Abstract
How to address the grief that attends the inevitable loss in war of those we love? How to turn victims of war into heroes? How to resolve the agonizing choices that war imposes on us? Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, the tale of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, and Pericles’s Funeral Oration as imagined by Thucydides were both written during the Peloponnesian War, and each points to the creation of stories told to assuage the grief that follows the loss of loved ones and to obscure the challenging moral choices that wars demand. Euripides’s characters are trapped by the moral ambiguities that plague our political decision-making and, through a startling conclusion to the play that recalls the language of Pericles’s Funeral Oration, they welcome the “vain myths” we introduce to make our wartime decisions seem painless and our moral dilemmas disappear. Only the mother Clytemnestra refuses to be lulled by the stories or disappear happily within the walls of her palace. The tragedian can give full voice to the complex role of those stories; the rhetoric of the political leader obscures the ambiguity and “vanity” of those myths. Given the wide familiarity with Pericles’s Funeral Oration, I devote most of my attention to Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and conclude with a discussion of Pericles’s famous speech.
Introduction
War—as we all know—leaves its victims. How to address the grief that attends the inevitable loss of those we love, how to turn victims into heroes? War entails uncertainty, as well, about what choices ought, in a moral sense, to be made. All polities that engage in warfare—that is, all polities—face these challenges. I consider here two works from fifth-century BCE Athens, Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and Pericles’s Funeral Oration, that expose how the creation of stories enables polities to dissolve these challenges. Each illustrates the myths intended to assuage the grief that follows the loss of loved ones and to obscure the challenging moral choices that wars demand. It is the tragedian, though, whose focus on the grief of the mother forces us to acknowledge the tensions that the myths cannot hide; the rhetoric of the political leader creating the image of fatherland conceals those tensions. Euripides’s tragic art exposes the work of the stories we tell about our political lives in a way unavailable to the political leader. Given the wide familiarity with Pericles’s Funeral Oration, I devote most of my attention to Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. 1
Iphigenia at Aulis
Euripides, writing under the shadow of the Peloponnesian War, wrote tragedies that powerfully exposed the suffering experienced by those passive victims of war, especially women and children. Most famous today is Trojan Women, a work that received much attention during the Vietnam War. Iphigenia at Aulis is as powerful a tragedy as Trojan Women; yet, while Iphigenia at Aulis was popular in the nineteenth century, it has received far less attention since then. It, too, explores the suffering caused by war, but from a different perspective, one that focuses on familial attachments and, most significantly for this paper, the stories told about political necessities that soften—even efface—the grief that attends the ruptures in family life war demands.
The play tells the wrenching tale of a father, Agamemnon, who, if he is to lead the Greeks against the Trojans, must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis. A chorus of women and others in the play—especially his wife Clytemnestra, Iphigenia’s mother—react to the agonizing choice he must make, whether to sacrifice his child or abandon the expedition and allow his child to live. In the end, Iphigenia proclaims that she is willing (indeed happy) to sacrifice herself so that the combined Greek forces can sail to Troy, thereby securing, as she sees it, the freedom of Hellas and the protection of its women. She will match in courage and patriotism the soldiers eager to face death in battle. By latching onto the myth of Agamemnon’s fraught choice to perform that sacrifice and then introducing Iphigenia’s eagerness to sacrifice herself, Euripides depicts the tragic tensions that emerge when the suffering results not from actions by the enemy as in his Trojan Women but from the choices we make between devotion to family and the losses demanded by the political and military needs of the community.
The stories that are told by political leaders like Pericles and gladly welcomed by generals like Agamemnon, stories that may alleviate grief and foster military pursuits, rub harshly against the suffering of the women banished from sight in Pericles’s speech and ignored in Euripides’s tragedy. Attending to their suffering, Euripides uses the myth of Iphigenia to explore the complex role of a woman, indeed a girl, who transforms herself from a passive victim to an active participant in the military action when (in Euripides’s version) she willingly dies for Hellas—abandoning the mother who pleads with her not to sacrifice herself and replace her familial connections with devotion to an abstract fatherland. 2 Euripides’s tragedy becomes a complex meditation on the multiple sides of decisions that set family against polity and, through a shocking final twist at the moment of sacrifice, the stories meant to ease the pain of those who, deprived by the sacrifices of war, long for the bodily presence of those they love, and to obscure the anguish entailed in the difficult choices war necessitates. The conclusion takes us to a political world built on imaginative myths and an amnesia that effaces the body and resolves the agonizing choices.
Iphigenia in Aulis has traditionally been read as a play defined by—indeed, flawed by—its characters’ indecisiveness as they confront the difficult choices faced when public needs are set against the emotional ties that bind family members. 3 At the core of the play is Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his own daughter so that he will be able to lead his army of restless soldiers to Troy. It is an act that, in this play (if not in Aeschylus’s version in the Oresteia), he at first resists. I do not write about the psychological causes of the frequent changes of mind displayed by the characters in the play nor do I regard the changes a flaw in the tragic plot; rather, I argue that those changes reveal the moral ambiguities that infect all decisions made in the context of war when the needs of the self, the family, and the political community tragically diverge, challenges that depend on story-telling to resolve. The challenges of decision-making fill the play and become emblematic of the uncertainty that attends all choices and of the stories fashioned by political leaders and communities that allow for the sacrifice not only of a young girl killed by her father, but also of the young men eager for glory on the battlefield in pursuit of freedom for their homeland. It is in this context that Pericles’s famous Funeral Oration enters the discussion. Pericles’s words capture the myth of the city constructed by the political leader to assuage the grief caused by the loss of sons and brothers and illustrate how such tales allow the ambiguities highlighted in Euripides’s play to dissolve.
Aeschylus’s Oresteia, performed five decades earlier, is a necessary frame for the discussion of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis. The chorus in the first play of that trilogy, Agamemnon, sing in heartbreaking detail of the sacrifice of Iphigenia that motivates Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband upon his return from Troy. Agamemnon, confronted with the need to slaughter “the beauty of my house / with maiden blood staining / the father’s hands beside the altar,” at first resists performing the deed, but “when necessity’s yoke” was put upon him, “he changed . . . he endured then / to sacrifice his daughter.” The chorus describes sacrifice: Her supplications and her cries of father were nothing, nor the child’s lamentation to kings passioned for battle. The father prayed, called to his men to lift her . . . and prone above the altar, as you might lift a goat for sacrifice, with guards against the lips’ sweet edge, to check the curse cried out on the house of Atreus. . . She struck the sacrificers with The eyes’ arrows of pity, lovely as in a painted scene, and striving to speak. . . . I saw not what happened next, neither speak it.
4
The Play 5
For those of us wedded to the story of Iphigenia told in the Oresteia, Euripides’s willingness to alter what we think of as the standard story may seem jarring. But Euripides does this often. Electra, in Euripides’s play of that name, lives with a farmer-husband whose hovel Clytemnestra, worried about its sooty walls, resists entering; it is not the palace of Aeschylus’s version; in Euripides’s Phoenician Women Oedipus and Jocasta still live when their sons Polyneices and Eteocles kill one another. Likewise, Euripides’s Iphigenia, as portrayed in his Iphigenia at Aulis, is not the victim of a father who briefly laments that he will have to slay his daughter, the “delight” of his home, or abandon the expedition to Troy. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon thinks only about failing his fleet and quickly decides that virgin blood must flow: “May it be for the best,” he simply says (Agamemnon 218), and with unwavering resolve performs the sacrifice. Euripides’s play is all about Agamemnon’s wavering resolve. Aeschyluss’ Iphigenia is far from embracing her own sacrifice. She must be gagged lest in her agony she curses the house of Atreus, her eyes seeking pity from those about to witness her slaughter. In Euripides’s version, she is the much-beloved child of both Agamemnon and Clytemnestra over whose impending death Agamemnon sheds many tears. Not a single tear mars the sacrifice about which Aeschylus’s chorus sing. Euripides’s Iphigenia urges her mother not to allow anger to infect her feelings toward her husband nor does she seek pity, but willingly (hêkousa 1552) sacrifices herself for Hellas, welcoming a death that, she predicts, will bring her and her family undying fame. And, just to jumble things further, she is not, in the end, slaughtered. Instead, her body disappears, replaced on the altar by a bloodied deer. Such alternative presentations of the classic myths illustrate the mutability of the stories that can be revised to home in on the playwrights’ focus. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon explores the nature of justice and sets the stage for the founding of the Athenian polity; Euripides’s Iphigenia explores a dedication to political endeavors that threaten the emotional bonds tying parent to child.
The plot line of Euripides’s play moves jaggedly from one situation to its opposite as characters change their minds and shift their intentions. In the first scene, 6 Agamemnon reveals that he has been told by the prophet Calchas that before the winds needed for the ships marooned at Aulis to sail to Troy can blow, he must appease the goddess Artemis by sacrificing his daughter. When he first heard this prophesy, he planned to dismiss the army since he would never dare to kill his daughter (96). But persuaded by his brother Menelaus to do something that he calls dreadful (deina 98), he wrote to Clytemnestra telling her to bring their daughter to Aulis, lying (pseudê 105) that their daughter was to wed Achilles. Now, in the pre-dawn hours, Agamemnon tells his old slave that he has changed his mind and has written a new letter telling Clytemnestra not to bring Iphigenia to Aulis. He sends his servant to deliver this second letter to Clytemnestra. It is too late. Clytemnestra, along with Iphigenia, the baby Orestes, and a large retinue are about to arrive at Aulis. Menelaus intercepts the servant and accuses his brother of betrayal, leading Agamemnon to change his mind again and return to the original plan of sacrificing Iphigenia.
The Chorus, comprised of young (“newly blossomed,” 188) women from Chalcis, is drawn to Aulis by the desire to see the pageantry of the shields and arms of the Greeks, their horses, and in general the crowd. They are thrilled at the sight of the two Ajaxes, of Diomedes, of Odysseus, of Achilles “racing the chariot wearing his armor” (210–11). “I came,” the Chorus sings, “to reckon and behold / their wondrous ships / to fill with pleasure / the greedy vision of my feminine sight (gunaikeion opsin)” (231–33). 7 Thrilled as the maidens are by this military spectacle, their attitude changes when they become aware of the sacrifice that this grand expedition, with all its warriors in their shining armor and all its ships, entails. Those who came “newly blossomed” to Aulis to marvel at the armaments for war end up lamenting the sacrifice that such an expedition requires. Pity replaces wonder (1336).
After Clytemnestra and Iphigenia arrive, Agamemnon persists with the fabricated story about the wedding, but Clytemnestra encounters Achilles, who reveals that he has no knowledge of any betrothal for himself and Iphigenia. And Clytemnestra learns from the old slave the real reason she and her daughter have been summoned. She enlists Achilles’s aid to prevent the sacrifice, but he is helpless even against his own soldiers. The expedition for which they are so eager depends on the sacrifice. In the following encounter between Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, and Agamemnon, both women plead that he spare his child, but Agamemnon refuses to change his mind again and plans for the sacrifice proceed. As the soldiers prepare to drag Iphigenia to the site where she will be slaughtered, the young girl (but not Clytemnestra) stops resisting and announces that she is eager to be sacrificed for the sake of Hellas. She sings of the fame that will be hers throughout Hellas because of her self-sacrifice. She tries unsuccessfully to console Clytemnestra and urges her not to be filled with anger at Agamemnon, a request, we know, that will not be honored. She then proceeds to the site prepared for the sacrifice. A messenger reports on the sacrifice, and unlike the description in the Oresteia, there are no “eyes’ arrows of pity” or mention of an “unspeakable” scene. Instead, the messenger reports that Iphigenia wished the assembled crowd good luck and victory in war (1557) and proclaimed: “I furnish my throat for the dagger with a firm heart (eukardiôs 1560).” After the priest and Agamemnon performed the necessary rites and the priest held the dagger ready to strike the lovely neck, the messenger reports, there was suddenly a “wonder (thauma 1581)”; Iphigenia disappeared and in her place lay a deer shedding blood on the altar of Artemis.
In the following analysis, Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis is a response to the version of the sacrifice told in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. 8 There, Agamemnon may have no desire to kill his daughter, but he performs it without the hesitation that marks Euripides’s version. His desire to lead the army on the grand expedition easily justifies the sacrifice of his child. Aeschylus’ arrogant Agamemnon does not agonize. Euripides by presenting Agamemnon’s anguish and his lack of clarity or certainty about what he will—or should—do highlights the tensions between the demands that come from the community and those of family; the horror of killing his child is set against the pressures from the crowd (ochlos) of the soldiers to perform the sacrifice, perhaps according to Habash (2017, 179), even the duty to do so. But Euripides’s version also captures how stories are told to relieve the anguish imposed by those tensions that set the demands of the many (the crowd/ ochlos) against the father’s love of his child. At the conclusion of the play the tensions happily fade away for all except Clytemnestra with the “wonder” of Iphigenia’s disappearance that transforms the horrific sacrifice into an act of heroic patriotism. Iphigenia’s willing self-sacrifice and “non-death” resolve the uncertainty of the choices made, affirming the beauty of the subordination of the family to military endeavors. In contrast to the searing portrait of the sacrifice that Aeschylus offers in the first chorus of his trilogy and will lead to the familial murders that fill the Oresteia, Euripides’s tale offers a bloodless sacrifice that masks the pain that war imposes on all.
While the Chorus delights in the messenger’s report that Clytemnestra’s child now lives among the gods, Clytemnestra expresses no joy: “O child (pai’), how will I speak to you? How will I affirm that these are not vain myths (matên muthous) spoken (paramutheisthai) to me to stop my grief?” Clytemnestra’s refusal to accept the sacrifice, her deep lamentations as Iphigenia is led away, her suspicion of “vain myths” all remind the audience that even a sanitized tale cannot soften the torment the loss of a child brings. Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis speaks to that grief, not to the anger it arouses against those responsible for that loss. Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra cries out for justice; Euripides’s cries out for the joys of the mother-daughter connections. Nevertheless, Euripides’s obvious allusions to the Oresteia do not let us ignore the anger that lurks in the background, behind the myths told to lessen the pain.
Indecision and Ambiguity
Part of the power of Euripides’s version of the Iphigenia story lies in his willingness to engage with the ambiguities—rather than the moral certainties—of the situations that face Agamemnon and the other characters throughout the tragedy. The Agamemnon of the Oresteia regrets the sacrifice of the “beauty of his house,” his daughter, but accepts the “yoke of necessity” and refuses to agonize over whether to perform the deed his political position demands. As the plot summary offered previously indicates, the characters in Euripides’s play are wracked by uncertainty or, in Menelaus’s words, they lack “a stability of mind (334).” The yoke of necessity so critical in Aeschylus’s version of the tale 9 surfaces as only one consideration for Euripides’s Agamemnon (443). When Aristotle finds fault with Euripides’s play for Iphigenia’s sudden change of mind, he expects tragic characters to be psychologically consistent, that they remain similar (omoion) to themselves throughout the action of the play. 10 But Euripides, by having several of his characters change their minds, presents his characters as consistently inconsistent, thereby capturing the ambiguity that haunts all decisions, the ambiguity surrounding the right choice, the moral action. His play depicts the deep tragedy of human endeavors resulting from the tensions that life in political communities poses, tensions that are resolved with political mythmaking, which enable those difficult choices to be made.
In contrast to those who fault the instability of mind that appears to mar the tragic unity of the play, I consider the indecisiveness not with a view to character formation that dominates the scholarly literature. Rather, the play embraces the lack of certain knowledge about the correct moral or “right” choice. Ambiguity challenges the actions of the central characters who must make choices under the shadow of the uncertainty of moral reasoning. Myths protect us from the uncertainty that stain the choices we make. Uncertainty about the right choice—the death of one’s child, the interests of the crowd, the many—puts suffering at the core of Euripides’s play, for both the leaders lacking the certain knowledge of the right choice and the family and the soldiers facing death in war who will suffer because of those choices.
The initial lines of Euripides’s play find Agamemnon calling to his old slave during the night when it is barely light and all is silent. The slave describes how Agamemnon erases what he has written, seals the tablet, then breaks the seal, then throws down the tablet—and weeps, showing himself at a loss (aporôn 40) and seemingly mad (mainesthai 41). The call to his slave when everyone else is sleeping, the persistent erasing, the tears all capture the uncertainty that eats away at Agamemnon; by the end of the scene, he acknowledges the lie in his first letter and admits that he “was not thinking nobly (ou kalôs 107).” Now he has rewritten the letter nobly (metagraphô kalôs 108), telling Clytemnestra that the wedding has been delayed and not to come. The repetition of kalôs, noble, right, beautiful, indicates how deeply the question of how he ought to act weighs on him. Despite his initial decision to lie and to sacrifice his daughter, he now views such actions as not noble. So, he decides—for the moment—to shift from not noble to noble, from ou kalôs to kalôs.
But then Menelaus intercepts the letter and confronts Agamemnon about his change of mind; he reminds his brother of Calchas’s prophecy and how his spirit (phrenas) initially rejoiced and submitted to the goddess’s demand that he sacrifice Iphigenia and that he did so willingly (hekôn), not by force (biai 359–361). At the beginning of their interchange, Agamemnon explains that he has rethought his initial willingness to sacrifice Iphigenia: “I will not kill my child (tekna) . . . I will not dissolve/pine away with tears day and night doing things that are against the law/custom (anoma) and unjust/wrong (ou dikaia) to the children to whom I have given life” (396–99). The Chorus, listening to this interchange, reacts approvingly, pleased that Agamemnon’s speech differs from his previous speech, pleased that he now recognizes that it is “noble (kalôs) to spare one’s children (teknôn 401–3),” setting the life of his child above political necessities. In the middle of his interchange with Menelaus, Agamemnon wonders if he is mad (mainomai) if he changes and adopts what he now calls a good decision (euboulian), having previously not thought well (gnous . . . ouk eu 388–89). Is inconsistency madness? Is uncertainty?
The reassessment ends, though, when the messenger appears to report that Iphigenia and Clytemnestra have arrived, and Agamemnon’s resolve not to kill Iphigenia (what he—for a moment—considered lawful, noble, just/right, kalos) weakens. He now laments the “yoke of necessity (anagkês zeugmat’ 443)” under which he has fallen. The god’s craftiness has overpowered his own (444) and, retracting his most recent decision, he once again yields to Menelaus: “I give myself. You are the powerful one (to kratos); I am miserable” (472). He blames the god and the crowd, the mob of soldiers who threaten him because of his change of mind. He explicitly laments the inversion that makes those who stand foremost as leaders of men, those who are well-born, slaves of the mob (ochlôi douleuomen, 449). As he tries to justify his change of mind, he cites outside pressures; he fears that his indecisiveness may reveal the madness about which he asked Menelaus. He is plagued by shame, he says, ashamed (aidoumai) about crying, but also ashamed (aidoumai again) not to cry (451–52).
The political situation with the restless troops waiting to set sail puts his sense of masculine independence at war with paternal love. While he submits to Menelaus’s insistence that he sacrifice Iphigenia, he nevertheless continues to bemoan his decision through the end of the play, his eyes often filling with tears as the plans for the sacrifice proceed. At the final moment, according to the messenger’s report, when the knife is about to slash Iphigenia’s throat, he covers his tear-filled eyes with his cloak (1545–50). It is a seesaw for Agamemnon. What is noble? What makes an action “necessary”? Can outside forces, divine forces, political forces (the gods, the mob) be resisted? How does one choose? All these questions plague Agamemnon, and his tears are a constant reminder of the ambiguities hovering over his choices. It is the myth of the miraculous salvation of Iphigenia at the conclusion of the play (like the story of Athens that Pericles offers) that resolves the ambiguities and enables the sacrifices that decision and choice demand.
It is a seesaw for Menelaus also. He changes his mind when he observes how Agamemnon suffers at the thought of slaughtering his child. He too cries and abandons his old speech and tells Agamemnon, “I am where you now are,” and advises Agamemnon not to kill his child, noting, is it “not just (endikon) that you moan/lament while I am happy (hêdeôs), that you kill yours while mine see the light (479–84)?” After having angrily accused Agamemnon of changing his mind at the beginning of the interchange, Menelaus questions his own choices and how he could have favored Helen over his brother, “the bad” (kakon) rather than the “good” (t’agathou, 488). He now acknowledges that previously he was “without sense and young (aphrôn neos te),” admitting “what a matter (pragmat’) it is to kill a child” (489–90). Pity envelopes him when he thinks of the wretched maiden and remembers that she, as his brother’s daughter, is kin. Menelaus concludes his long speech, telling Agamemnon that he has changed and abandons the dreadful speech (deinôn logôn) that he had once expressed (500), declaring that the love that he now shows his brother derives from what is “natural” (pephukota, 501). Thus, he proposes that they disband the expedition. The Chorus of Chalcidian women praises him for changing his mind and for not urging Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter. Though originally eager to see the shining display of military might, these young women are horrified by the prospect of the sacrifice of one’s child, whatever the “necessity.” For them, as for Clytemnestra, there is no ambiguity. The child must not be sacrificed—whatever the consequences for the expedition with its brilliant shields and outfitted ships. Those who have not yet borne children side unambiguously with the familial rather than the political.
Despite praise from the chorus and his own tears, Menelaus will change his mind again when Agamemnon returns to his decision to sacrifice his child and admits that the brothers, “by necessary fortune” (anagkaias tuchas, 511), must perform the bloody murder (phonon, 512). Menelaus returns to the pressures that underlie this necessity and questions Agamemnon: “How? Who forces (anagkaisei) you to kill/slaughter (ktanein) your [daughter]?” (512). Agamemnon’s reply: He feels constrained by the Greek army who, when they will learn of Calchas’s oracle, will demand the sacrifice. In response, Menelaus proposes that they kill the prophet, a plan that would, however, be useless given that Odysseus also knows of the goddess’s demand. So, Menelaus, rejecting what the Chorus had just called a noble choice, reverts to the original plan. Iphigenia must be sacrificed.
Agamemnon and Menelaus are not the only ones who change their minds. It is Iphigenia’s reversal at the crisis point of the tragedy that defines Euripides’s version of the story. We hear first from Clytemnestra that Iphigenia is distraught (as well she might be) after learning that her father plans her death, and after Clytemnestra confronts her husband with the horror of his plans, Iphigenia speaks directly to Agamemnon, pleading for her life. She wishes, she says, that she possessed Orpheus’s facility with words. With Orpheus’s gift, she might persuade her father to spare her. But she is not Orpheus. All she has are her tears and the body (sôma) that she throws before him in supplication (1211–17). In her pleadings, she draws deeply on the father/daughter connections, reminding him that she was the first to call him father and he to call her daughter. She reminds him how he held her upon his knees, the knees before which she now prostrates her body. She reminds him of how he envisioned her happy future in a husband’s home and how she touched his chin, the chin she now grasps in supplication. As she pleads with him not to kill her, she repeats the word “father (pater),” which appears at the end of a line five times during her speech. Hers is an impassioned and poetic speech in which she asks that if she cannot persuade him with words (logois), let him kiss her so that once she has been killed, she will have a memento of him (1237–40), imagining that the kiss will last through her journey to the underworld. Iphigenia’s heart-rending words ask her father not to send her away from the light, that which, she says, is sweetest for humans to see (1218, 1250), into the nothingness and immateriality of the underworld. 11 Her words fail to persuade.
Agamemnon responds that he would be mad (mainomen) if he did not love his children (1256), but he finds himself caught. Beginning two lines with the word for what is dreadful/terrible (deinôs), he laments how dreadful it is to do what he is forced to do—but also dreadful not to (1258–59). As he tries to explain why he has to sacrifice his child rather than save her, he mentions initially again the strength of the army filled with men who are driven by a certain Aphrodite (longing/desire) to sail to Troy, but he then turns to the argument that Iphigenia will herself use to explain her transformation from the child pleading for her life to the noble heroine willing to sacrifice herself. Agamemnon leaves aside the pressure of the mob to which he has said he is a slave and explains that the expedition is not simply to retrieve Helen for Menelaus, as much of the earlier discussion had suggested; it is to stop the abduction of the wives of the Greeks (1266). He denies that he is a slave to Menelaus (katadedoulôtai, 1269); no, it is Hellas—all of Greece—that controls him. It is Hellas that places on him that yoke of necessity that demands the slaughter of his daughter—whether he wishes it or not (1271–75). It is Hellas, the fatherland, to which they must submit. Hellas must be free (eleutheran 1273). In the final line of his response to Iphigenia, he tells her and those who would sympathize with her: “Let not the Greek wives be taken by force by the barbarians” (1275), thereby transforming the expedition from one of revenge for the abduction of “bad” (but pretty) Helen and her retrieval for his brother, or even of the pursuit of fame and glory for himself, to that of protecting all the women of Greece and their families. He creates a story that justifies submitting to the necessities of war by transforming the expedition into one that preserves—does not destroy—the family.
Immediately following Agamemnon’s speech, Iphigenia sings about her death, an unholy slaughter by an unholy father (anosioisin sphagaisin . . . anosiou patros, 1317), before trying to hide from the soldiers who are prepared to drag her to the sacrificial altar. But, suddenly, she reverses herself. She no longer resists or lets her mother hold on to her as the soldiers approach. Now, completely reversing herself, she adopts her father’s concern with the freedom of Hellas and the safety of her women. She tells Clytemnestra that she must hear the things Iphigenia has now thought about (ennooumenên 1374) deeply (though, we must admit, most briefly). She asserts that it has seemed best to her that she die (katthanein men moi dedoktai). Indeed, she wishes it (touto d’ auto boulomai 1375). Dying gloriously (eukleôs 1376), she will become famous. She is the one to whom all of Hellas looks. She is the one whose sacrifice will bring back the winds to fill the sails of the idle ships so that the army can proceed to Troy. And picking up on the theme Agamemnon had introduced, she is the one who will protect women yet unborn from abduction by barbarians. As the one whose death will free (êleutherôsa) Hellas, she will be blessed (makarion 1384).
Departing from the language that dominated the earlier sections of the play, which focused on the deep, even tender, personal and bodily connections between parent (both father and mother) and child, the filial connection now swerves to that between the individual and the fatherland, the mental image of Hellas. Iphigenia urges her mother not to be too much in love with her own soul/life (philopsuchein 1385); Clytemnestra bore Iphigenia, the child says, not for herself alone (ouchi soi monê), but in common (koinon), for all of Hellas (1386). She speaks of the multitudes of men with their swords who, because their fatherland (patridos) has been harmed (treated unjustly, adikêmenê, 1388), dare to die on behalf of their country. Her single soul/life (psyche mi’ 1390) should not stand in the way of the expedition. “What justice would there be in speaking against this?” she asks her mother (1391). In a somewhat perverse claim, but perhaps thinking of Achilles, she affirms that it is better that a single man (anêr) rather than ten thousand women (1394) see the light.
Iphigenia’s conclusion to this surprising speech deserves quoting in full: Sacrifice, pillage Troy. These will be my long-lasting memorial, and these my chidren and my marriage and my fame (doxa). . .It is right/seemly (eikos) that the Greeks rule over the barbarians, not, mother, the barbarians over the Greeks. The barbarian is a slave; the Greeks are free (1400-01).
Abjuring the wedding and marriage about which she was so thrilled previously and the children that might come from that marriage, she dedicates her body to Hellas (didômi sôma toumon ‘Elladi 1397), replacing marriage and children with the promise of everlasting fame that her willing sacrifice will earn.
Iphigenia’s choice earns immediate praise—but not from her mother. The Chorus, who previously stood in horror at the thought of sacrificing a child, acknowledge the harmful luck the gods have decreed, but call her choice noble (gennaiôs 1402). Achilles describes himself as envious of Hellas as the object of her devotion. She has spoken words worthy of the fatherland; she has stopped fighting the gods and considers what is best and necessary. All of which has left him, Achilles, more eager to save her life so she can become his bride. When Iphigenia urges Achilles neither to die nor to kill anyone so that she may live, that he rather allow her to be sacrificed and help “save Hellas (1420),” he still imagines that when she sees the sword near her neck, she might change her mind (metagnoiês 1424); he will be nearby to intervene if she does.
Despite all the language of fame and dying for Hellas that Iphigenia anticipates, Clytemnestra still tries to persuade her daughter to resist. Iphigenia, in response, urges her mother not to grieve, but to abandon the acts of mourning, cutting her hair or wearing black or dressing her sisters in black; Clytemnestra should not raise a memorial mound for her (1442). She assures her mother that through her sacrifice, she—Iphigenia—will be saved (sesômai), and further, through her, Clytemnestra will be famous. She whose language had been replete with words referring to herself as a body (sôma) in her supplications to her father now imagines being “saved” abstracted from her body. As with the soldiers in Pericles’s Funeral Oration, she will not need a physical tomb. She will need only memory. She who had pleaded with her father not to send her to the world of dark nothingness now longs for the immaterial world of memory that does not depend on light nor sight. She no longer laments her impending slaughter; she is, she insists, lucky (eutuchousa) that she can perform a good deed (euergetis) on behalf of Hellas (1437). Clytemnestra, unpersuaded by this talk of immaterial fame and dying to save the fatherland, cries out as Iphigenia heads to the sacrificial altar of Artemis: “Oh child (teknon), are you on your way . . . leaving your mother (mêter’). Stop. Do not leave me!” (1464–66).
The song Iphigenia sings as she goes off to the sacrifice continues to celebrate her role as the bringer of safety (sôterian) and victory (nikêphoron) to the Greeks (1472–73). She even adopts a word to describe herself that Aeschylus (playing on Helen’s name) had used to describe Helen 12 : She is a heleptolin (1475), a sacker of the city, the conqueror of the barbarians. Rejoicing in her role supporting the anticipated victory of the Greeks, she replaces the mother who gave birth to her body with Artemis, her divine mother (potnia mâter), and then calls the land itself (gâ) her Pelasgian mâter (1487, 1497). Speaking to the land, she says, “You [i.e., not Clytemnestra] nurtured me (ethrepsath’) as a light for Hellas” (1502).
The Chorus, who had expressed such certainty before about how dreadful (deinon) it would be to kill one’s child and who vividly imagined how the shower of blood from her severed throat will defile the lovely skin of her body (1515–16), now supports Iphigenia’s choice to be sacrificed. “Fame (kleos) will never leave you,” they tell her (1504). And as she leaves to be sacrificed, the Chorus sings in exaltation that she—not the warriors who are about to sail to Troy—will be the sacker of Ilium, repeating the Aeschylean word of a few lines earlier; she will be heleptolin (1511–12), the sacker of the city. Though her body will no longer remain on the earth, she will not die. From words describing the flowing blood that will stain her lovely body, the Chorus ends its song of praise, singing of the always-to-be-remembered fame (kleos aieimnêston 1531) that will crown the army of the Hellenes who will destroy Troy. And the messenger, sent by Agamemnon to report the details of the sacrifice to Clytemnestra, assures her as well that Iphigenia will have undying fame throughout Hellas (aphthion doxan kat’ ellada 1606). Earlier in the play, in the second choral ode, the Chorus, after praising moderation in sexual desire and describing shame as wisdom (aideisthai sophia 563), which enables one to see what is necessary to achieve “ageless fame” (kleos agêraton 567), distinguishes female virtues that lie in the hidden realm of love from male virtue. For men, they say, “ageless fame” rests in increasing the city, making it great. Iphigenia’s choice gives the lie to this distinction. Her fame will not come from the hidden realm of love and family. It comes from her choice to publicly reject the love of family, to affirm her love of an abstract Hellas instead, and welcome her death. The messenger also reports Iphigenia’s final words to her father. When Agamemnon weeps at his daughter’s arrival, she rebukes him: “O father (pater), I come to you; I give my body (sôma) before the altar of the goddess on behalf of the fatherland (patras) and on behalf of all the land of Hellas.” She does so willingly (hêkousa 1552–55). “I furnish my neck to the dagger (sphagêi) with a with a firm heart” (eukardiôs 1560).
All the language about “saving Hellas” needs to be read while remembering how this justification for the expedition to Troy has been undercut throughout the play—from the interchange between Agamemnon and Menelaus that acknowledged the war effort as the result of Menelaus’s desire for a “bad” woman, Agamemnon’s fear of the crowd’s (ochlos) passionate desire (Aphrodite 1264) to sail to Troy, and the fear that angry Greeks would plunder his palace in Argos should he abandon the expedition (531). Now, Agamemnon says he is a slave not to the crowd, but to Hellas. Iphigenia’s rhetoric of saving the homeland may be sincere, but Euripides has structured his play to make it sound hollow, given the multiple earlier discussions of the various justifications for the expedition, thereby raising questions about the value of the self-sacrifice of her body. 13 The stories told to assuage the grief of those who remain mask that meaninglessness. It is Clytemnestra—sent home by Agamemnon to care for her children—alone among the characters of this play who perceives (or at least is willing to articulate) the vanity of those tales.
The “Non-Death” of Iphigenia
In the shocking conclusion to the play, the messenger reports on the preparations for the sacrifice, how Calchas held a sharp dagger, garlanded the head of the young maiden, asked Artemis to receive the sacrifice of “pure blood from the neck of the beautiful maiden” (1574), shed so that the Greeks might have a safe voyage and destroy the towers of Troy. While the priest took the dagger and examined the maiden’s throat for the best place to strike, and while the crowd surrounding the site of the sacrifice looked downward, something miraculous (thauma 1581) occurred. The entire army saw an unhoped-for sight: The blood of a dying doe, who had replaced the maiden, covered the altar. The messenger reports this with joy. Reminding Clytemnestra again of the “immortal fame” Iphigenia now has earned throughout Hellas (1606), he tells her to set aside her grief and shed any anger she may feel toward her husband. With a paradoxical phrase, he says: “This day sees your child both dying and living” (blepousan 1612). The word I (and others) translate as “living” is really “seeing.” To live, as indicated earlier in the play (1218, 1250), is to see the light. Hades, the land of darkness, lacks light, seeing, and material bodies. The Chorus who initially came to Aulis marveling at the shining armor of the Greek fleet now delights (hêdomai) at hearing that the child (tekna) is living (zôn) and imagines her among the gods (1613–14), not in Hades.
Whether Iphigenia is in Hades or among the gods, this “non-death” that the messenger describes and that the Chorus confuses with living (zôn) provides no consolation for Clytemnestra. Her “living/seeing” child is not alive. There is no body for her to embrace or see in the home of a husband and children. From the Oresteia, we and the ancient audience know that Clytemnestra will neither shed her grief nor will her anger at her husband soften. Undying fame cannot be hugged; it cannot celebrate a marriage; it cannot bear children; it cannot engage in conversation. In Clytemnestra’s earlier confrontation with Agamemnon, she had excoriated him with the reference to the “empty chair of his child, the empty maiden rooms (kenous . . . thronous/ kenous de parthenônas” (1174–75). Only a body can sit in the chair, inhabit a room. Immortal fame cannot. The messenger may tell Clytemnestra: “The gods save that which they love” (1611), but this bodiless salvation gives no solace to the mother. Throughout, Clytemnestra spoke bluntly of the dagger entering the young girl’s neck, of the blood spattering the body of their child (teknon 1185). Clytemnestra’s final words in the play (as it now stands) are: “O child (pai’). . . . How shall I speak to you?” (1615).
Clytemnestra dismisses the story that the messenger has just told her about Iphigenia both dying and living; such stories, she says, are simply “vain myths (matên muthous) spoken (paramutheisthai) to me in order to stop my grief” (1615–19). Muthos appears twice within two lines of her lament, and the chorus repeats the word when they see Agamemnon approaching, prepared to tell the same stories (autous . . . muthous 1620). The chorus does not modify Agamemnon’s muthoi with Clytemnestra’s adjective “vain”; we remain uncertain about how they are using the word with which they introduce Agamemnon’s final speech to his wife. In it, he assures her that on account of their daughter, who now lives among the gods, they are blessed (1621). Accepting this wondrous solution to the dilemma that caused him so much agony earlier in the play, he no longer sheds tears. Bidding his wife farewell, he joyously heads to Troy, having—and not having—sacrificed his daughter; he anticipates a happy return and wishes that all goes well for Clytemnestra during his absence (1621–26). It will not. Clytemnestra will remain unpersuaded by the “vain stories/myths” told to turn the death of the body into the bloodless speech that fame and memory offer. Her refusal to accept such stories provides the incentive for the tragedies that Aeschylus portrays in the Oresteia. The stories told to resolve the agonizing choices that plague the characters throughout this tragedy ring hollow for the mother Clytemnestra.
The last words of the current version of Euripides’s play belong to the Chorus. Speaking to Agamemnon, they urge him: “Son of Atreus, go to the Trojans rejoicing (chariôn), . . . [and] rejoicing (chairôn) return” (1628–29). Buoyed by the story of Iphigenia’s non-death, he sets off rejoicing. We, though, know what his return will entail. It is not rejoicing.
Pericles’s Funeral Oration 14
Clytemnestra is not consoled by the assurance of undying fame offered by Iphigenia, by the Chorus of Chalcidian women, by Agamemnon, and by the messenger. The “vain myths” that fail to persuade Clytemnestra are, however, baked into the culture of fifth-century Athens and captured in Pericles’s Funeral Oration as imagined by Thucydides. Pericles presents his oration in honor of the soldiers who died during the first year of the Peloponnesian War. The fame of this oration comes from its ennobling description of Athens as a democratic regime, one where attention is paid to the welfare of the whole, where “everyone is equal before the law in the matter of private disputes,” while “in terms of public distinction preferment for office is determined by merit.” It is a regime where, as Pericles says to his Athenian audience, “we love fine things but are not extravagant, we love learning but are not effete.” It is a regime that “is an education for Greece” (2.37, 40, 41). 15
Having offered his panegyric for the city, Pericles eventually turns to the men who have died fighting for Athens. Though they died for Athens and not “Hellas” as in Euripides’s play, the muthoi are similar. “The defeat of the enemy was their ruling passion,” he says of the dead soldiers, and “judging this the most glorious of dangers to face they embraced it, choosing to be avenged on the enemy” (2.42). Gladly they chose likely death for the sake of the city whose excellence Pericles had just extolled. For giving their bodies (sômata) to what is common (koinêi), they have earned unageing praise (agerôn epainon) and the most remarkable tomb (2.43). Pericles says this shortly after having asked his listeners to gaze on the power of the city, to become her lovers—erastês (a highly sexualized term)—as if they could make love to the abstraction he has created in referencing the “power of the city” (2.43). 16 And despite using a word that is built from the language of inscriptions in stone (episêmotaton) to describe the tomb in which the bodies lie, Pericles claims that those tombs are not the stone stele that mark where “they lie” for all to see, but those “in which their fame (doxa) survives in eternal memory, to be celebrated forever (aieimnêstos) in word and deed” (2.43). The stele pale in significance before the whole world that keeps those warriors alive in a collective memory, a memory that does not depend on visible inscriptions that may fade or on the stone stele onto which they are inscribed that may topple.
Having presented this vision of the immaterial fame that will attend the fallen soldiers, Pericles speaks to the relatives of the dead, not to console them but to remind them of the good fortune that attends those who have experienced their most glorious deaths. Just as Iphigenia had assured Clytemnestra of her good fortune, Pericles assures those who may grieve over the death of their loved ones. Perhaps Pericles does not go so far as Agamemnon, who says to Clytemnestra that they are “blessed by the gods” that their daughter willingly sacrificed herself for Hellas, but he also offers the mothers and the fathers and the brothers a story of eternal fame meant to assuage their anguish at the sight of those empty chairs, those empty rooms, reminders of the bodies that no longer fill them. 17 Offering them not “commiseration but cheer,” 18 he tells them: “You know that you grew up in a world of chance and change; and this is good fortune (eutuches)—to win honour in death as they have done” (2.44). And just as Agamemnon jauntily tells Clytemnestra that they are “blessed” by the “non-death death” of her daughter as he sends her home to care for the children who survive, Pericles tells the parents of the dead soldiers that they, too, should consider themselves lucky to have lost their sons for the sake of the city. Instead of being bound by grief, Pericles encourages parents to have more children if they are young enough for the glorious city he has just built with his words. 19 Pericles ends his speech with his exhortation to the women of Athens. They, like Clytemnestra, are sent home where their reputation (doxa) and fame (kleos) for virtue lies in their being least spoken of among men, whether for praise or for blame (2.45). 20
In Euripides’s tragedy Hellas plays the role of Athens in Pericles’s speech—the abstraction that transcends the body, the idea that offers unageing fame to replace the mortal body lost in war. And the story he tells about Athens turns the tragedy of loss into a lucky, indeed a welcome, opportunity for sought-after eternal renown.
As mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, the Iphigenia at Aulis is a tragedy that many see plagued by the frequent reversals as the main characters face agonizing choices. The indecision lying behind these reversals comes from the uncertainty about what may be the right course of action. To sacrifice the daughter, one female, so that myriads of men can live (briefly?) to carry out the expedition that is (perhaps?) to protect future generations from barbarian invasions. Or to spare the child by aborting the longed-for expedition, recognizing the horror of killing the child to whom one has given life and whom one has loved, whom one has touched and kissed, the child who has climbed upon one’s knees and grabbed one’s chin. The stories told and the creation of an abstract fatherland help dissolve the ambiguities that haunt decision-making. The suffering—whether of the sacrificed daughter or the son sent off to battle—disappears in the delight of expectations created by the stories that all is or will be well in future glory.
The brutality of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, the frequent references throughout the play to the lovely throat that will be sliced by the sacrificial dagger, Clytemnestra’s resistance, and the Chorus’s comments leave no question for the audience about the horror of the act. At the same time, though, Euripides suggests that with storytelling, such a horrific act can be accepted, even welcomed, as an escape from the uncertainties that frame moral choices. Iphigenia’s song, following her decision to willingly sacrifice herself, takes the expedition to Troy out of the questionable realm of personal vengeance, oaths that may have been taken long ago, and vain ambition, and builds the image of a “Hellas,” not simply one husband, wronged, a “Hellas” whose women need to be protected. 21 Building that image, Iphigenia foreshadows the “wonder” of her body’s replacement on the altar with a deer, the myth that will extirpate from the mind the horrors that attend the sacrifice of a child and the expedition causing the deaths of so many young warriors. The young girl who initially only wants to delight in the imagined joys of marriage and motherhood must be obliterated to allow for the savagery of the war that is to follow. And with the story of Iphigenia’s replacement by a deer and whisked away to live among the gods, we see the suffering sanitized and made acceptable to all—except to the mother who still longs to embrace her daughter.
The story of Iphigenia at Aulis is the story of the sacrifice of a young girl that is to be accepted—indeed welcomed—because of what it promises to give to the abstraction of “Hellas.” But it is also a story of all those young Athenians who head to war, sacrificed for the fatherland, a city that is—as Pericles imagines it—the school for all “Hellas.” The bodies of the dead soldiers his oration commemorates do not go to live among the gods; their bodies are not replaced on the battlefield by a bloodied deer. They die. Both Euripides and Pericles understand the suffering that affects those who are engaged in war. Euripides the playwright, though, can highlight, as Pericles the political leader cannot, the ambiguity of the choices that lead to the suffering that those left behind will feel; the statesman Pericles may acknowledge the grief that the family feels, but for him and his audience at the public funeral, there must be stories, the muthoi, that efface the deaths that war entails. Only by doing so, by ignoring the ambiguities entailed in making the choices so central to Euripides’s play, can the Athenians be at war with the Lacedaemonians. A rejoicing Agamemnon, who was wracked by indecision at the beginning about whether to sacrifice his child, ends the play with enthusiasm and confidence about the expedition that will sacrifice the children of so many others. Behind his euphoric departure stands Clytemnestra with her resistance to the happy endings engendered by the vain stories told to assuage her grief.
Euripides’s play forces us to recognize how we create the tales that allow us to overcome (ignore?) the ambiguities that infect our lives as political and moral creatures and accept, indeed welcome, the suffering that war demands. It is the tragedian who insists that we acknowledge the ambiguities erased by the stories the political leaders tell. It is the tragedian who forces us to acknowledge the fullness of our human nature. Setting Euripides’s ancient tragedy against perhaps the greatest and most famous speech from antiquity reminds us of the stories that create the mental images of political bodies that enable us to suppress and ignore that fullness.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper, with different titles, were presented at the 2024 meetings of the American Political Science Association, at a conference on Sidelines Redrawn in 2025 at Bard College, and at the 2025 meetings of the Association Political Theory. I benefited greatly from the comments – official and unofficial – I received at each of those occasions, as well as from Jan Blits. The editors of this journal did much to help me give shape and focus to the version that appears here. The original paper was inspired by a viewing of Michael Cacoyannis’ film of Iphigenia in Aulis. Thanks to James Cogswell for bringing the film to my attention.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.