Seoul Hero

Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians is a fascinating account of the abandonment of human sacrifice within the cult of Artemis at Brauron, an Athenian cultic site. As such, it functions in a similar way to the familiar story of Gen. 22, known as “the Binding of Isaac.”* For those, like me, who have been raised in an intimate relationship with the Bible, the story offers many similarities. The differences, however, prove to be even more fascinating. This short post will offer a few thoughts on the play, using both my own background and the excellent notes and prefaces within the Penguin edition of “Heracles and Other Plays,” translated by John Davie with notes by Richard Rutherford. This post represents the second in a series I intend to continue, in which I look at the plays of the classical Athenian dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. The first post, on that most wonderful of all humanistic works, Heracles, can be found at my old blog.
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*Those unfamiliar with biblical scholarship should note that numerous scholars have ascertained that human sacrifice was present within the context of Yahwistic worship. The biblical accounts themselves usually try to hide this fact.

The play opens with a monologue spoken by Iphigenia, priestess of Artemis and daughter of Agamemnon. As is usual for Euripides, the first lines of the opening also contain the geneology of the speaker. Rutherford has noted the “monotony” of this particular feature (246). However, for those with a background in Greek mythology, the flavor of this particular geneology alerts the reader to the theme of the play. The very first lines, in fact, introduce the issue of human sacrifice and divine cursing:

Pelops, son of Tantalus, came to Pisa with his swift horses and won the hand of Oenomaus’ daughter. She became the mother of Atreus, and Atreus had as sons Menelaus and Agamemnon. I am Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia….By Euripus’ banks, where the ceaseless gusts churn its waters and disturb the dark surface of the sea, my father sacrificed me, as he thought, for Helen’s sake, to honour Artemis in Aulis’ famous bay.

The mention of Tantalus is programmatic, for it was he who killed his son and offered him as food for the unwitting gods. He and his “house” (i.e. family of descendants), were punished for this, hence the misery of Iphigenia, and Orestes, her brother. Iphigenia continues her opening by mentioning “sacrifice” no less than seven times in the first sixty lines (I am using English, and suspect that one of the occurrences translates a different Greek word, however). Like Jephthah in the Book of Judges, Agamemnon was a military commander who had unwittingly vowed to sacrifice his daughter in order to gain a favorable battle. Unlike Jephthah, however, Agamemnon, deceived his daughter by leading her in a chariot to what was promised to be her wedding ceremony in which she would marry Achilles. Iphigenia, however, was saved by Artemis herself, who brought her to a barbarian land, Tauria (modern Crimea), where she was charged with preparing and consecrating living human victims for sacrifice there. At the beginning of the play, she is a “guest” of the barbarian king Thoas.

Meanwhile, Orestes, the much younger brother of Iphigenia, pursued by the Furies, is told by the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi that if he can carry the image of Artemis from its temple in Tauria, and bring it to Greece, he and his father’s house will be free of their curse. The reader already suspects at this stage the conclusion of the play: recognition by brother and sister, with her escape from the barbarian king who holds her captive. Reading this instruction about the divine image from the standpoint of Gen. 1 is fascinating, but the play makes it clear that the image and Iphigenia are not the same.**
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**As an aside, it is noteworthy that the image, like the image of Artemis mentioned in The Book of Acts, “fell from heaven.”

The issue of human sacrifice is given rather fuller treatment in this story than in one of the Biblical stories to which it is be best compared: the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22). Artemis, priestess of the goddess, herself says of her father’s attempt to sacrifice her that it was “an offering of little pleasure to the nostrils of the gods” (approx. line 210). She particularly bemoans the manner of the sacrifice: deceit under pretext of marriage to a great hero. This practice, of course, of combining marriage to a great hero with human sacrifice and deceit is well-known to anthropologists as a widespread cultural phenomenon. By contrast, the story of Jephthah in the Bible makes clear that the woman to be sacrified knew full well that she would never marry.

Iphigenia further says, in the same context, that she, to put it bluntly, hates her job: “my work is to make altars run red with the blood of slaughtered strangers, harsh music to the ear, while pity resounds in their agonized cries, pity in the tears they shed.” Later, Iphigenia further criticizes the practice of human sacrifice (l. 380):

“Oh, I cannot admire this equivocating of the goddess! She denies her altars to any man whose hand has shed blood or touched a woman tue to give birth or a dead body, counting him unclean, but she herself delights in sacrifices where men’s blood is spilled.”

Only a moment later, however, Iphigenia backs off from making the goddess herself responsible:

“I cannot believe it. No, I think it is incredible that Tantalus gave a banquet to the gods in which they feasted with pleasure on his son’s flesh. It is the inhabitants of this land, I think, being themselves murderers, who attribute their vileness to the goddess. I cannot suppose any god capable of evil.”

There seem to be several layers of meaning, here. First, it appears that in another version of the myth, the gods knowingly ate Tantalus’s son. Later, this would be determined to be inappropriate. Second, Iphigenia gives an aetiology of the origin of human sacrifice in an extremely sophisticated manner when she argued that humans make gods in their own image. The real gods, she stated, were not capable of evil. This motif, where a character voices the opinion that he or she cannot believe of a god that which is unworthy of a god, also occurs in Heracles. In voicing these misgivings, Iphigenia, like others in ancient Greece, is setting out on a new course away from violent theism towards a new kind of humanism.

Ancient Greece was a patriarchal place by modern standards, but the attitudes towards women present within the play are as fascinating as they are progressive. In the first place, the principal protagonist is a woman, and it is from her perspective that the story is told. The divinity she serves, and who saved her, is the goddess Artemis. At the climax of the play, when the king of the barbarians appears set to capture the fleeing Orestes and Iphigenia, Athena herself, another goddess, brings a peaceful conclusion to the whole matter in a typical deus ex machina moment. In contrast, to the action of the goddesses, the male deity Zeus is named once (in an oath), while Poseidon is depicted as a tool of Athena (he calms the seas at her behest), and Apollo remains out of site, notwithstanding his oracle’s utterance, which directs the course of Orestes prior to the beginning of the play. By contrast, in the Binding of Isaac, and the story of Jephthah, the deity is male, and the protagonist is a male would-be killer. The intended victim is also male in Gen. 22. The role of female characters in the two biblical stories is limited to Sarah, who is notable by her absence in Gen. 22, and to Jephthah’s daughter and the mourners who accompany her. It is noteworthy in this context that while Orestes fits exactly Joseph Campbell’s journey of the mythological hero (departure, trials, attainment of the boon [in this case the statue of Artemis], return), so does Iphigenia! In fact, this Greek myth, as altered and reworked by Euripides, has a much more humanistic bent, and is less women-phobic, than the two biblical stories in question.

In both Gen. 22, and in Iphigenia, the innocent human victim is not slain, and there is a repudiation of human sacrifice, as well as an alternative to human sacrifice that is prescribed. Although the whole sacrifice in Gen. 22 is presented as a test of Abraham’s commitment to his god, that god still requires the blood of a lamb. Similarly, in Iphigenia, when Athena orders the removal of the image of Artemis from Tauria to Brauron, she stipulates that at festivals held to honor Artemis, the worshipers are to “apply a sword-blade to the neck of a man and draw blood, to satisfy religion, and so that the goddess may have her privileges” (approx. line 1460). Explicitly, she says that this is to be done in memory of the blood of Orestes which was not shed. Just as Athena, in the same speech, uses the example of Orestes as an aetiology for the practice of acquital of the defendant in the event of a 50/50 jury decision, so here, too, Athena makes the example of Orestes programmatic. Meanwhile, Iphigenia is to “keep the keys of the goddess” in Brauron, where “garments of fine-spun web, such as women who die in childbirth leave in their homes,” will be the offerings she is to make.

Athena, as the eponymous deity of Athens, exercises a civilizing influence on the imported cult of Artemis, now practiced in Athenian Brauron. I do not know whether Athena’s role in the story is the same throughout all the versions of this myth, or was added as a novelty by Euripides. Irrespective of that, however, Euripides is reflecting the feelings of the Greeks, who saw themselves as superior to barbarians.*** Equally, the play reflects a change in the sacrificial practices and location of the official cult of Artemis. Finally, Euripides, who never gives the apparently bloodthirsty Artemis a chance to speak in the play, challenges his readers to abandon inhumane practices done in the name of gods created in the image of man. If Iphigenia, priestess of Artemis, can come to a new understanding of the deity she serves, then so can anyone.
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***As Rutherford notes, Euripides introduces a capital bit of humor when Thoas, king of the barbarians, learns of Orestes killing of his mother, Clytemnestra, (which he does not appear to know was done in vengeance for her murder of his father). He exclaims: “Not even barbarians would have had the heart for such a deed!”