Iphigenia in Aulis

In the final part of the play, conventionally known as the exodos (referring to the part of the play taking place after the final stasimon sung by the Chorus and ending with the exit—Greek exodos—of the characters and Chorus), the differences in the personal and moral values of the main characters come into sharp focus.

In the early episodes of the play, there at least two ways to interpret the cause and purpose of the Greeks’ war against the Trojans. The first and simpler interpretation is that the war stems from Menelaus’s desire to recover his adulterous wife, Helen. The second and more idealistic interpretation sees the war as a noble effort of the united kings and cities of Greece to defend their conjugal rights and teach the Trojan “barbarians” a lesson. In this view, the war is an assertion of Greek or “Panhellenic” culture and values. The latter interpretation is favored by those who defend the war and the sacrifice of Iphigenia (Menelaus, Agamemnon, and eventually even Iphigenia herself), while the former is favored by the detractors of the war (especially Clytemnestra).

The different ways that characters in the play interpret the Trojan War raises questions about the nature and meaning of war: Can a war have more than one purpose? Is there such a thing as a noble or just war? What are the sacrifices that war demands, and how can they be justified? More than one character in the play argues that the war against the Trojans is just and even sanctioned by the gods. At the same time, the Greeks’ desire for war is repeatedly characterized as irrational and all-consuming.

However, almost all the play’s main characters exhibit some inconsistency in their views. In the first episode, for instance, both Agamemnon and Menelaus oscillate between viewing the war as a petty squabble for one man’s wife and as a just war to assert the moral supremacy of Panhellenic culture. This oscillation highlights another major theme explored in the play: the inconsistency of human character. Perhaps the best illustration of this theme (which Aristotle himself had singled out in his Poetics) comes from Iphigenia in the exodos. When she first learns of Agamemnon’s plans for her, she is terrified and explicitly rejects the very idea of a glorious death:

People are mad, I say, who pray for death;

It is better that we live ever so

Miserably than die in glory. (Lines 1251-52)

Yet barely 200 lines later, when Iphigenia discovers the hopelessness of her situation, she completely reverses her previous stance:

I shall die—I am resolved—

And having fixed my mind I want to die

Well and gloriously, putting away

From me whatever is weak and ignoble. (Lines 1375-76)

Other characters of the play also experience shifts in their perspectives, especially in the exodos. Clytemnestra, for instance, changes from a dutiful wife to a woman bent on punishing her husband for his crimes, while Achilles, who is at first interested in little more than his honor and his name, is ready by the end to defend Iphigenia even if it means the end of his glorious career.

The mythical context of the play also becomes increasingly important in the exodos. When Clytemnestra warns Agamemnon of the “hatred […] and the retribution” (1178) that he will inspire if he sacrifices Iphigenia, she foreshadows what the audience knows will be the continuation of the myth: Clytemnestra will murder Agamemnon when he comes home from Troy in retaliation (as many, though not all, ancient accounts claimed) for Agamemnon killing Iphigenia.

In the final scenes of the play, Iphigenia tries to prevent this grim future by pleading with her mother to forgive Agamemnon, but the audience, well versed in the myth of Agamemnon, knows that Clytemnestra will not forgive him, and that she will ultimately kill him when he returns from Troy. The presence of the baby Orestes—whose tears Iphigenia even uses in her attempt to convince her father to spare her—further reinforces the familiar continuation of the myth: the adult Orestes will eventually kill his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father. In this way, the play builds its use of dramatic irony; the audience is aware of the fate of the play’s characters in ways that they are not.

Usually rejected by editors and scholars, primarily on stylistic and metrical grounds, the final epilogue of the play raises further questions. If the epilogue is excluded, then the play ends on an unambiguously sad note, with Iphigenia setting out to be sacrificed by her father. The epilogue, however, tells a different story, one in which Iphigenia is ultimately saved by Artemis while a deer is sacrificed in her place. This ostensibly happy ending, however, is not without ambiguity. First, the story of Iphigenia’s salvation is told second-hand in a Messenger Speech (a common convention of Attic tragedy), and thus may or may not be entirely true—Clytemnestra, unsurprisingly, expresses doubt about the story’s veracity, and it is easy to imagine (as Clytemnestra does) that Agamemnon invented the story in an attempt to assuage his wife’s anger at him. Indeed, some aspects of the story do not cohere with what has happened earlier in the play—perhaps most notably, the Messenger’s account of the sacrifice depicts Achilles playing a willing role in the ritual, even though he had promised earlier in the play that he would stand by in his armor in case Iphigenia changed her mind and decided she wanted him to save her. This and other contradictions produced in the epilogue could suggest that these final lines were not written by Euripides (as most scholars argue), or they could be another example of the play’s exploration of the contradictions of human character and the ambiguity underlying human values, motivations, and actions.