INTRODUCTION.

I.

THE STORY AND PLOT OF THE PLAY.

THE Iphigeneia among the Tauri of Euripides is a drama of incident and plot rather than of character and tragical situations. Its place in the group of Attic tragedies to which from its subject it belongs is determined by its action, which may be described as the final calming of the storms which had raged for many generations in the house of Tantalus.

Though in the Iliad1 we read of the desolation which wasted the house of Tantalus's daughter, the overweening Niobe of Thebes, the only passage2 which speaks of his other descendants, tells of a peaceful transmission from his son Pelops to Atreus, from Atreus to Thyestes, and from Thyestes to Agamemnon, of a great empire. Still the Odyssey which relates the punishments suffered in the world of shades by the presumptuous Tantalus himself, knows also of some of the woes which happened to his descendants the 12. 602-617.

2B 102 ff.

3

3X. 582-593.

Atreidae. It tells 1 how Aegisthus, having supplanted Agamemnon in Klytaemnestra's affections, slew him on his return from Troy, and further,2 how Orestes avenged his father by killing Aegisthus. It does not, however, tell us how Klytaemnestra met her death. To these two murders were afterwards linked a chain of horrors which extended upwards to Pelops, and even to his father Tantalus, and downwards to the children of Agamemnon. This chain seems to have been forged by a later epic poetry than that of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and certainly received its final elaboration in the drama of historical Greece.

The family whose name in earlier epic and lyric poetry was a synonym for lordly splendour and mighty sway, appears in tragedy stained in all its generations with ghastly crimes, and scourged by a series of ghastly punishments.3 Even in the earlier forms of the story we have some slight clue to the workings of the minds that wrought this great transformation. It was an excess of prosperity that directly caused Tantalus's fall, and the dangers of an excess of prosperity were still more patently displayed to the later Greeks in the history of many of their own despots. These dangers are often dwelt on by the tragedians, and they are following a familiar impulse when they trace the 18. 512 ff., and X. 408 ff.

2 y. 303 ff., and elsewhere.

3 Cf. v. 197 of this play φονός ἐπὶ φόνῳ ἄχεά τ' ἄχεσιν, and the whole passage in which it occurs.

workings of the nemesis that dogs the steps of greatness, not only in the fortunes of the founder of the house of the Tantalidae, but in those of all his descendants.

In a story, as presented by a poet, there are many things besides its intrinsic interest that deserve notice; or rather, there are many more points which go to make up this interest than we at first suspect. To the Greeks the form into which a dramatic poet threw a religious legend had, as a grand spectacle of the heroic age, a purely mythological interest appealing to their artistic susceptibilities, and it had for them besides, what we should now call its aetiological interest, the interest attaching to the points of connexion brought out by the poet between the gods and heroes of the past and the local legends, the existing ceremonies, and the common terms of their daily life. To the modern student also there is an attraction in attempting to trace in the mythology its growth from an earlier form of worship and religious thought, and its transformation at the hands of the poets. For to these the free-minded Greeks allowed the liberty in dealing with their mythology which their genius. claimed. As Herodotus says1 of Homer and Hesiod, οὗτοι δέ εἰσιν οἱ ποιήσαντες θεογονίην "Ελλησι. In all these three respects the story of the play before us provides rich matter for investigation. We will 1 ii. 53.

take the last-i.e., the genealogy of the legend— first.

It will be best to begin by giving the story shortly in the form in which Euripides gives it. It is this: Agamemnon, at the bidding of the seer Kalchas, had decoyed to Aulis and there sacrificed, as he thought, his own daughter Iphigeneia, to propitiate the wrath of the goddess Artemis; for this wrath it was, said Kalchas, that made the adverse winds blow which detained his whole fleet at Aulis from their voyage to Troy. It was not, however, his daughter that he had sacrificed, but a hind, which Artemis herself had substituted for her at the last moment. The real Iphigeneia the goddess had carried off far away to the land of the barbarian Tauri, at the north of the Euxine, and there established as her chief priestess. One of the duties of the priestess was to consecrate to death as victims to the goddess any shipwrecked or captured Greek who came into the barbarians' power. Her brother Orestes, who was a little child when she was taken from her home, lived to avenge his father's death, nearly twenty years afterwards, not only on the traitor Aegisthus, but on his still more traitorous mother. This last murder, as well as the former, Orestes performed by Apollo's express command. Notwithstanding, the Furies,1

1 Thumen (Die Iphigeniensage in antikem und modernem Gewande, Stralsund, 1881, p. 6) has an interesting discussion of the nature of Orestes's punishment. According to him, the matricide feels no pangs of remorse, no longing for expiation;