks, she had enjoyed decades of development as the shining center of a culture burgeoning under new-found freedom after the defeat of the Persian Empire.

Beginning in the sixth century B.C. and continuing into the fifth, the dominant power in the Mediterranean world was the empire of the Persians, who expanded their control not only throughout Asia Minor (including Greek colonies there) but across the Greek mainland. Following the revolt of several subject cities after 500 B.C. (which Athens supported), the armies of Xerxes marched as far as Macedon in northern Greece, devastating as they went. This first campaign ended when the Athenian army defeated the Persians at Marathon in 490 B.C.

A second, punitive invasion began in 480 B.C., when Xerxes marched an army of 100,000 against a loose alliance of Greek city-states again led by Athens. This tiny defensive coalition managed somehow to turn back the overwhelming might of the Persians at the battles of Salamis and Plataea. While Athens itself was burned by the invaders, the Persians ultimately withdrew. With the end of the Persian Wars, the Persians scaled back their expansionist efforts, Greece gained political and intellectual independence, and the Ionian city-states became free. These former Persian subjects, ignored by the Spartans in their pleas for protection, allied instead with Athens, which swiftly became the economic, political, and cultural leader among the Greeks.

This period of peace and prosperity witnessed the lightning rise of democratic Athens under a succession of important leaders. Most famous among them was Pericles. Though he achieved lasting prominence through his leadership in war, Pericles was as influential in reforming Athenian government and society, and fostering astonishing artistic creativity. Under his guidance, political control shifted from a limited aristocratic oligarchy to representative governance and participatory democracy. Laws were made and codified to enlarge the rights of the common citizens and expand their role in the governance of their city--but also to limit access to such citizenship. Over the objections of the Spartans, sometime allies now concerned at the rapid rise of Athenian power (and eager to limit the spread of democratic ideas), the Athenians built walls as far as their major port at Piraeus. This created one of the largest walled enclaves in the civilized world and further stressed the ambitions of this fledgling power.

In the face of occasional Persian incursions, several Greek cities had united in an alliance known as the Delian League. Formed and based at Delos, the League provided for mutual defense against the Persians based on contributions of money, men, or materiel. Soon enough however, the massive treasury and general leadership of the League were taken over by the Athenians. League membership became mandatory, the equivalent of colonial submission to Athenian control. Cities attempting to leave were subjected by force. By 448 B.C., the League became the Athenian empire: former allies were reduced to the status of tribute-paying subjects and organized into five fiscal districts; democratic governments were instituted in all member cities; and laws and standards became uniform. By 425 B.C., this empire consisted of as many as 400 city-states, the revenues from which were used to pay for the expansion of the Acropolis in Athens, welfare for Athenian citizens, state-sponsored artistic projects, and the expansion of already potent naval forces.

Shadows of War

Inevitably, the expansion of the Athenian empire created enormous instability. Subjected cities increasingly resented and resisted Athenian control. More dangerously, however, Athens' expansion came into direct conflict with the Spartan alliance. Just as naturally, the cities' political systems clashed, Sparta's oligarchy and aristocratic absolutism combatting Athenian democracy and representative liberty. A fragile truce, broken by constant low-level clashes, held between the rival powers for thirty years, as they worked obliquely to offset each other's sway. Old alliances became shaky. Territorial incursions increased. Finally, as would happen with a similarly explosive balance of powers in 1914, a small, almost incidental spark caused the entire Hellenic world to ignite in open warfare. In the spring of 431 B.C., the same spring that saw the production of Euripides' towering and savage tragedy Medea, Thebans attacked the outpost of Plataea (previously known as the site of the Greek infantry's glorious defeat of the Persians). This was taken as a direct attack on Athens by forces loyal to Sparta, and the thinly veiled hostility erupted into full-scale war. The Peloponnesian War would consume the best of all who took part, and finally ring the death-knell of Athens' glory as a world power.

The outbreak of war, which began in confidence and jubilation, soon brought accompanying misery. Plague broke out in Athens in 429 B.C., claiming the lives of thousands of citizens--including Pericles. The war party gained more power and, led by Cleon, led the city in disastrous military ventures, rejecting peace offerings time after time. A rough stalemate settled in. For more than twenty years, Sparta's potent army dominated engagements on land, while the Athenian fleet preyed at will on the seas. For months each year, Athens was besieged and its inhabitants trapped within its walls; their navy allowed the Athenians to alleviate the effects of the Spartan siege, maintaining the city through access to far-flung colonies and tributary cities while raiding in turn the Spartan homeland.

Vast resources were consumed on both sides, including incalculable losses in human lives. Most notable was the ethical cost to Athens. As the stranglehold around the city tightened, as former allies and subjects deserted or revolted, as thousands died from plague, as the tide of war turned in Sparta's favor, the Athenian's conduct of the war became increasingly desperate. Voices were raised in protest, loudly heard from Euripides and a few others who were then alienated from the otherwise hawkish populace. From the sense of justice and purpose seen at the start--exemplified in the leadership of Pericles--Athens' policies and politics fragmented and became merely savage.

Among the worst of these offenses was the massacre of the Melians, which spurred Euripides further in creating plays deeply critical of war, xenophobia, and the outrages perpetrated in the name of patriotism. In 416 B.C., the city of Melos revolted against Athens and was forcibly subjected; the women were sold into slavery and all the males summarily put to death. Though it was not uncommon to execute enemy defenders (the Spartans did so at Plataea), the Melians had been allies and the massacre was seen by many as exceedingly brutal. It is likely this shaped Euripides' understanding of the events in the Iphigenia Cycle.

The final blow came with two disastrous decisions, hotly debated at the time and bitterly resented after: the invasion of Sicily in 415 B.C. and the choice to put decisive trust in land armies rather than in the tested naval might. In these engagements, the vaunted Athenian navy was virtually destroyed in its entirety, while the army suffered crippling defeats against superior forces. Yet further peace offers from Sparta were again rejected. These all proved decisive mistakes, and in 404 B.C. (a mere two years after Euripides died in exile) Athens surrendered totally to Sparta.

Revealingly, historians record a sense of near-jubilation and relief attendant on the surrender--even during the mandated destruction of defensive fortifications. There was, Thucydides records, a palpable sense that larger Athenian liberties had been preserved or even restored. Saved from the demands of war, the city could return to its previous civilized pursuits cultivating philosophy, political activity, literature and the arts.

Ritual and Sacrifice

The performance of sacred rituals--particularly that of human sacrifice--forms the very core of both of Euripides' plays dealing with the story of Iphigenia. Written at very different stages of Euripides career, in response to equally extreme but nearly opposite circumstances, both plays are also set in a distant, mythical age of Greek history. Yet as much as they record the realities of the life-and-death struggle between Athens and Sparta, and within Athens for the spirit of the city, the plays also reflect a very real past in which accepted religious rituals included the blood offering of humans.

Not so very far removed from the demands of war, as Euripides hints in Iphigenia at Aulis, human sacrifice remained a vestigial memory of a more brutal time in Greek history. Blood offerings were enshrined in allegory and myth, often put at a remove from the present. While without a doubt human sacrifice was not a part of the daily experience of Euripides' audience, nonetheless it remained a reality. In 480 B.C., before the Battle of Salamis, the Athenians killed three Persian captives in honor of Dionysus. At an annual rite known as the Thargelia, two Athenians were ritually stoned to death to atone for the wrongs of the city at large. (There seems to have been an entire group of outcasts known as Pharmakoi reserved for such sacrifices or civic emergencies). In Rhodes a condemned felon was sacrificed annually at the festival of Chronos, while at one temple of Apollo priests regularly threw a victim from the cliffs to cleanse the community.

More typically by far, however--at celebrations, events, ceremonies, or occasions great or small--Athenians would sacrifice animals (sheep, goats, rabbits or pigs) or offer libations of wine, grain, or flowers. Nonetheless, it is apparent that in a not-so-distant past these offerings would have included the ritual sacrifice of humans--most often children. Archaeological evidence shows children's remains found under the thresholds of buildings, where they were presumably buried after being sacrificed to bless the erection of a new home, temple, or palace. Neighboring civilizations with whom the ancient Greeks had contact--from the Semitic tribes of Israel to the kingdom of Crete--were known to perform human sacrifice in extreme situations. Indeed, the most common account of the Iphigenia story holds that it offers mythic and symbolic record of the shift from human to animal sacrifice. (A further remnant of the earlier custom was the practice of sprinkling sacrificial beasts with water or barley, primarily to make the animal nod its head to symbolize consent, just as humans had been expected to die as willing victims of the gods.)

More common in Greek culture during Euripides' lifetime was the exposure of unwanted children. Female infants were regularly abandoned, as more generally were any newborns in times of famine or other hardship. These exposed babies might be left where they were to be found by passersby (traditionally, one function of brothels seems to have been to raise abandoned baby girls), or to perish--but direct infanticide was avoided. In the case of Iphigenia, however, as in the Biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac, the father is asked to kill his own child by his own hand. Is it sacrifice or murder, and how can we tell the difference? Is this death any less barbaric than the Taurians' custom of slaying Greeks, seen in the second play? Does the daughter's sacrificial death differ from the death of all the sons who went out to war?

Also unusual in Euripides' drama (but typical of his interest in women characters) is the value thus placed on a female child by her selection as a propitiatory offering. While this would have been striking in a culture accustomed to relegating women to a status little better than that of slaves--whether politically, economically, or socially--it would have paled in comparison to the implicit challenge Euripides offered with these plays to established religious customs. By using human sacrifice in each, with such different contexts and emotional resonances, yet with such implied similarity, the plays invite us to question the validity of any such sacrifice. Moreover, they seem (as they evidently did for Euripides' contemporaries) to ask troublingly: What kind of gods would ask such payment? Can it be just or moral? Difficult issues indeed.

SYNOPSIS: IPHIGENIA AT AULIS

• Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and leader of the Greek army
• Queen Clytemnestra, his wife, mother of Iphigenia
• Menelaos, King of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon, husband of Helen
• Chorus of women from Calchis
• Iphigenia, eldest daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra
• Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons
• Old man, a slave
• A Messenger

The port of Aulis. Night. Calm. Such a calm that not a breath of wind stirs. The peace is shattered by confusion and distress, as Agamemnon--the leader of Greek armies assembled for the invasion of Troy--tries to decide whether he will sacrifice his eldest child, Iphigenia. Without her death, the goddess Artemis refuses to send the winds that will carry the ships of the Greek fleet to Troy, where they can win back Helen, stolen wife of Agamemnon's brother, Menelaos.

Calling a trusted old servant, Agamemnon decides to send a message to his wife, Clytemnestra, countermanding an earlier order that she bring his daughter to Aulis. Menelaos, however, intercepts and reads the message. He returns to berate his brother for betraying the larger cause of Greek unity and justice for his own personal benefit. Agamemnon, however, argues so persuasively that Menelaos is convinced and converted, agreeing that no war is worth the life of a child.

Too late. The army hears of the plan just as Clytemnestra arrives with Iphigenia, both convinced that they are coming to celebrate the young girl's wedding to Achilles. The soldiers, near riot, demand that the sacrifice take place so that their expedition can continue. To his surprise, Achilles hears from Clytemnestra that he is to be wed, though he knew nothing of it. The Old Man resolves the confusion, telling the queen of Agamemnon's ruse and the impending danger: the only ceremony is to be Iphigenia's bloody death.

Much heated discussion follows as mother and daughter try in vain to persuade the king to spare his child. Achilles offers to fight the entire Greek army singlehandedly to save his young bride. In the end, however, Iphigenia consents to sacrifice her life for the freedom and glory of her country, and is led off to the altar. But there is a final twist in the yarn of fate, for Artemis does not let Iphigenia die under the knife. At the last second, a messenger reports, startled observers found it was not the girl that lay bleeding and gasping on the altar. The goddess has substituted a young deer, an animal sacred to her, and carried off the maiden to be her priestess. With this ambiguous sign of divine intervention, Agamemnon sails for Troy.

SYNOPSIS: IPHIGENIA AMONG THE TAURIANS

• Iphigenia, priestess of Artemis
• Orestes, her brother
• Pylades, his companion
• Thoas, King of Tauris
• Herdsmen
• A messenger
• Athena, goddess of wisdom
• Chorus of enslaved Greek women

Iphigenia, saved by Artemis from death at the hands of her father, has been transported to the distant and barbaric land of the Taurians (today, the Crimea, on the north shore of the Black Sea). There King Thoas has made her a priestess in the temple of Artemis, responsible for consecrating victims before they are offered to the goddess. For in this land, any Greek man captured is sacrificed. Ignorant of this custom, Orestes has come with his companion Pylades to Tauris: the oracle of Apollo has decreed that, to expunge his guilt for the murder of his mother and end his torment by the Furies, Orestes must steal the statue of Artemis.

As the women cleanse the temple, herdsmen spot Orestes and Pylades and bring word of their presence to Iphigenia. Though the men are behaving wildly--Orestes has slaughtered a herd of cattle in a fit of madness prompted by the Furies--they must be captured and prepared for sacrifice. In due course they are brought to the temple, where the women eagerly press them for news of Greece. Iphigenia, anxious to send word to her family, offers to spare one of the men if he will promise to return to Argos with her letter; however, neither man is willing to leave the other to his death. Finally, Pylades promises to deliver the message. When they hear the contents, which are addressed from Iphigenia to her brother Orestes, brother and sister are joyfully reunited.

They must then hatch a plan to escape Tauris and return to their homeland with the statue of Artemis. At Iphigenia's urging, the Greeks make use of Orestes' plight: as a matricide, he is unclean and must be consecrated before his sacrifice. Claiming that he has touched--and hence defiled--the statue as well, the priestess takes it with her as she leads the men to the sea to perform the ritual cleansing.

There, they embark for Greece, only to be seen by the men of Thoas; at the same time, a storm begins to blow them back to shore. Word is brought to the king, who sets out to recapture the foreigners, only to be stopped by an apparition of the goddess Athena. Thoas, the goddess says, must let the strangers and the enslaved women go. They will return with the statue to Greece and establish in Athens a new temple consecrated to Artemis. Obedient to this expression of divine will, King Thoas graciously relents.

SOURCES

The tragedies submitted at the Athenian theatrical festivals did not typically attempt to create new material. Instead, the emphasis was on taking stories and events known to everyone and treating them in an original manner. Indeed, in ways we can perhaps only guess at today, it was crucial to the spirit of the civic festivals at which all plays were performed that the story be one well-known in its outlines to the entire community. The most typical source for most Greek plays dealing with the heroic and legendary past was Homer--the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Playwrights might additionally look to the mythic history of gods and demigods that formed the basis of Greek religious belief.

In his Iphigenia plays, Euripides follows the outlines of this familiar material, showing the framework of the Trojan War and using many of the characters made famous by Homer. Nowhere, though, does Homer speak of Iphigenia, nor of a sacrifice at Aulis. Agamemnon is said to have a daughter named Iphianessa at one point in the Iliad, but that is all. The events among the Taurians are likewise nowhere to be found in the Homeric saga, though they intersect with the story of Orestes, told in many other tragedies as well. Instead, as he did on more than one occasion, Euripides seems to have tailored his play in a uniquely personal way to create a specific commentary, in response to the Athenian conduct of the war against Sparta and what he perceived as zealous credulity in religious matters.

Where Euripides does allude directly to Homer and classical mythology is in the general context for his plays and the history of his characters (who then frequently deviate significantly from the accepted models of their behavior and nature). In Iphigenia in Tauris, for instance, Orestes (Agamemnon's son and Iphigenia's younger brother) appears as a central figure. He was one of the most common and popular literary heroes, noted for slaying his mother Clytemnestra in revenge for the murder of his father--for which matricide the unfortunate Orestes was pursued by the Furies. With him comes his close companion, Pylades, also a figure of minor legend. The two share a deep love that closely parallels that Homer shows between the mighty Achilles and Patroclus. Similarly taken from Homer are the principal characters of Agamemnon and his queen, Clytemnestra, his brother Menelaos, the hero Achilles, and others such as wily Odysseus and the seer Kalchas.

Vengeance Begets Vengeance

In drawing on Homer for these elements, Euripides also drew on a still-older literary and traditional source. This was the series of ancient tales that tell of the long sequence of misfortunes befalling the family of Atreus, King of Mycenae and father of Agamemnon and Menelaos. According to the most common version of the legend, Zeus, king of the gods, had a favorite mortal son named Tantalos. This demi-god was invited to dine one day with the gods on Olympos; in return, he invited the gods to a feast at his home--where he served them a stew containing his own son, Pelops, whom he had killed and cooked in a test of his guests' divinity and omniscience.

Though Zeus brought Pelops back to life, Tantalos was severely punished and his family cursed. He himself was condemned to spend eternity in Hades, famished and thirsty, up to his neck in water he could not drink and surrounded by fruit he could not reach. Through treachery and murder, Pelops won himself a bride and the throne of Mycenae--as well as the curse of one loyal follower he betrayed and killed. In turn, his sons Atreus and Thyestes became bitter rivals for their father's throne. When Atreus won out, Thyestes seduced his wife. In revenge, Atreus imitated his grandfather and served Thyestes' sons to their father at a feast. For this, Thyestes issued his own curse on his brother and his descendants.

The curse duly continued with Atreus' own sons, Agamemnon and Menelaos. After competing against all other eligible bachelors in ancient Hellas, Menelaos won the hand of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. When Helen was abducted by Paris and carried off to Troy, Agamemnon was chosen to lead the allied army of Greeks sailing to recapture her--all of whom had sworn to defend the rights of Helen's husband. Before departing, however, the general killed a deer sacred to the goddess Artemis. In revenge, she becalmed the fleet. To secure fair weather, an oracle told, Agamemnon was required to sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. Once again, one member of the House of Atreus shed the blood of another.

Ten years later, returning victorious from Troy, Agamemnon was murdered in his bath by Clytemnestra his wife, still enraged over the slaughter of her innocent daughter. Clytemnestra in turn fell victim to the family curse when her son Orestes returned from exile to kill her in vengeance for his father's murder. This new crime brought new distress: pursued by the avenging Furies, Orestes was driven from his homeland to wander the earth in madness until the gods determined his fate. To cleanse his guilt, the young man was ordered to steal the statue of Artemis from Tauris, where it was the center of barbaric rites of human sacrifice, and return it for worship in Athens.

After generations of bloodshed, the curse seems to have ended at this point. The popular version of the tale allows Orestes to be cleansed and even happily married. Euripides' treatment, however, adds a final wrinkle, when Orestes is captured trying to steal the statue and confronts the prospect of death as a human sacrifice--at the hands of his own sister, true to the pattern of his family's curse.

PRODUCTION HISTORY

Both parts of the Iphigenia Cycle were originally presented as separate plays at the main dramatic festival and competition in Athens, the City Dionysia. First seen, around 414 B.C., was the end of the story, Iphigenia in Tauris. The production would have been paid for by a wealthy sponsor, the choregos, and included a chorus of men as the enslaved Greek women and a trio of trained actors presenting the rest of the roles. Euripides himself probably oversaw rehearsals--perhaps even drilling the performers in their lines, as scripts were not regularly written down. Euripides seems to have numbered among his few friends Timotheus, one of the more advanced and innovative composers of the time; perhaps the music to which the chorus and actors sang and chanted their verses was created by this friend.

The performance took place in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, when warfare and death had become part of Athenians' everyday life as they sent successive generations out to die on the battlefield. Yet, in the midst of this gore, everything halted for the festival that honored Dionysus, patron of wine, revelry, and drama. The City Dionysia was a major international theater exposition with a religious framework. Emissaries and dignitaries from the civilized world were honored guests for sequences of interconnected plays offered in competition by the best playwrights the city could boast.

Euripides' plays--puzzling in their variations of form and content, challenging in their psychological complexity, and subversive in their political critiques--rarely won the prize. Iphigenia in Tauris was not so honored, though Iphigenia at Aulis was victorious in 406 B.C. As we know the play (seemingly written during Euripides' brief, final exile in Macedonia) only in versions prepared by later copyists, there is no agreement on whether the often puzzling text of this piece represents a work unfinished and fragmentary, one amended by other hands, or merely an exploratory attempt to try new forms. Portions of text appear extraneous or spurious, while some ancient sources mention additons or alternatives that are now lost.

Whenever and however it was written, Iphigenia at Aulis was produced by Euripides' son at the City Dionysia soon after the author's death, in combination with two of his other last plays including the Bacchae. Possibly in belated deference to the skill of this native son, the festival judges awarded Euripides first prize one final time. Typically of Greek drama, which tended to treat in endless variation versions of the same story, Euripides made no attempt to link Aulis to its previously written sequel. There is no evidence the two were performed together, nor does there seem to have been pressure to reconcile the events in one with their manifestation in the other.

In later decades and the centuries that followed the capitulation of Athens, the two plays--like most of Euripides's works--were performed and disseminated by travelling troupes of actors. For several centuries, they were known only to a select few in hand-written versions, copied from manuscript to manuscript, preserved with seventeen others and some few scattered fragments. Scholars collected anthologies representative of Athenian drama, and it is largely these selected works that remain today. Thus, we know that the Iphigenia plays, while perhaps not familiar from performance, were considered among the very best the classical world had to offer.

With the Renaissance in Europe came a revival of interest in classical literature and renewed performances of live theater. However, the Greeks, studied in school, tended to be represented on stage only in imitation, in reworkings of a few tragedies according to rules drawn from Aristotle's Poetics or in plays based on fourth-century New Comedy (preserved through the Roman farces of Plautus and the commedia dell'arte tradition). During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, French tragedian Racine famously composed a neo-classical drama, Iphigenie, that was closely modelled on Iphigenia at Aulis. In the play--one of the more popular and successful of its time--Racine freely adapted the original to offer characteristic expression of his outlook and the intellectual currents of his day. In 1787, Goethe did the same for the tale of Tauris, though from a very different perspective. He took the recognizable threads of melodrama evident in the original and crafted a truly romantic version of the myth. Characters were added, events manipulated, and a love story happily woven into the text. Again, his rendering of Euripides was utterly informed by his context and artistic impulses, for both works strove to express the humane ideals of the Enlightenment.

By this time, the tale was better known for its treatment in these two versions than for the originals. An opera by GlŸck based on Aulis and a few dramatic or epic poems on the subject kept the story alive as a literary trope. Performances of either of Euripides' originals were rare outside the academic arena, where in British and American universities they received occasional stagings.

The twentieth century, however, has expanded considerably the breadth and scope of classical plays brought newly to life onstage, and the Iphigenia plays have not been excluded from this entirely. In 1921, Margaret Anglin appeared in a production of Aulis in New York directed by Maurice Brown., and in 1930 a nationwide contest was held in Italy for a new translation of the play. The winning entry was produced in a stylized and fantastical setting, suggestive of almost prehistoric ferocity. Modern dramatic competition at Delphi and the National Theatre in Athens--as well as at the ancient amphitheaters of Epidaurus and Dodona--have kept the play in almost constant performance in Greece since the Thirties. Notable among these was a staging of Aulis by Dimitris Rondiris, who radically used folk elements and conceived the work as a piece of music to produce a memorable vision of the play that vastly expanded its theatrical potential.

Perhaps the apex of Iphigenia's modern popularity and exposure came with a film made by the renowned Greek director Michael Cacoyannis. The film used location shooting and expanded the story somewhat to provide a charged, ambivalent, highly political look at what Euripides had created--but chose to encounter only the first part of the story. The Cacoyannis film was based on his stage production of the play, produced first in Greece then taken on tour, where it played at the Classic Stage Company in New York. In it, Cacoyannis placed a carefully regulated chorus before a massive set of steps; Irene Pappas offered a regal Clytemnestra, Christopher Walken a barely controlled Achilles, and Agamemnon was irredeemably weak and vacillating, a victim of politics and his own position. As Iphigenia, John Simon found Jenny Leigh "magnificent" in a performance that proved the very concept of catharsis.

It was two landmark modern productions in English that daringly put the cycle into the larger context of Greek plays and the myths they retell. In the first, The Greeks, England's Royal Shakespeare Company performed John Barton's monumental adaptation of the entire saga surrounding the Trojan War. Ten plays were condensed and mingled to produce a massive trilogy, hailed as "spellbinding" by Irving Wardle in the London Times and recognized by Michael Coveney as an "astonishing coup." In stark, simple language, with actors playing multiple roles in thematic doubling, the production traced themes of sin, retribution and redemption from the opening moments of Iphigenia in Aulis through to the final paean of joy that closed Iphigenia in Tauris. Inspired by this production, Garland Wright directed the "Clytemnestra Project" at the Guthrie, in which Iphigenia at Aulis was similarly placed in a larger context and powerfully integrated into the pattern of Greek myth, with three plays that told the story from Clytemnestra's perspective.

Otherwise performances have been few and far between, none attempting to consider the plays as an artistic unit. Until recently. The two were reunited as a pair in 1991, when Tazewell Thompson directed both together at Boston's Huntington Theater. Now they reunite again in Nick Rudall's translations, which link the plays with a shared understanding of the author's language and dramatic forms while preserving the significant differences that separate them as individual expressions.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

Euripides is most assiduous in giving the utmost tragic effect to these two emotions--fits of love and madness. Herein he succeeds more, perhaps, than in any other respect, although he is daring enough to invade all the other regions of the imagination.
-Longinus.

When I was a boy, I was fondest of Aeschylus; in youth and middle-age I preferred Euripides; in my declining years I prefer Sophocles....Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of Aeschylus...nor diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Table Talk," 1833.

Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872.

Euripides' sublime work has this final quality to make it precious to us: it is extremely modern. For in it, implicitly and even explicitly, the challenge to God rings out: God is cruel, or he does not exist....And it is for such a universe that Euripides speaks his words of courage and consolation.
-John Simon, review of Michael Cacoyannis' production of Iphigenia at Aulis, 1968.

Every play of Euripides seems to be asking a question or else boldly stating some...paradox. It is easy to see why Euripides was, even in antiquity, branded "the philosopher of the stage" and linked with men...whose new philosophy called all in doubt,...celebrating the power of rhetoric to affirm uncertainty.
-Erich Segal, "Euripides: Poet of Paradox," 1968.

[Euripides] called out to his contemporaries and his elders: I am determined no to compromise with anything just because it has been that way in the past, whatever it may be.... His theater is a theater of society, political theater. Euripides was a writer who wanted to enlighten. .... Iphigenia has left the world of reality. The mob that is determined to slay her is converted in her imagination into a nation animated only by motives of nobility. She is in a paroxysm of ecstasy that knows nor men nor the world....A beautiful spectacle, transporting her into the realm of the mystical.
-Siegfried Melchinger, Euripides, 1973.

Every grand and lofty impulse which had ennobled Homeric man is in Euripides reduced to mere pettiness and whim. His characters are no longer obsessed by the intrinsic value and significance of their goals. They have neither the force of will nor the conviction to struggle for something higher than personal advantage: Euripides has become interested in the psychology of action.
-Bruno Snell, "From Tragedy to Philosophy," In Greek Tragedy, ed. Eric Segal, 1983.

Euripides, I believe, was first and always a poet and playwright. He was a man who felt himself a member of the human race rather than of one half of it. He recognized the distinction between royal and common, as he recognized the distinction between good and bad; but he did not equate good or bad with royal or common, nor with slave or free, nor with Hellene or barbarian, nor with male or female.
-Philip Vellacott, Ironic Drama, 1975.

[Iphigenia] remains, like Euripides, intensely tragic....It deserves a place in the modern repertoire, [and] Cacoyannis' film...recreates for the modern audience that irresistible, unbearable assault on the emotions that was Euripides' special skill and that made him, in his own time, a poet greatly loved but also feared.
-Bernard Knox, review of Cacoyannis' Iphigenia at Aulis in New York Review of Books, 1978.

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