The Classical Journal Volume 70 Issue 2 1974-1975 (Doi 10.2307/3295610) R. Caldwell - Tragedy Romanticized - The Iphigenia Taurica

Euripides' "Iphigenia among the Taurians": Aetiology, Ritual, and Myth
Author(s): Christian Wolff

Source: Classical Antiquity, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Oct., 1992), pp. 308-334
Published by: University of California Press
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CHRISTIAN WOLFF
Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians:

Aetiology, Ritual, and Myth
EURIPIDES'Iphigenia among the Taurians is usually regarded as an excep

tionally well-made play, more transparently coherent and unproblematic than,
say, the kindred Helen or Ion. Yet accounts of it have tended to overlook or
downplay its extensive aetiological passages.1 That these are almost entirely
concerned with ritual, however, suggests a possible alignmentwith the stories of
the two protagonists, one a priestess once sacrificed now sacrificing, the other,
caught between Apolline oracle and pursuing Furies, in danger of imminent
sacrifice, and all in a setting, before a sacred precinct of Artemis, in which cultic,
and pseudocultic, activity is continually evoked and carried on.2What follows,
I would like very much to thank for their comments and criticisms Seth Benardete, Carolyn
Dewald, Helene Foley, Albert Henrichs, Sally Humphreys, Gregory Nagy, and the anonymous
readers.
1. On the play's construction see, e.g., Anne Pippin Burnett, Catastrophe Survived: Euripides
Plays of Mixed Reversal (Oxford, 1971) 47-72, esp. 50; and for a nice summary of the paradoxical
web of its plot, Ernst Buschor in the introduction to his German translation (Munich, 1946) 92-93.
Burnett, however, inwhat is overall the best account of IT, says nothing about the aetiologies. With
Goethe she considers the play "themost humane and good-tempered of the classical tragedies" (47);
but in his version Goethe excised all the substance of the ritual material (and so of course the
aetiologies). For a recent reading that sees IT in a more problematic light, cf. E. Masaracchia,
"Ifigenia Taurica:Un dramma a lieto fine?"QUCC, n.s., 18 (1984) 111-23.
2. D. Lanza ("Una ragazzaofferta al sacrificio,"QS 22 [1989]5-22, esp. 13, 16-18) stresses the
importance of cult in IT. Cf. also A. Spira, Untersuchungen zum deus exmachina bei Sophokles und
Euripides (Kallmiinz, 1960) 118-20. For extensive discussion of ritual in the fabric of Euripidean
drama, see H. P. Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice inEuripides (Ithaca, 1985). I know of no
comprehensive discussion of ritual aetiology in tragedy.C. Codrignani, "L' 'aition'nella poesia greca
prima di Callimaco," Convivium, n.s., 26 (1958) 527-45, is a preliminary outline. There are sugges
tive reflections on (Greek) aetiology generally by J. Redfield, inD. M. Halperin, J. J.Winkler, and
? 1992BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Euripides' IT:Aetiology, Ritual, Myth
WOLFF: 309
then, is a reading of the play in the light of its aetiologies that intends to show
that the play's formal, paradoxically turned elegance contains stronger, perhaps
more unruly strains than are usually acknowledged, and that thiswider scope is
brought about particularly through the aetiologies.
Along theway, then summarilyat the end (sectionVI below), Iwould like to
suggest a kind of metatheatrical attention in the play to the process of interpreta
tion. Aetiology here is both a dramatic instrument and, more abstractly, an
explanatory mode. Formally it is addressed to an audience in a way somewhat
different from the rest of the play's dramatic speech, song, and action. This
difference encourages interpretation and opens up the possibility of questioning,
and somay effect that sometimes more discontinuous and unsettling reception of
the drama that is especially associated with Euripides.
The aetiologies come in the latter part of the play. I would like to consider
first a passage earlier on that illustrates a character interpreting and how we are
induced to supplement that interpretation-a passage having to do with the
nature of divinity and a ritual.
After a report of the capture of twoGreek youngmen and on the expectation
that she, as priestess of Artemis, will directly prepare them for sacrifice, Iphigenia
concludes a speech of remembered grief, despair, and vengefulness as follows:
Ta fflg OEO'i 6i [tLEJ9potciaL
oocpfIatcTca,
iTtLgPgQOT'V TiEVlyV TLng&acpvTat qCpvoV
% r VrEXQOV
xci koXElag OiynXEQOLV
Powicov a&JEdQyEL, (IvoaaQov (cog yovqvF,v
caiTYi 6& 0voiacg M6ETcat PQoToxTxvoLg.
OVx Eo0' Oinog ETEXEV v fi A i6g 66ataQ
ATlDO) Tooca6Xr v aca9clav. Eyid) iV[ owv
la TavTdlkov 0EOLotV EOTlEt1aa'Ta
aTtoTca XQivw, JTaCL66g of0Jvacl (30oa,
Txoig 6' EV06a6', coav'toig vxctg aV0QcoJoxTovoUg,
Eg TqV OE0V TO cpauXov avaCpEQELv 6oxC
o166Eva yaQ o0tcfl 6acti6vcov ELval xax6v.
(380-91)
She would separate out in the goddess whom she serves a pure, and by implica
tionHellenic, aspect that is authentically divine, and a corrupt, Taurian one that
F. I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in theAncient Greek
World (Princeton, 1990) 123-25; and G. Nagy, The Best of theAchaeans (Baltimore, 1979) 279 n. 2.
For recent accounts of the complex of Artemis's cults andmyths, seeW. Burkert, Greek Religion, tr.
J. Raffan (Cambridge,Mass., 1985) 149-52; J.-P. Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Es
says, ed. F. I. Zeitlin (Princeton, 1991) 195-219; F. Graf, Nordionische Kulte (Rome, 1985) 59, 227
49, 410-17.

310 CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY Volume 11/No. 2/October 1992
can be dismissed as no more than a projection of human bloodthirstiness. The

immediate context, then the procedure of Iphigenia's argument, and finally the
ensuing action of the play all suggest that this is a mistaken or too simple
project.3 At thismoment her words are colored by a subjective rebelliousness
and reflect despair. A sacrificial victim herself, she has just recalled the anguish
of that experience (359-63), not her rescue by the goddess. Now too she sup
poses her brother, Orestes, last hope of the familial house, to be dead because of
the dream in which she had prepared him for sacrifice (53-54; cf. 378). There is
also contradiction in denying the goddess's bloodlust when Iphigenia has just
declared herself savage (egri6metha, 348). Iphigenia'smaking an argument for
divine purity appears to be a response to the painful contradiction of her situa
tion as an exiled Greek woman assisting barbarians in sacrificing her country
men. Such contradiction both runs over into her argument and points to the
complex, polarized nature of Artemis herself.
Iphigenia charges the goddess with trickiness and duplicity, sophismata
(380), with requiring ritual purity-no involvementwith bloodshed, no contact
with childbirth or a corpse (381-82; cf. 1210-11)-and yet takingpleasure in the
blood of human sacrifice.Apparently to overcome this impasse Iphigenia shifts
from ritual to mythic ground: Leto, the goddess's mother and Zeus's wife, could
not have given birth to so stupid and insensible a being (amathian, 386).4 Now
Iphigenia extends her argument by referring to another mythical instance, the
story of Tantalus's cannibalistic trick on the gods. She moves from an alleged
divine pleasure in killing to one of eating (384, 388), judging the latter to be
incredible, apista (388).5 This word, though (like sophismata at 380), can have
variable and ambivalent force. Within the play it indicates disbelief (though
pretended, 1293), untrustworthiness (1298), or, in litotes, submissive trust
(1476). But it is also used in expressions of joyfulwonder (782, 796) and unex
pected success or pleasure (328, 642). This suggestion of ambivalence is ex
tended by the contradictions that arise when we recall that the Greek Artemis,
whose purity Iphigenia would recuperate, is after all the goddess on whose
account she was sacrificed (19-20), and that Tantalus, whose cannibal meal for
3. Cf. D. J. Mastronarde, "The Optimistic Rationalist in Euripides," in M. Cropp, E.

Fantham, and S. E. Scully, eds., Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy (Calgary, 1986) 201-11, esp. 208 on
this passage of IT.
4. For amathia, holding the goddess to intellectual as well as moral standards, see the discus
sion of the comparable passage at HF 346-47 inH. Yunis, A New Creed: Fundamental Religious
Beliefs in theAthenian Polis and Euripidean Drama, Hypomnemata 91 (Gottigen, 1988) 144. Iphige
nia's use of amathia also serves to insist on the purely negative force of sophismata at 380. For
sophismata of gods, cf. Phoen. 871, Ba. 489, IA 444, fr. 972.
5. The revision of Tantalus's myth recalls Pindar, 01. 1.36-53. For a link of this revision to the
aetiology of Olympic ritual, see T. K. Hubbard, Helios 14 (1987) 3-21; G. Nagy, Pindar's Homer
(Baltimore, 1990) 116-35; W. J. Slater, "Pelops at Olympia," GRBS 30 (1989) 485-501. In a
valuable study,M. J. O'Brien ("Pelopid History and the Plot of Iphigenia in Tauris," CQ 38 [1988]
(98-115) argues for the paradigmatic importance of Pelopid myth for the play (but not so convinc
inglywhen referring specifically to the courtship of Pelops andHippodameia).

WOLFF: 311
the gods Iphigenia finds unbelievable, is forefather of a line that includesAtreus

and Thyestes (cf. 812).
Tantalus's myth serves to generalize Iphigenia's argument: the gods must all
be pure. It is also relevant because Tantalus is the founder of Iphigenia's line (1,
200, 988). If he is exonerated of his crime, so may his descendants be, in the
event down to the sister and brother, Iphigenia and Orestes. However, while
Iphigenia offers an explanation of the ritual of human sacrifice intended to
absolve the goddess-an explanation that interprets the sacrifice as only human
and non-Greek in origin, no attempt ismade to account for the shocking content
of Tantalus's story.6There seems again to be an impasse.
But a way out is suggested. Euripides represents Iphigenia first identifying
an ideal of purity in ritual practice (381-83). When this fails because of the
counter instance of an impure ritual, she next appeals to myth, the parental Leto
and Zeus as sources of moral cohesion. Here too, though, there is a coun
terexample within myth in themorally repulsive story of cannibalism. Finally,
the impure ritual is explained away by a kind of anthropological rationalizing and
by a simple assertion of divine virtue (390-91).7 Yet the story of cannibalism
remains unaccounted for. But if we reconnect myth and ritual, and leave out
rationalizing and abstract "theology," a way can be found. The story of Tanta
lus's feast follows on human sacrifice according to the familiar logic of ritual
sequence: sacrifice, here in its "perversion," that is, mythic exaggeration as
human sacrifice, is followed by cooking and eating, here in the perverted or
exaggerated form of cannibalism.8Euripides' text, as distinct from, though inter
woven with, the argument he has represented Iphigenia making for herself,
suggests myth can be, so to speak, saved by what is in effect an
how Tantalus's
aetiological link to a general ritual procedure. And saving the myth of Tantalus's
crime means maintaining a strong sense of ambivalence in human beings' transac
tions with the gods. We are also prepared for the development of the play's
subsequent action.
6. Contrast Pindar, who offers at least a nominal explanation of how the aspect of the myth that
he correctsmistakenly gained currency (01. 1.46-51).
7. For the intellectual background of this attempt to redefine divinity, extending back to
Xenophanes, see now the discussion of HF 1340-46 in Yunis (above, n. 4) 157-66, and in a wider
context, including the remarkable reflections on divinity and purifying rituals in theHippocratic On
the Sacred Disease, see G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in theOrigins and
Development of Greek Science (Cambridge, 1979) 10-58; for the expression of nonstandard views on
religion and morality, and prosecutions for impiety in the fifth century, see K. J. Dover, "The
Freedom of the Intellectual inGreek Society," in The Greeks and Their Legacy 2 (Oxford, 1988)
135-58 (originally in Talanta 7 [1976]24-54), with particular reference toEuripides, 148-51. Euripi
des here allows Iphigenia to use an alternative intellectual discourse about religion and the "moral
ity"of gods, but in a context of cultic discourse about ritual purity that, integratedwith the drama's
narrative, will be subject to tensions and changes in that narrative's development; the intellectual
discourse then is elided.
8. Cf. W. Burkert, Homo Necans (Berlin, 1972) 114-15; Slater (above, n. 5) 497-98. For
sacrifice and cooking generally, see the extensive account of G. Berthiaume, Les roles du mageiros
(Leiden, 1982).

312 CLASSICAL
Iphigenia's effort to regenerate the goddess Artemis is incomplete and com

promised. The play will be more centrally concerned with the purification and
regeneration of Orestes, in parallel with and by means of a transfer of Artemis's
statue from barbaric lands to Athens. This will involve not the rejection or
purification of myth or ritual but amore complex understanding of them. Here
Iphigenia faultsArtemis's sophismata.When it comes to the escape plot she will
herself, exploiting Orestes' pollution, resort to trickery (sophismasin, 1031) and
practice religious deception (dolia . . .katharmata, 1316; cf. 1355).9
II
Athena appears suddenly at the end of the play, on (or possibly suspended
above) the roof of the skene, which representsArtemis's temple. She intervenes
in the dramatic action, ensuring the final success of the protagonists' escape plot.
She thus closesoff the dramatic narrative, the play's construction of its myth,
and, at the same time, in her aetiological exposition shifts attention to ritual. The
drama's linear, narrative movement is brought to closure by a link to ritual
practices that by virtue of their cyclical repetition have a kind of permanence.
The aetiology makes a transition from a onetime fictional construction-our
particular play-to a world

of ritual activity experienced directly by some mem
bers of the play's audience and known at least by report in the community as a
whole. This is also a move from the floating fictional or mythic space of the
drama to the actual locations of the rituals at Halae
Araphenides and Brauron
(1448, 1462)-a move

especially appropriate to this play, whose action is about
getting out of a nightmarish realm of the barbarian other and returning home to
Greece.
There are separate aetiologies for Orestes and Iphigenia. First Athena in
structsOrestes as follows:
[acOdv 6', 'OQE?Tc , Trag adg EJrtlOTOkCd

(xXUELg yd& acv6iv xalzrx oir Jrouagv o0dg),
X()Qel kacW3bv&yacka oUyyovov xTeoVl.
oTav 6' 'AOrvaC ag
t 08o6[dTlOUVg [t6Xn,
XcO6g TS ?GOTLV 'AOi6oS zrQOg?EoXdCoTg
OQOiOl, y?EiTo 6?lQ60og KagOT(ag,
iL?6g* 'Ak&g VLVoiUtOg 6voa?6Ct kc6Sg.
EitaicOa T?Uiag ctvav 'L6QvIal p?Tag,
EitxvOiFiov yifg TavQltXfg T6OVOV T ooov,
oig 'E?eL6XOELg J?CQlOhOVX xat' 'EkXkoa
olo(TQolg 'EQglVov. "AQTctLV 6? VLV 3gOTO'o
TO
kXoLJTv tViVOOVIo TcavQOXjorov O6v.
VO6OV T?E ?g T6v6'- 6o0av EoQLTa&rln
XS,
9. Burnett (above, n. 1: 58-61) has a fine account of this play of deception, though she sees it in
a purely benign light.

WOLFF:
Euripides' IT:Aetiology, Ritual, Myth 313
TTCOflgoMpayrli
&cJTIV'etJLtoXETo
Lcipog
6En JtQO av6Q oc aLfiLd T' etavlTco,
'
6oact ExacTLOedra towsgTtiRag
5EX.
(1446-61)
A temple is to be built in which to relocate the Taurian Artemis's statue; a
new epithet will be given the goddess (the textwavers between reference to the
statue or herself: 1448, 1453, 1456-57); and a new sacrificial ritualwill be insti
tuted at Halae. Like the effect of closure on the play's action-and indeed on all
the action's antecedents, the long story of this family's vicissitudes-building a
new temple indicates stability recovered. It also balances Iphigenia's dream
vision, at the start of the play, of the physical ruin of her paternal house (46
49).10The new epithet for Artemis-Tauropolos, whose aetiology is extracted
by etymology,1 will fix thememory of the statue's savageTaurian origin (Tauro-)
and itsmovement (-polos), Orestes' driven wanderings standing in for the latter
(1454-55).12
Athena's intervention stops theTaurians' pursuit of the escapingGreeks and
negotiates with Poseidon a change to favorableweather (1435-45). The Greeks
might have escaped but for a sudden shift of the wind driving them back to shore
(1392-95). This must recall the contrary winds at Aulis, which occasioned the
intended sacrifice of Iphigenia (cf. 15-27, 215, 354-58, 1082, and, concluding
the messenger's speech just preceding, 1418). What had been carried out at
Aulis, as a human sacrifice, made fair sailing weather possible. Now, in a gener
ally benign and concluding reversal,Athena arranges good weather and provides
an aetiological account of a ritual of nonlethal human sacrifice.
This sacrifice of blood drawn from an anonymous human victim is (1) to
serve as apoina, compensation; (2) hosias hekati, (provisionally) "for religion's
sake"; and (3) so that the goddess Artemis may have her honors, timai (1459
61). Each of these explanatory features reflects back on elements in the preced
ing drama, bringing them into a new focus. At the same time the drama as it
unfolds to this point gives a complex substance to what Athena's aetiological
explanations encapsulate.
10. Compare the earthquake that in the dream causes the house to fall, oetovetvai oakw (46),
and the stormyweather that checks the ship's escape, nJovTi) ...ok..a (1443; cf. 262); Poseidon is
concerned with both phenomena. (In Artemidorus 2.41 dreams of earthquakes, generally of bad
omen, are favorable for thosewho want tomake a voyage and be free of their debts. They signify a
shake-up of the dreamer's life.)
11. Surely Euripides' invention for this play. For otherwise more plausible explanations of the
epithet, see H. Lloyd-Jones, "Artemis and Iphigenia," JHS 103 (1983) 96-97 = Greek Comedy,
Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and Miscellanea: The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh Lloyd
Jones (Oxford, 1990) 321-22; F. Graf (above, n. 2) 415 and n. 58.
12. The statue is reported to have come first to the Taurians "from the sky" (88, 1384; cf. 977,
986), like a number of ancient sacred images (see Burkert [above, n. 2] 91, 384 n. 84). Tradition,
though perhaps in a number of cases post-Euripidean, locates it in a wide range of places (Paus.
3.16.7-9; and see F. Graf, "Das Gotterbild aus dem Taurerland," AW 10.4 [1979] 33-35; A. Brelich,
Paides e parthenoi [Rome, 1969] 244-45).

314 CLASSICAL
The word apoina occurs in the phrase T; onig oGpaync; a&rTLv' (1459), which
must mean that the riteAthena describes constitutes compensation forOrestes'
evaded sacrificial death at Artemis's altar. However, ifwe take orlg subjectively
and allow owpayis to refer to the killing of Clytaemnestra, the phrase might have
referred toOrestes' payment formatricide.13The immediate context, the ritual
being explained here, blocks such a possibility, but insofar as payment formatri
cide and appeasement of the Furies (twicementioned inAthena's speech: 1439,
1456) are the basis of Orestes' story in this play, the alternative reading is not
entirely erased. The notion of compensation helps to confirm Orestes' final
release from the Furies.
Compensation or requitalmay also be appropriate for the stealing of Arte
mis's statue
from its temple. Whatever myth may tolerate, the theft of a sacred
object, hierosylia, is a very serious crime in the everyday world, on a level with
treason and punishable by death, refusal of burial in one's native land, and
confiscation of property.14 Orestes feels the need to excuse it-on the grounds
that Apollo's oracle had commanded it (1012-14). And when the escape is at
greatest risk Iphigenia asksArtemis to forgive the stealing of the statue (1400; cf.
995-97, 1358-59). Nevertheless, both Orestes and Iphigenia imply, as does
Athena, that the theft is justified because the statue is being taken from barbari
ans and brought to Athens (1014, 1399-1400; cf. 1086-88).15 The rescue of
Iphigenia by Artemis was described in the language of stealing ('x)FtjhEv,
28).16There are productive thefts by gods in themyths of Prometheus and of
Hermes, stealing from existing religious powers in order to advance human
culture and redefine relations between human beings and gods. Such a process is
illustrated in the play's third stasimon, the account of Apollo's violent appropria
tion from the dragon Pytho and Earth's daughter Themis of the Delphic shrine
and its prophetic authority. It is on that authority that Orestes has acted, first in
13. For the ellipse whereby sphages at 1459 refers to the complex notion of a sacrificial death
owed by Orestes to theTaurian goddess, but not yet paid, compare the use of phonou (as corrected
by Badham) at 1418 referring to the killing at Artemis's altar at Aulis, which threatened Iphigenia,
but from which she was saved. In each case an appropriate meaning emerges, but the semantic
compression allows a flickering sense of something else related to the primarymeaning: inOrestes'
case, his sphage of Clytaemnestra; in Iphigenia's, her actual phonos atAulis assumed by theGreeks
(563-64, 770-71; cf. 26-27, 338-39, and 359-61 with 1418-19) and recounted,without mitigation, in
Aeschylus's Agamemnon.
14. Xen. Hell. 1.7.22; David Cohen, Theft inAthenian Law (Munich, 1983) chap. 3; Robert
Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford, 1983) 170-75. For
statue stealing involving punishments like those in IT, see Hdt. 5.83.2-86 (earthquake andmadness);
Athen. 672b-d = Menodotus, FGrHist 541 F 1 (attempted statue theft foiled by inability of thieves
to row their ship clear of land);Hdt. 7.129.2-3 (tidal irregularitiesdestroy Persians who had dese
crated a shrine and its statue). It may be worth noting that in Plato Laws 9.869b2-3 crimes of
hierosylia are associated with the killing of parents.
15. One may think also of the Palladium theft, for which see Burkert (above, n. 2) 140, 404 n.
11.
16. A common usage: see, e.g., 11. 3.380, 5.390; Aesch. Ag. 662; Soph. El. 1133; Thuc.
1.115.5; Eur. El. 16, 286, 540.

WOLFF:
killing his mother and then in carrying out the theft of Artemis's statue (cf. 77
79, 85-88). Apollo commands matricide and sacrilege. His own story sanctions
killing associates of older female deities, and greed (1275; cf. HH Herm. 335).
At the same time his command of truth (1254) and a general sense of confidence
in the newly acquired oracle (1282) are asserted. Apollo's theft prefigures
Orestes' and Iphigenia's. Just as the god's theft ismeant tomake a progression
from older, female, potentially deceiving and chaotic powers to Zeus's new
dispensation, so the humans' theftmarks a progression from barbaric toGreek.17
The ideological resonance of such "progressions" is clear enough. But in the
drama they are traced in an ambivalent light, characterized by amix of violence,
deception, and reordering, of the criminal and restitutive. Compensation,
apoina, is applicable to that criminal aspect. The aetiology, then, explains the
ritual while making of it a commemoration of an ambivalent strain of the drama,
a strain that appropriate compensation, through the ritual,would now resolve.
Theft from an altar, it is also worth noting, is attested for a ritual. In Sparta a
well-known ordeal required select youths to try stealing offerings fromArtemis
Orthia's altar. They were whipped in the attempt so that blood flowed on the
goddess's altar. This bloodletting, as a reported aetiology explains, was insti

tuted to replace human sacrifice. The severity of thewhipping was regulated by
the changing weight of Artemis's status (as in our play a small wooden bretas) in
the arms of her priestess. This statue was said to be the same one that Orestes
and Iphigenia stole from the Taurians.18 The ritual stealing in Sparta was part of
initiatory proceedings for ephebes. Its staged (though potentially quite danger
ous) "impiety" belongs to the inversion or transgressionof norms and social rules
characteristic of the liminal world of rites of passage. That Orestes' and Iphige
nia's stories involve initiatory motifs is now well recognized.'9 Such motifs, and
17. This has now been explained with exemplary clarity by C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Myth as
History: The Previous Owners of theDelphic Oracle," in J. Bremmer, ed., Interpretationsof Greek
Mythology (Totowa, 1986) 229-31 = C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Reading"Greek Culture: Texts and
Images, Rituals andMyths (Oxford, 1991) 230-32.
18. Paus. 3.16.7-10. Further sources and full discussion of the rite in Brelich (above, n. 12)
133-36; see also Vernant (above, n. 2) 235-37. Burkert (above, n. 2: 152) relates the Spartan rite to
the sacrificial ritual atHalae; so too A. Henrichs, "Human Sacrifice inGreek Religion: Three Case
Studies," Entr. Hardt 27 (1981) 205 n. 4. Cure for madness linked to an end of the practice of human
sacrifice is found in a story told by Pausanias (7.19), which also involves a priestess of Artemis and
the Delphic Oracle. See also H. J. Rose, "Greek Rites of Stealing," HTR 34 (1941) 1-5 (on Hdt.
3.48 and the Spartan rite).
19. For Orestes, see J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragedie en Grece ancienne
(Paris, 1977) 151-53; F. I. Zeitlin, "The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth andMythmaking in the
Oresteia," Arethusa 11 (1978) 170-84. For ephebic and initiatory themes generally in Attic tragedy,
see J. J.Winkler, "The Ephebes' Song: Tragoidia and Polis," Representations 11 (1985) 26-62, esp.
32-38 (omitted in a revised version of this essay in J. J.Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do
with Dionysus? [Princeton, 1990] 20-62). For sharper focus on the historical development of the
ephebeia, see P. Vidal-Naquet, "The Black Hunter Revisited," PCPS 32 (1986) 126-44; Sally
Humphreys, "Lycurgus of Butadae: An Athenian Aristocrat," in J. W. Eadie and J. Ober, eds., The
Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in Honor of Chester G. Starr (Lanham, 1985) 206-9. For
Iphigenia, see below, nn. 20, 38.

316 CLASSICAL
their associations with liminal and transitional states, are also important aspects
of this play.20
There are ritual aetiologies involving compensation and replacement at the
end of Euripides' Medea (aeFoCviv I?OQTYV
xai TXk ... &aVT To6E b6vooafC3oV
p6ovov,1382-83) andHippolytus (&vxiTcZFv6E TY xaxXO)vtlJag oEyioag, 1423
24). In each of these plays compensation is for fatal, terribleevents-infanticide,
a young man's death because of a father's curse. In IT the compensation indi
cated by Athena is for a near-fatal but avoided act, the sacrificial death of
Orestes through his sister's agency. Itmarks a positive turn of events, a hopeful
move into the future. This
is achieved, however, to the extent that attention is
drawn away from the truly irretrievable and criminal act in the past, the matri
cide. It is achieved by a kind of substitution.
Compensation and substitution are closely linked notions-substituting is a
way of compensating. Both are central principles in the operation of ritual sacri
fice,21 and in the stories of Orestes and Iphigenia. The latter had been saved when
Artemis put a deer in her place on the altar (avT&Lboioa, 28, 782-83; cf. 359). Both
Orestes and Iphigenia undergo the experience of sacrifice, all but the final blow.
She recalls vividly the anguish of having been deceived and, as far as he knew, sacri
ficed by her father (211-12, 359-71, 852-53; cf. 541). Orestes endures a pro
longed expectation that his sacrificialdeath is inevitable (cf. 482-91, 691-705).22
20. In general, there is the shape of the youthfulOrestes' story as a quest ina remote, dangerous
place difficult of access (cf. 90, 94, 241-42, 422-26, 884-91), the culmination of a period of roaming
about away from his city (cf. peripolon, 84 = 1455,where theword and thenotion are absorbed into the
Tauropolos aition; on the ephebes as peripoloi see P. Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of
Thought and Forms of Society in theGreek World, tr.A. Szegedy-Maszak [Baltimore, 1986] 107).
"Cunning, deception, disorder and irrationality" (ibid. 113) are notable in the drama (for deception,
cf. 89, 112, and below; for irrationality there isOrestes' madness, 281-94, 307-8; and for disorder, cf.
570-73). Growing up and hunting together is recalled (709; cf. perh. 284; Vidal-Naquet 117-19).
Exploits at night are proposed (110, perh. 1024-26; cf. Vidal-Naquet 118), though not in fact carried
out. Interestingly the initiative and plan for achieving the quest are Iphigenia's (see furtherbelow, and
F. I. Zeitlin, "Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine inGreek Drama," in
Winkler and Zeitlin [above, n. 19] 80-82). Initiatory themes involving Iphigenia are recollected from
the past and "subverted":preparations formarriage (24-25,214-17,364-73,538,856,859), including
a suggestion of prenuptial bath (818) and cutting of hair on leavinghome (820-21); sacrifice (28, 211
12, 359-60, 770-71,783-84, 860-61, 1082-83); also the denied dancing forHera (221) andweaving of
PallasAthena's image (222-23). See R. A. S. Seaford, "TheTragicWedding," JHS 107 (1987) 106-10;
andmore generally C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Studies inGirls' Transitions (Athens, 1988), esp. 111-13; S.
G. Cole, "The Social Function of Rituals of Maturation: The Koureion and the Arkteia," ZPE 55
(1984) 238-44. For Iphigenia and theArkteia, see below, n. 38.

21. On the "ritual mechanism" of substitution in sacrifice, see Henrichs (above, n. 18) 205-8;
H. S. Versnel, "Self-Sacrifice, Compensation and the Anonymous Gods," Entr. Hardt 27 (1981)
159-85; D. D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice inAncient Greece (London, 1991) 71-76; andmore gener
ally, in the context of Vedic ritual, B. K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion
(New York, 1989) 172-80.
22. For the parallel circumstances of brother and sister, see Burnett (above, n. 1) 47-49; D.
Sansone, "The Sacrifice-Motif inEuripides' IT," TAPhA 105 (1975) 283-95; O'Brien (above, n. 5)
109-12. I shall argue below that there are in fact differences, largely related to gender, which
undermine this parallel by the end of the play.

WOLFF: 317
Iphigenia in her anguish declares she will show no more pity toward theGreeks
who are brought to her for sacrifice: any Greek victim will serve as a substitute
object of revenge, replacing thosewhom she takes to be the originating causes of
her suffering, Helen andMenelaos (356-57; cf. 337-39, 439-46; 8, 13-14, 521
26). (This is also a significant displacement away from the immediate agent of
hermisfortunes, her father,Agamemnon.) Euripides next manages a plot turn in
which, immediately on Iphigenia's determination for substitute revenge, her
next victim is to be the unknown Orestes, who has himself been brought to
subjection because of those deities of strictest payment, the Erinyes (281-303).

This potentially disastrous substitution will be canceled by the recognition of
brother and sister, but not before we have seen Orestes offer to replace his friend
Pylades as sacrificial victim (597-608; cf. Pylades' offer, 674-75).23
The escape, finally, is also devised according to the model of substitution.
A pretended ritual cleansing and purification is to replace human sacrifice.This
trick-b6kl xcaaOaQcTa (1316; cf. 66Xia tEXvllrc', 1355)-is Iphigenia's; she
has learned, one could say, the lesson of Artemis's sophismata (380; cf. XcLVov
Eir(ebtac , oo(pio(aoatv, TeXvag, 1029, 1031-32), and she has learned from
having herself been tricked at Aulis, where an apparent human sacrifice re
placed amarriage ritual (24-25, 370-76, 856-61).24 The invented, "false" ritual
in fact achieves an actual, "true" final purification and release of Orestes as
well as the recovery of Artemis's image (cf. 1441b, 1469, 1489). In addition,
though represented in the play's fictional world as a human means of deception
thought up by Iphigenia to effect an escape, the ritual washing by the sea

corresponds to actual cult practice familiar to the Athenian audience: the wash
ing of the Palladiumand perhaps the washing of Athena's statue during the
Plynteria.25 This play, within the drama, of deceptive contrivance and "real"
effect, involved with ritual material, runs parallel to the way the drama itself
may be seen to work: as a fictional construction (performed on the ritual
23. Cf. too Iphigenia's readiness to die ifOrestes survives the escape (1002-6)-and Orestes'
readiness to die if they cannot escape together (1007-11). The theme of sacrifice is given a secular
turn. Euripides' extensive interest in willing human sacrifice is well known: cf. E. A. M. E.
O'Connor-Visser, Aspects of Human Sacrifice in theTragedies of Euripides (Amsterdam, 1987), with
a survey of earlier discussions, 5-17; to which add S. Trenkner, The Greek Novella in the Classical
Period (Cambridge, 1958) 69-77; and now Hughes (above, n. 21) 82-86.
24. Cf. Seaford (above, n. 20) 108-10. Iphigenia says she was offered inmarriage to anAchilles
who was son of Hades, not of Peleus (369-71). Her failed marriage is underscored by recurring
references to Achilles in the first half of the play (25, 537, 663, 856; cf. 375); his association with
Hades is reinforced by reference to his ghostly raceson the nearby islandof Leuke (436-38; cf.Andr.
1260-62), and he is perhaps linked to Thoas (so named because "swift of foot," 32-33), king in
something like a land of death (so H. Hommel, Der Gott Achilleus, SB Heidelberg, Phil.-hist. K1.
[1980] 1.Abh., 36).
25. The Plynteria association was suggested by U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube
der Hellenen, 3d ed. (reprint: Basel, 1959) 1.22 n. 3. But not much is known about the particulars of
the festival: see Parker (above, n. 14: 26-27) with references to earlier literature. For the washing by
the sea of the Palladium and the distinction of this ritual and the Plynteria, see W. Burkert, "Buzyge
und Palladium," ZRGG 22 (1970) 357-64.

318 CLASSICAL
occasion of the festival of Dionysus)26 that produces meanings that are symboli
cally or psychologically "true," that engage in some way with the audience's
sense of reality.
Athena's aition for theHalae ceremony articulates the principle of apoina,
compensation by means of substitution, a principle applicable both to sacrificial
ritual as such and, pervasively, to Euripides' play.27In the end Orestes' release is
predicated on a final payment for his criminal revenge, for thematricide. Substi
tution becomes a way out of the dilemma of revenge. The aetiological link to a
sacrificial ritual using token substitution takes the place of the Tantalids' self
generating chain of intrafamilialkilling-the last, avoided and replaced, instance
of which would have been Iphigenia's involvement in the death of Orestes (cf.
866-72, 1007-8).
The new sacrificial procedure described by Athena is also instituted hosias
hekati (1461). For the sense of this hosion I follow Benveniste's definition: "the
act which makes the 'sacred' accessible."28 What was previously a barbaric prac
tice, inaccessibly (among remote Taurians) and unmanageably (because involv
ing human sacrifice) sacred, will become properly available toGreeks, or more
particularly to Athenians. This notion identifies what the compensatory rite
achieves, a state of being, in Burkert's words, both "pious and free," operating
in the human world after having settled one's accounts with the purely sacred,
the sacrificial practice in its rawest form.
Finally the new ritual intends that Artemis, coming to Attica as Tauropolos,
maintain her prerogatives, her timai (1416). She must not lose her divine force,
her sacredness, in the transfer. Thus her timai continue to include offerings of
human blood, and therefore she can be a powerful guarantor of the efficacy of
the ritual substitution. Iphigenia had offered the goddess a kind of salvation in
Athens, a "blessed" city (eudaimona, 1088) and a "pure" home (katharon,
1231). Athena, however, certifies that the Taurian goddess who comes to Athens
brings with her an ineradicable, original nature. This final association of Artemis
with human blood also decisively negates Iphigenia's earlier attempt to recon
ceive the goddess as a simply pure, and, from a human viewpoint, morally
transparent divine being (383, 386, 391). Athens will receive a powerfully am
26. For the importanceof the festival setting and some possible implications for the understand
ing the drama performed in it, see S. Goldhill, "TheGreater Dionysia and Civic Ideology," JHS
of
107 (1987) 58-76 (rev. in Winkler and Zeitlin [above, n. 19] 97-129); also W. R. Connor, "City
Dionysia andAthenian Democracy," C&M 40 (1989) 7-32.
27. It also pervades the play's language; in addition to d&notva (1459), cf. JIOLtv (200; 446,
with &vTi7Jakog),JtoLvcoOat (1433), (djTo-)Tivetv(78, 338-89), (&vTL-)Tllo0tQev (357, 558, 925),
CavTlTlOEvact(358), avti6L66val (28, 737, 783), (E?-)akudooelv (135, 193, perh. 292), &vtarmoXXvwal
(715), &vTiLpacXkog (179), [teOLorival (775, 991, 1177), [tet6atTalS (816); cf. also 821, and 61bx
(339, 944), 6ixaLov (559, 1469), and X6adL(14, 507, 602, 631, 847, 1444).
28. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes 2 (Paris, 1969) 200. Cf. Burkert (above, n.
2) 270: "hosion signifies that one is done with the sacred and thereby at once pious and free" (my
transl.).

WOLFF:
bivalent goddess inwhose nature purity and blood, life support and killing are
inextricably combined.29
III
Athena next addresses Iphigenia:
oE 6' apA(pi oaEvaIg, 'IcplyEveLa, xkiuaxag

BQavQvoviag 6cL T&6E xkrqovUeX v OcEa
ou xai TEaOd)T xaxOavovoa, xai treJrXkov
ayaktad oot1 0joovotv ?iJrIlVOVg v(pdg,
ac av yvvatxLS EV TOXO1g pVXoQaYEId
XTnwao' EV OlXOLg.
(1462-67)
Two sanctuaries aremarked off, one just accounted for, of Artemis Tauropolos
at Halae, the other of Artemis at Brauron. Iphigenia's story ends in the latter.
Athena next will mention the chorus briefly, then turn again to Orestes. Five and
a half lines for Iphigenia are framed by some twenty for Orestes. What might so
far have seemed a near symmetrical balance of focus and treatment between the
play's two central figures is now qualified.
Orestes' aition involves a new foundation, a death-evading substitution, and
release from the past. Iphigenia appears to go nowhere. At Brauron, repre
sented as a preexisting site, she will still carry on her offices as the goddess's
kleidouchos (cf. 131, 1463). She is saved from further attendance at blood sacri
fices, but the aition relates her death and a subsequent cult practice commemorat
ing death: the dedication of garments of women whose "death agony was in
childbirth."30Throughout the play Iphigenia repeatedly expresses passionate
29. For this ambivalence of Artemis's nature generally, see, e.g., Burkert, Vernant, and Graf
(above, n. 2). The text of IT ismost revealing at 402-6, where Artemis, designated as "maiden
daughter of Zeus," koura(i) dia(i), is the one forwhom "humanblood soaks altars and shrines," and
at 1097, where Artemis is goddess of childbirth, lochia, followed by 1113-16, where she is the
goddess "who slays the deer" and the goddess at whose altars "sheep are not sacrificed" [Musgrave's
correction of the text at 1116 seems inevitable and is adopted by all recent editors], marking firsther
role as huntress and suggesting the (wild) animal substitute sacrifice, then, euphemistically. human
sacrifice. For a lexical association of the Taurian sacrifices and the Halae ritual, note heorte at 36, of
the former, and heortazei at 1458, of the latter (the only occurrences of thisword family in the play).
I have been much helped inmore clearly seeing unfolded in the play this double, ambivalent yet
integrated, nature of Artemis by comments fromAlbert Henrichs, who also draws my attention to
the acute observations on the play's aetiological conclusion by CedricWhitman, Euripides and the
Full Circle of Myth (Cambridge,Mass., 1974) 32-34, esp. on the link of Athena and Artemis as
parthenoi, both virginal and implicated in violence and blood (a link extending to Iphigenia); on the
"paradoxical conflicts in Artemis," her "contradictory aspects," which the transfer to Halae "brings
into unity . . .without losing sight of them"; and on the drawing of blood in the ceremony "lest the
cost of purity ever be forgotten."
30. Iphigenia's actual tomb contrasts with the mistaken and so canceled funeral rites for
Cpd6g, "finely woven fabrics"

Orestes (61-62, 159-69; cf. 632-35, 702-4). The phrase EUJncvous
(1465), is distinctive-the epithet is attested only in this play-and occurs here for the third time. See

320 CLASSICAL
desire for return to Argos and reunion with her brother. The latter is achieved
temporarily.Athena recalls the hope of return toArgos right to the end (1440;
Argos is named here for the last of thirty-two times in the play), only now to
deny it.31
Iphigenia's prospective death and the reference to her burial indicate her
heroization and shift her into a chthonic realm. Her humanity, finely suggested
in the play's action (and prized and idealized in later times), is submerged. There
were signs of an Iphigenia as heroic counterpart to Artemis. Both are addressed
as potnia (463, 1123; 533, 1082), both are called kouralkora (402, 1114). Both
have interrelated timai (748, 776; cf. 54, 1461). Both-Artemis as statue
dropped on the Taurians out of the sky (29-30, 88, 977) and are objects of theft
and rescue (28, 1400; 1359).32Through the aetiology applicable to her Iphigenia
is definitively drawn into that realm of the goddess's fearful ambivalence, which
she had earlier sought to deny (380-91).
Athena confirms Orestes as the young man who successfully survives and
overcomes his trials and tribulations (cf. 1441b, 1454-55; 89-92, 114-15, 121
22). But Iphigenia's indispensable role as her brother's rescuer is now passed
over, usurped by Athena. Reassociated with death and blood Iphigenia could
now even be said to draw off some of Artemis's harsher aspect. As the chorus
recallwith her epithet Lochia (1097), Artemis is also associatedwith childbirth.33
Dedications to her of women's garments, especially in connection with marriage
and childbirth, are well attested in the treasure records of Artemis Brauronia
and in dedicatory epigrams in the sixth book of the Palatine Anthology. In the
case of childbirth the inscriptions imply and the epigrams clearly indicate that the
mothers survived (IG II2 1514-25, 1528-30; AP 6.201-2, 271-72, 274). As it
happens, cult commemoration of death in childbirth is attested only in this
passage of our play, and focused specifically on Iphigenia.34
the suggestive, if not altogether persuasive, discussion of R. Caldwell, "TragedyRomanticized: The

Iphigenia Taurica," CJ 70 (1974-75) 39-40. At 312 Pylades' protective covering of Orestes with
"finelywoven fabrics" of his cloak is followed by the latter's recovery from hismadness. Iphigenia's
fine weaving as a girl (814; cf. 817; contrast 222-24) evokes a darker aspect of the family past (the
quarrel and crimes of Atreus andThyestes), which, however, serves as recognition token. Now at the
end she ishonored by dedications of fineweavings, but theywere left behind by dead mothers (1466
67). In the first two instances, involving Orestes, ambivalence is shifted to a positive direction; in the
last it ismaintained.
31. In one account Iphigenia does in fact return to Argos after Artemis's image is brought to
Brauron (Paus. 1.33.1). In the play Iphigenia tells of having sent a lock of her hair back to Argos for
a cenotaph there (820-21).
32. For Iphigenia as (chthonic) partner of Artemis, see, e.g., Burkert (above, n. 2) 152, 188,
202-3; Lloyd-Jones (above, n. 11) 95-96 = 319-20; E. Kearns, TheHeroes of Attica, BICS Suppl. 57
(London, 1989) 27-33, esp. 32-33, 174 (useful overview of the literary sources).
33. Cf. Eur. Su. 958, Hi. 166; Lloyd-Jones (above, n. 11) 95-96 = 320, with n. 53; Cole (above,
n. 20) 243 n. 62.
34. The inscriptions are from theBrauronion on theAcropolis, but probably duplicate those at
Brauron (T. Linders, Studies in the Treasure Records of Artemis Brauronia Found in Athens [Stock
holm, 1972] 70-73). The epigraphicalmaterial fromBrauron remains almost entirely unpublished. If

WOLFF:
Birth and marriage (not fully achieved without the production of offspring)
as well as the close relations of parent and child are important in the play. The
choruswomen elaborately celebrate Artemis Lochia inDelos, Leto's giving birth
there, and the locheia kleina of Apollo (1097-1102, 1234-42). The dangers of
pollution attendant on birth and approachingmarriage are evoked (382, 1228).
Stories of intergenerational violence and conflict partly reflect these dangers
which in the case of birth at least are real enough in everyday life-as well as
issues of social ideology. The infant (brephos) Apollo leaped out of his dear
mother's arms to kill the monstrous guardian of Earth's shrine at Delphi; she
gives birth (eteknosato) to dream visions to defend the rights of her child (paid')
Themis, whom Apollo had "removed" (1260; cf. 175); Apollo "with childish
hand" supplicates his father for restitution, which in amusement at the child's
(tekos) greed Zeus allows (1247-75). The partly humorous and poetically dis
tanced account of Apollo's glorious birth and success in divine generational and
sexual conflict counterpoints Iphigenia's story. The very fact that she was "the
most beautiful thing the yearmight give birth to," "the childClytaemnestra gives
birth to in the house" (20-22), is what marks her for death at her father's (tou
tekontos, 363) hands. Her supplication of her father fails (363-64). She laments
her unfortunate life from the night her mother consummated marriage and con
ceived her, when the "Moirai lochiai drew tight a cruel and barren early child
hood" (sterran paideian) for her, whom her mother bore to be "a victim for
sacrificial slaughter, for a father's outrageous treatment" (203-11). The sacrifice
of the child-maiden Iphigenia coincided with and replaced what was to have been
her marriage (25, 214-17, 364-71, 538-39, 818-19, 856-61). In the ritual that
ends her story, Iphigenia, once the child a father meant to kill, becomes the
focus of mothers who are killed by the offspring they have given birth to.
Orestes is glimpsed as an infant (asApollo is) by hismotherly sister (231-35,
834-36; the phrase eti brephos in both passages is used of Apollo, 1249). Iphige
nia is then nearly the instrument of Orestes' death as a young man, which causes
her to recall her father's attempt to kill her (852-53, 864-72; cf. 992-95).
Clytaemnestra may also be recalled, who had rejected, and may have tried to kill,
her son; but was then killed by him so that, among other things, he could get on
with his life. The matricide, that most radical violation of a family bond, is
throughout the play both drawn to our attention (79, 556, 924-25, 957, 1007)
and, as said before, displaced or evaded. It is even made the subject of a kind of
folk etymology hears "Iphigenia" as "Strong inBirth," her connection here to death in childbirth is a
paradoxical reversal. Historical etymology has been elusive: see, e.g., C. Calame, Les choeurs de
jeunesfilles en Grace archaique 1 (Rome, 1977) 292 n. 234; K. Dowden, Death and theMaiden: Girls'
Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology (London, 1989) 46, 212 n. 62. Perhaps the iph- element may
suggest heroic strength in the face of life or death throughpopular association with epic ip0OLCog.
This
epithet is found in the epitaph of awoman who died while giving birth (IG II/III211907), cited byN.
Loraux, "Le lit, la guerre," L'Homme 21 (1981) 39. Loraux (45 n. 38) refers to IT 1464-66 in the
context of her discussion of marriage with childbearing as themost glorious and "manly" achieve
ment allowed a Greek woman, though such an association seems muted in the IT passage.

322 CLASSICAL
double-edged joke. Thoas calls on Apollo inhorror, exclaiming that no barbarian

would have dared such a crime (1173-74). Innocently appealing to the god who
had authorized the crime, he baldly exposes the scandal of Orestes' story, even as
Iphigenia is deceiving him by using that crime to enable escape and rescue.
The matricide was a subtext of Orestes' aition, specifically evoked by refer
ences to the Furies (1439, 1456) and suggested in the notion of apoina (1459); it
will also be implied in a reference toOrestes' trial at theAreopagus (1469-71).
Matricide may also be a link between Orestes' aition and Iphigenia's. In the
latter the mothers whose deaths are caused by their children recall Clytaem
nestra.35Her story is pieced together throughout the play (5, 22, 25, 79, 204-11,
237, 289, 552-53, 555-58, 818, 820, 924-27, 934, 940; cf. 472, 665, 957, 964,
1007, 1173), fading and absorbed into the fates of these anonymous and real-life
mothers-a process similar to the final transfer of Orestes' punishment to the
anonymous male victims at Halae.
Orestes' story is like a difficult but finally successful ephebic initiation, and is
continuous with its aetiology. Iphigenia's is harder to pin down. It is partly a
story of denial and repetition. Early in the play she laments being "without
marriage or child or city or friend" (agamos ateknos apolis aphilos, 220), and,
except for belonging to a polis, though not her own, this is still the case at the
end. At Aulis she had been a victim who enabled a war to begin, her father to
win glory, and the violation
of the marriage of Helen and Menelaos to be
avenged (10-20). Among the Taurians, whose land is compared to Aulis (358,
1082-83), she saves her male kin so that the paternal line may be continued (cf.
695-99, 1004-6).36 Initially the play inverts the situation of Aulis: Iphigenia has
acquired power as a priestess over sacrificial victims (though it is a power she
abhors), and then, as she makes a new life possible for Orestes, she loses her
own, that is, she loses her human identity.
Iphigenia could also be seen as sacrificed for the play's chorus of women, her
fellow exiles.37 After the Brauron aition Athena directs their return to Greece
(1467-68), where, unlike Iphigenia, they will, one may assume, recover and
realize repeatedly evoked memories and desires for home, parents, beauty con
testswith like-agedparthenoi, andmarriage celebrations (452-55, 576-77, 1096
97, 1143-52; cf. 1070-71).
These expectations in the cycle of girls' lives, culminating inmarriage, were
ritually marked on occasions that notably included the Arkteia cult at Brauron
and, in some way, Iphigenia.38 There is a tradition locating at Brauron both the
35. A connection of Clytaemnestra to Iphigenia's aition is tentatively suggested by Caldwell

(above, n. 30) 40, and was independently observed byMasaki Kubo (in conversation).
36. For the importance in the play of the paternal oikos, see O'Brien (above, n. 5) 111, 115.
37. A suggestion I owe to Helene Foley. No provisions are made for the future of the analogous
chorus of Helen (cf. K. Matthiessen, Elektra, Taurische Iphigenie und Helena [Gottingen, 1964] 45).
38. There has been much recent discussion of the Arkteia (e.g., Dowden [above, n. 34], Kearns
[above, n. 32], Sourvinou-Inwood [above, n. 20]; inDHA 16 [1990] 9-90, there are state-of-the
question contributions by P. Brule, Dowden, and Sourvinou-Inwood, with full current bibliography),

WOLFF: 323
start of Iphigenia's story, the sacrifice byAgamemnon (with rescuing bear substi
tution instead of the deer as at Aulis), and its end.39 Perhaps one dramatic fiction
cannot quite manage to include both a connection of Iphigenia to bears at
Brauron, as the local Attic cult suggests, and the pan-Hellenic myth of the
substitute deer sacrifice at Aulis (28, 783; cf. 1113). Yet when the aition's text
begins by framing Iphigenia's name within "the holy terraces of Brauron" (1462
63), theArkteia may well have been evoked, especially ifwe recall the initiatory
themes relating to girls and marriage in the play. But if such an evocation is
made, it also underscores the absence of any explicit mention of the Arkteia and
its positive ritual purposes. At any rate, what Euripides has chosen to have
Athena speak about are dedications on occasions of failure-the deaths of moth
ers, and nothing is said about whether or not the children survived.40
Why is this aetiology so arranged? One could attempt to answer from the
viewpoints of both ideological and dramaturgical considerations (and allow that

the lattermay open up ideology to questioning). Iphigenia's story is implicated in
a familiar pattern of sexual ideology.41 Like that of the original female powers at
Delphi, Gaia and her daughter Themis (1259-69), and like that of her mother,
but Iphigenia's possible connection to the bear ritual is rarely addressed directly. It may not be
possible for the time being to go beyond a formulation likeHenrichs's (above, n. 18: 207): "In the
Brauronian cult of Artemis, the Iphigenia myth and animal substitution existed side by side as
mutually supportive elements in a coming-of-age ritual inwhich preadolescent girls called 'bears'
lived in seclusion in her temple." Two items, though,may still be worth considering. Phanodemos in
the 330s B.C.E.said that a bear, not a deer, was substituted at Iphigenia's sacrifice (see below, n. 39).
And a reading of the texts of Ar. Lys. 644-45 together with Aesch. Ag. 239 may be seen to link
Athenian girls as bears at Brauron to Iphigenia (C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Aristophanes, Lysistrata
641-647," CQ 21 [1971] 339-42; cf. Sourvinou-Inwood [above, n. 20] 132-33; a slightly different
reading of the text, but still supporting the link, is offered by T. C. W. Stinton, "Iphigenia and the
Bears at Brauron," CQ 26 [1976] 11-13, followed by J. Henderson in his Lysistrata edition [Oxford.
1987], on 645; the interpretation of the Agamemnon passage is also controversial: see now D.
Armstrong and E. A. Ratchford, "Iphigenia's Veil: Aeschylus, Agamemnon 228-48," BICS 32
[1985] 1-12).
39. Phanodemus, FGrHist 325 F 14; the Leiden scholion on Ar. Lys. 645; cf. Euphorion fr. 91
Powell. My assumption, necessarily tentative, is that traditional elements predating IT are repre
sented in these texts.
40. Offerings on occasions of failure seem unusual. The Halae ceremony of the neck cutting is
also unusual ("seltsame Ritus": Graf [above, n. 2] 414). The ritual information in both cases is
uniquely attested in this play, and in each case information otherwise known (Arkteia; the
Tauropolian pannuchis attested inMenander's Epitrepontes) is omitted. Yet Euripides' choice of
these apparently unusual cultic features is not due to some sort of antiquarianism, but to his dramatic
purposes. Hence his silence about the Arkteia need not imply that a heroized Iphigenia had no actual
involvement in the bear rituals.One could say thatEuripides' aetiologizing is significantly selective.
On rituals in Greek tragedy as part of a dramatic fiction, and partly "fictionalized," see P. E.
Easterling, "Tragedy and Ritual," Metis 3 (1988) 87-109, esp. 98-99, 109 (though she considers
elements of ritual dramatically represented, not rituals reported in aetiologies).
41. She herself states it plainly: "a man lost to his house / in death is sorely missed [potheinos];
what concerns a woman is of no account [asthene]" (1005-6). For the complex representation in the
Oresteia, see Zeitlin (above, n. 19); also Zeitlin inWinkler and Zeitlin (above, n. 19) 78-87. Cf. now
thewidely contextualized discussion of David Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement
of Morals inClassical Athens (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 133-170.

324 CLASSICAL
who took up sword and axe against her menfolk,42 Iphigenia's strong presence is
represented, acknowledged, and then displaced. The play shows her as both an
unwilling and a dangerous agent of savage barbarian practices (cf. 34-41 [not all
of which is textually secure], 225-26 [again, the gist is clear, the text hard], 585
87, 595-96, 617-18)-dangerous especially because of her justified grievances
againstGreeks, including immediatemembers of her family (cf. 356-58, 440-46;
336-39; 8, 17-24, 211, 360-68, 784-85, 852-53, 862-63, 920, 1083) and danger
ous in her association with Artemis.43 Iphigenia has sharedwith the other human
actors limits and failures of understanding,44notably of her dream, inwhich her
brother appears as her sacrificialvictim (53-55; female and dream are associated
in the Delphic story, 1261-67: contrast 570-71), and of the complex nature of
Artemis. Orestes is one step ahead of her at the climax of the recognition scene
(777), though she then takes control by her careful insistence on the proofs of his
identity (806-22). The process of recognition had been initiated by her sympa
thetic questioning (resisted by Orestes), and furthered by her plan to send a
letter toArgos. She is the first to call passionately for escape (873-99) and then
devise and direct it. But, as said, this positive movement in the characterization
of Iphigenia is checked. There is a tension at once within the play's action (the
myth as dramatically shaped) and between that action and the aetiological conclu
sion. The latter marks a degree of discontinuity between the humanized and the
sacral Iphigenia, between an Iphigeniawho insistson a pureArtemis, untouched
by human bloodshed, birth, or death (380-91; cf. 1228), and one who is recast in
the service of and then, as a figure of heroic cult, in closest association with an
Artemis still connected to human bloodshed and, through Iphigenia, to death in
childbirth. The force and effect of this is hard to gauge. Iphigenia's role as
priestess and then heroine at Brauron, though succintly registered, carries cul
tural weight. Yet Euripides' choosing to make such an elliptical and muted final
representation of her has an unsettling effect. Is the play suggesting a final

subordination of female power, or does it allow (perhaps at the same time) a
suggestion that such power is capable of posing a threat to a system that exists to
subordinate it?
42. Aesch. Ag. 1379, 1384; Cho. 889; cf. IT552, 926.
43. The ambivalence of the sacred as represented by human sacrifice toArtemis throughout
the play inevitably rubs off on the figure of Iphigenia. Ovid neatly catches this and makes Orestes
parallel: "virgo Pelopeia . . . / sacra deae coluit qualiacumque suae. /Quo postquam, dubium pius an
sceleratus, Orestes" (Tristia 4.4.67-69). Thus too the (I believe) unresolvable question about the
nature of Iphigenia's participation in the actual sacrificing: cf. J. C. G. Strachan, "Iphigenia and
Human Sacrifice in Euripides' Iph. Taur.," CPh 71 (1976) 131-40; and D. Sansone, "A Problem in
Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris," RhM 121 (1978) 35-47. Note the ambivalence implied at 463-68,
where both the chorus and Iphigenia express a need to satisfy properlywhat Artemis requires for the
human sacrifice, yet the chorus simultaneously indicate their distance as Greeks from what the
Taurians do.
44. On doxa, delusion and misunderstanding in the play, see the fine observations of H.
Strohm, Euripides: Iphigenie im Taurerland (Munich, 1949) 24, 35-36.

WOLFF:
IV
The relation of aition to drama raises questions that emerge first in an

aetiology of the Choes, the Pitcher Feast, located unusually in themidst of the
play's action, and recounted, also unusually, by the human participant.After the
recognition scene, the urgent need towork out an escape plan (cf. 902-6) is put
off by Iphigenia's need to learnmore about the past, and by Euripides' need to
explain how the story of Orestes' journey to the Taurians fits into the more
familiar outlines of his myth. The possible dramatic relevance of this aetiology is
generally ignored.45But in fact Euripides here combines an underpinning for his
dramaticmuthos with a strikingly transparent link to the immediateworld of his
audience. He occasions a moment of aetiological self-awareness while drawing
on a number of the play's main themes.
Orestes tells the story of his arrival in Athens:46
XO0b)v6' XECToE tQ61rcTa RE'v (4a')ot6?LgS vCOv

ExC)v E6Ea9O' Cog OEoTg OTVYOEVOV.
ol 6' EoXov a6wo, evLta uovoTtQaTEda tOt1
JatcgXov, otxcv ovTEg EV TCmCU oGTEyEl,
otyL] 8' ETEXT'VcLVT'&tQ6yo(pE0yxTOV ', 6ojcg
acLTO' T'O'L6vaclV JIcOaLTO6g T' o'driOv iXct,
eg 6' &yyog i'lov i'oov &arLot BaxXfov
?@TQt Ca JTXkq@cQoavTegEIXov ri6ovqv.
xay6) '^EkEYaL TEiV Evovg OVX i LOMv,
`kyovv 6b otLynx&66xovv ovx E6ival,

?eya OTEVatowv oUvex' r UlTQ@Og(povEU5.
xkco 6' 'AOvcvaiolot TatCa 6voTvXr]
Treckr-1v yEV?oa0C, xa&tl TOr vo6Fov ?EVELV,
XOQlgg ayyog HIauak8og TLidv XEdV.
(947-60)
Word has reached him (xXvco), Orestes concludes, that his misfortunes have
become a ritual for the Athenians that is observed to this very day (x&CX ...
(IEVELv).47Such aetiological self-awareness on the part of a human character
differs from aetiological prophecies like Medea's (Med. 1378-83) or Poly
mestor's (Hec. 1259-67) in being still well within the continuing action of the
play and by its reference to both a time and place coterminous with the audi
ence's. For a moment the tragic drama's normally distanced fictional setting in
remote archaic time is dissipated, and a ritual present, familiar to the contempo
rary audience's experience, is as itwere remythologized.
45. Strohm (ibid.) on 958-60 says that honoring Attic tradition takes precedence over dra
matic plausibility.
46. J. Diggle's OCT text (Oxford, 1981), which accepts corrections by Hermann at 951 and
Housman at 952.
47. Cf. the quasi-formulaic eTL xai (vuv) in aetiological passages at, e.g., HH Herm. 125-26,
Hdt. 3.48.3; cf. also the form of II. 24.614-17.

326 CLASSICAL
The Athenian Choes festival has a general, characteristic double aspect

related to the dead on the one hand and to cheerful celebration on the other.
This catches up the weight of death and the past that permeates the earlier parts
of the play-the grim Tauric atmosphere (cf. 72-75), Iphigenia's funeral ceremo
nies for an Orestes imagined dead (159-69; cf. 632-35, 702-4), evocations of a
ghostly Achilles (369-71; and see above, n. 24)-as well as the joy of recognition
and reunion just achieved. More particularly, the Choes suggests, asWalter
Burkert has shown, "the stamp of sacrifice"-silence, individual tables, equal
distribution of portions (cf. 953), and an atmosphere of guilt and pollution. The
festival day is a tLcQagaqesaQCtwhen all temples, except for this sole occasion
Dionysus's Temple in theMarshes, are closed, a time of religiously hedged risk

and anomalous behavior.48
The paradoxical silence duringwine drinking, normally themost sociable of
activities, belongs to an old tradition of silence imposed on the community's
relation to a murderer.49 Here the Athenians "contrived by their silence" that
Orestes be speechless (951). He cooperates, regarding it unfitting to dispute with
his hosts,50 and instead suffers "in silence" and pretends "to be oblivious, though
moaning greatly, because [he] was his mother's killer" (956-57). Putting off
explanation and self-defense Orestes observes the old rules governing the recep
tion of a xenos. Along with the Athenians he contrives to allow the festive
occasion to take place. In this way his pollution is both distanced and incorpo
rated, acknowledged and evaded. This doubleness is reflected in Orestes' si
lence, which isoddly and pointedly contradicted by his loud, presumably inauspi
cious, groaning. He now also names the crime-[tTroQ6 cpovecg-that he had
before explicitly kept silent: T& tqirTQOgTUcav' & OLyCOLEV
xax6 (940; cf. 924-25,
938).51
48. Burkert (above, n. 8) 236-55, esp. 242, 245 (link of Choes to initiation: cf. above, nn. 19,
20), 246 (ancient evidence linkingOrestes toChoes). Also on theChoes, see J. Bremmer, The Early
Greek Concept of theSoul (Princeton, 1983) 109-20.
49. Aesch. Eum. 448 (cf. 276-78); Eur. HF 1218-19, Or. 75; Parker (above, n. 14) 371. At
Aesch. Cho. 291-94 sanctions imposed on a homicide, including refusalof participation in communal
drinking (cf. the law cited inDem. 20.158), are paradoxically threatened by Apollo ifOrestes does
not become a killer and avenge his father.
50, '.EXeyEaL (955); cf. Aesch. Eum. 433. There are other suggestions of legal language in these
lines: ixtbv (948), and perhaps ai6bs (949) in the sense of forgiveness in a homicide case (LSJ s.v.
ai6og I 2, acieotta II 2; law cited in Dem. 43.57), though the word also evokes the Athenian
reputation formercy and assistance to outsiders in trouble. The judicial aspect of the story is thus
drawn into the Choes aetiology and so anticipated and partly preempted (the trial fails to resolve
Orestes' case).
51. For this seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of silence and naming, here in the case of a
religiously charged crime whose consequences involves the Erinyes, one may compare A. Hen
richs, "Namenlosigkeit und Euphemismus: Zur Ambivalenz der chthonischen Machte im attischen
Drama," in A. Harder and H. Hofmann, eds., Fragmenta Dramatica: Beitrage zur Interpretation
der griechischen Tragikerfragmente und ihrerWirkungsgeschichte (Gottingen, 1991) 161-201, esp.
162-79, on the paradoxical unity of naming and not naming (and euphemistically naming) of
chthonic deities, esp. the Erinyes; see also 175-76 on IT 944 (after 931, 941). One may note that in
a religious setting silence is a barrier marking off sacred and polluted from the profane. The chorus

WOLFF: 327
Iphigenia had been both silent and not silent about the sacrificial rites of
Taurian Artemis (37, perhaps 41; 384, 618, 775-76).52 Matricide and human
sacrifice, interconnected in the play's dramatic muthos, are also parallel as at
once unspeakable and yet spoken. Like the Choes festival, marked by silence,
they have a double force. And in each case an aetiological principle is at work
indicating how, bymeans of ingenious and guileful substitution, narrative events
in the past (themyth) become symbolic constructions in the present (the ritual).
In each case, too, the animating force is a movement from death to survival and
celebration-and perhaps, for the spectators, from undifferentiated reception to
some kind of understanding.
The Athenian task described by Orestes of accommodating his sacred and
criminal person is comparable to the action of transferring the bloody Taurian
Artemis toAttica. Iphigenia devises the notion of using the ritualof washing the
goddess's statue, the essential part of the plan to steal it.53 The Athenians'
reception of Orestes is also a contrivance, a kind of religious trick54 that inge
niously satisfies both ritual restriction on one who has shed blood and a complex
of social purposes represented by the "new" Choes ritual. By a kind of inocula
tion with the polluted hero, communal bonding is reinforced; an ideological
point ismade-a matricide has become acceptable-and a principle of xenia has
enter into Artemis's precinct with the ritual call EiCpacEiT' (123), and they call for silence when the
sacred victims Orestes and Pylades are brought in (458). But silence must be broken-in sacrificial
ritual by prayer, and then at the moment of killing by the wild outcry of women, the ololuge (e.g.,
Aesch. Sept. 269; E. Fraenkel on Ag. 597; Burkert [above, n. 2] 127). Silence is amark of religious
power; breaking it, an assertion of human life and presence (cf. J.-P. Vernant, Mythe et pensee
chez les grecs, 2d ed. [Paris, 1969], 260). Once purified, Orestes can speak (cf. Aesch. Eum. 445
53). Iphigenia disguises the escape plot by pretending that "a ritual action is in progress," raising
the ritual cry (vcok6okvE) and chanting incomprehensible spells (xctn&6e PdQPactac/ [El
uayEcouv'),"as though," the Taurian messenger reports,more suggestively than he knows, "wash
ing away bloodshed" (1336-38). When the escape is nearly successful, it is accompanied by the
auspicious singing of the paean- prEvqpft? ov ...JT.. cva (1403-4), euphemia shifting from its
negative silent pole to a positive, celebrational one. There had been secular versions of this
movement from silence to speech too. Orestes being first brought before Iphigenia refuses to give
his name as a defense against ridicule, in the old style of heroic resolution (500, 502) and in
despairing resignation. The silence about his name allows the recognition to be unfolded to its full
extent. To be finally realized, it requires that Iphigenia's letter not "speak itswriting in silence"
(cpgqoELt otCyoa TcyyeyQct[Evcta) but that she herself "declare in speech" (k6oy cpqdoow) its con
tent, and her identity (760-71). Note also the conspiratorial silences marked at 723-24, 1056-64
("Schweigebitte": seeMatthiessen [above, n. 37] 45-46), 1232-33.

52. The text of 35-41 is disputed, and parts of it are bracketed; but most editors allow either 37
or 41 to stand. Useful discussion by H. Erbse, Studien zum prolog der euripideische Tragodie (Berlin,
1984) 195-98.
53. If, as suggested above, the Plynteria is evoked by this plan, one may note that the day of its
observance was an apophras hemera, an ill-omened day (Plut. Alc. 34.1; cf. Xen. Hell. 1.4.12), as the
Choes was a day of pollution, miara hemera. The apophrades hemerai were apparently also days on
which Athenians judged homicide cases (see J. D. Mikalson, "HEMERA APOPHRAS," AJP 95
[1975] 19-27, esp. 25; more extensively on the apophrades days, W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at
War 3 [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979] 209-29).
54. Note ETEXTvavlvT' (951); cf. EtrlXcavroaTTo in Apollodorus's account of the Choes aition,
FGrHist 244 F 143.

328 CLASSICAL
been maintained (in symmetrical reversal of the signal violation of that principle
by the Taurians-whose king emphatically rejects for his people the possibility
of matricide: 1174).55
The midaction aition of the Choes registers a successful ritual negotiation
whose effects have been experienced by theAthenians in their own lives.Yet the
drama actually runs a somewhat different course because it is predicated, as
Orestes next recounts, on the failure of his trial at Athens. He appears towin
vLxcov 6' &arflca (967)-but only some of the Furies are persuaded by the judicial
decision, 6ixn (968). The rest are unpersuaded by nomos (970), and drive
Orestes out of Athens again and back to Apollo at Delphi, who sends him to the
Taurians and into the action of our play, the Furies still in pursuit. A religious
observance has been accounted for, but its potential complement, the aetiology
of a court and a civil, judicial procedure, acquittalwhen a jury'svote is equally
divided, is sidestepped.56
This of course recalls Aeschylus's Eumenides, with notable and particular
differences.57Orestes' purification atDelphi, for example (Eum. 204-5, 237-39,
280-83, 578; cf. 445-52, 473-74; Choeph. 1059-60), gets no mention, leaving in
clear relief Iphigenia's purification scheme (described in full technical detail:
1222-29; cf. 1207, 1218, 1338). In Aeschylus the Areopagus is founded for
Orestes' trial (Eum. 483-84); in IT reference ismade to the (doubtless earlier)
55. The xenia of the Athenians is matched at the "new" Apolline Delphi, Jrokv6voQL... v.
EVOEVTI OQo6vO(1281). And Iphigenia, who has been possessed of a technenxenoktonon (53) and
xenophonous timas (776), emphatically refuses to harm Thoas because thatwould be terrible xeno
phonein (1021), thoughOrestes has no such compunction (1020, 1022; cf. Eur. El. 896-900). Gener
ally on xenia in the Greek world, see now G. Herman, Ritualized Friendship and theGreek City
(Cambridge, 1978). For xenia and the Choes aetiology, see Bremmer (above, n. 48: 109): the
Anthesteria "recalled . . . among other events, the threat of strangers who could destroy the social
fabric"; also 113-19, and Burkert (above, n. 8) 250-52.
56. This context would explain the shift from dike to nomos in the parallel phrases 6octtl &v
'
ov .... . eo oaL 6ixn (968) and 6oal 'EQLtvUov oi'x rTelio09(oav v6ot) (970). Platnauer and
Strohm ad loc. each say that dike and nomos here are roughly equivalent, requiring for nomos the
meaning "judgment," "judicial decision," which is, I believe, unparalleled. Though dike and nomos
can be complementary (e.g., Theognis 54, Hdt. 4.106), they are not equivalent. Nomos at 970 should
have the sense of "institutionalized practice," as at 959 of the new Choes rites. The practice at 970 is
the one whereby a jury's equally divided vote means acquittal, the practice according to which
Orestes would have won his case, but which some of the Erinyes refused to accept. Only when this
number are satisfied, as implied somewhat obliquely by Athena at the end of the play (1439-41b.
1455-58), can the aition for the judicial practice, referred to as nomisma, be certified (1470-72).
Religious nomos is a precondition of judicial nomos and dike (cf. 1458, 1471, also the surprising
1469).
57. The extensive Aeschylean references in the play have long been variously observed and
interpreted: e.g., Burnett (above, no. 1) 71-72; Caldwell (above, n. 30); D. H. Roberts, Apollo and
His Oracle in theOresteia (Gottingen, 1984) 102-8; B. Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia: Studien
zum komischen Elementen in der griechischen Tragodie (Gittingen, 1982) 202-3, who observes a
shift from "political" to "private" resolution in IT, though each of these terms needs further consider
ation (for the former, see C. W. Mcleod, "Politics and the Oresteia," JHS 102 [1982] 124-44); see
also Sourvinou-Inwood (above, n. 17) 225-32 = 227-33; R. W. Wallace, TheAreopagus Council to
307 B.C. (Baltimore, 1989) 87-93, 209-10.

WOLFF:
aition of its purely divine foundation (945-46).58 In Aeschylus Athena deter

mines for the Erinyes their new shrine near the site of the court (Eum. 804-5);
here theymake their own determination (969). Aeschylus stages the conclusion
of the matricide's story in an Athenian setting. His representation of the found
ing and operation of the court that absolves Orestes serves as "the mythical
charter for the post-Ephialtean Areopagus."59Euripides pays a passing tribute to
thisAeschylean project, but as to something belonging to a historywhose impact
has long since faded. There will
be a second, final reference to the Areopagus
court (1470-72), but Athena then speaks of it as in a remoter past, in which she
had saved Orestes (EEawocoo 6b / xaci ntiv o', 1469-70), a claim, we may notice,
that if strictly true would have made the action of the play, as it concerns
Orestes, superfluous (cf. tooApollo's "saving," 965, 975, and, in contrast, Iphi
genia's, 984). Euripides locates his version of Orestes' story in a remote, exotic
setting where concerns are not so much political as personal, familial, and reli
gious: to save the paternal oikos, to save Orestes and to get possession of
Artemis's statue (984-86). The Choes aition evokes Athens in a barbarian land
and so suggests, as does the transfer of a Taurian goddess to Attica, that barbar
ian things are also a dimension of the Greek world, that the "other" is also part
of the "self."60 And though an Aeschylean political dimension has been side
tracked, the play's concern with religious practices still connects the private
drama of the central characters to the city's communal life.61 It is not, however, a
straightforward connection. A notable public institution, theAreopagus council,
is shown to have failed, even with Apollo's presence and Athena's support, to
impose its decision and guarantee an acquittal. Orestes is saved by more round
about means. The Choes links him centrally
aetiology to a major Athenian
celebration, from the stage is not to the city's center but to
yet his final departure
an outlying deme, jtgog eoXadrTol / OQOLOI (1450-51), where his final release is
commemorated and explained by a local and anomalous ritual.62
IT shows a possible conclusion of the story of the Tantalid line and a resolution
of a last, notable dilemma: what to do with the young matricide. The story of a
sister figure (as in the Electra plays, which culminate with the matricide) is drawn
58. See Jacoby, FGrHist IIIb Suppl. (Leiden, 1954) 24-25.

59. Mcleod (above, n. 57) 129.
60. See E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford,
1989), esp. 201-23; cf. S. Said, "Grecs et barbares dans les tragedies d'Euripide," Ktema 9 (1984)
27-53, esp. 43. H. Bacon, Barbarians in Greek Tragedy (New Haven, 1961), notes that "nothing
distinguishes them [the ITs Taurians] from Greek shepherds, and no foreign manners have been
given toThoas" (150; cf. 144, 149), and that temple descriptions and ritualdetails too are essentially
Greek (132-37).
61. Cf. Foley (above, n. 2).
62. See above, n. 40.

330 CLASSICAL
into the process and located at the center of its dramatic representation. She is the
moving force of the escape plot, and her survival and very presence may suggest
thatAgamemnon's crimewas not irredeemable, thatClytaemnestra therefore had
after all no adequate basis for her vengeance, and that Orestes had a stronger one
for his.63This implied narrative logic is part of the comprehensive ideological
scenario that supports the young male's story of survival and final success. In
general, resolution isachieved partly by divine fiat-through Apollo's (obscurely)
guiding oracle and Athena's (unexpected) final intervention-and partly by hu
man initiative. In the play's language, divinely guiding tucheand human techno(cf.
89) combine to bring about something like a culturally appropriate ending. These
two forces also partly overlap. Human action involves the appropriation of reli
gious procedures, and its techno is a form of dolos, of tricky negotiation, that is
akin to theway religious institutions are shown to originate and work.
Of the three ritual aitia in the play the one for Halae follows most continu
ously on Orestes' story. The themes of this aition-new foundation, new cult, a
principle of replacement (apoina), the social channeling of a divine power whose
sources and connections are represented as archaic, non-Hellenic, and wild
come together as part of a conclusion that must be considered beneficial to the
community. But an audience surelywill not have forgotten the drama leading up
to the aition, a drama of delusion, mortal risk, and escape involving the highly
charged and ambivalent powers of the sacred, of human sacrifice and in
trafamilial violence. Iphigenia's aition picks up allusively a theme of women's life
transitions, but she herself is not to experience them. The aition cuts off her
human story, and in such a way that her promotion to a final sacred status seems.
from the viewpoint of the preceding drama, a darkly colored, abrupt interven
tion. Iphigenia acquires-in the perspective of dramaticmyth; in the perspective
of ritual she reacquires-her final association with the ambivalent sacredness of
Artemis. This and her femaleness also fit an ideological pattern in which the
female is at once intermediary or instrumental and powerful in ways difficult but
necessary to control. In the case of the Choes a successful
negotiation
aetiology
is described and affirmed by something very close to a direct appeal to the
Athenian audience. Yet this aetiology is embedded in an account of the failure of
the Areopagus council, and involves the crime of matricide and Athenian subter
fuge, though the matricide, again, has an ideological dimension whereas subter
fuge need not be problematic in Greek culture.64
These aetiologies bring into focus interactions as well as tensions between
the play's construction of dramatic myth and its evocation of real-life ritual. The
question may be raised whether Euripides means
thereby to suggest a challenge
or questioning of the ritual's meaning, its capacity to seem to be effecting some
63. I owe this suggestion to Seth Benardete.

64. See, e.g., M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, Cunning Intelligence inGreek Culture (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J., 1978), esp. 33, 44, 61, 64; P.Walcot, "Odysseus and theArt of Lying," AS 8 (1977)
1-19; cf. E. L. Wheeler, Stratagem and theVocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden, 1988).

WOLFF:
thing worthwhile, or whether the play's effect is in the end to reinforce the
viability of ritual by suggesting that the ritual absorbs disturbing elements in the
myth. There is, I think, no determinable answer, because the aetiologies through
which the rituals are brought to an audience's attention are themselves part of a
total dramatic and fictional structure, and indeterminacyor ambivalence is intrin
sic to such a structure-to the nature of tragic drama.65 One could say that in IT
both drama and ritual are generally aligned toward what is said to be a benign
and desirable aim, soteria,66 that is, deliverance, safe return, safe passage. Its
achievement, however, for both dramaturgical and ritual reasons, cannot be
easy. Itmust be earned by the experience of anguish, despair, risk, and danger.
The quality and seriousness of the final achievement depend on the force of the
obstacles to reach it, on a price paid. A delicate balance is required
overcome so
that the final victory or resolution is neither hollow nor cheap. The tensions in
the fabric of the play are part of its dramatic dialectic and signs of a balance in
the process of adjustment.
VI
As indicators of a desirable conclusion as well as means of focusing the

tensions implicated in such a conclusion, the aetiologies are part of this balancing
act. They are also in this play part of a metatheatrical dimension. Because they
are explanatory and self-referential, the issue of interpretation is likely to be
65. This is a large issue whose adequate treatment would go well beyond the limits of the
present article. Briefly, though, I have inmind, on the one hand, the general sense of Attic tragedy
developed by J.-P. Vernant (above, n. 19: chap. 2) as a historically definable fabric of "tensions and
ambiguities," and the view recently articulated by Goldhill (inWinkler and Zeitlin [above, n. 19],
esp. 123-24, 126-27; cf. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy [Cambridge, 1986] 112-13) of a tension
and dialectic between transgressive elements in tragicmyth and normative features both within the
drama (e.g., the role of the chorus) and implied by the festival context of the drama's performance.
With regard to IT in particular, I note the remark of E. Hall (above, n. 60: 148) that in this play "the
layers of irony become almost impenetrable." On the other hand, I am thinking of the likely
heterogeneity within a late fifth-century audience and signs that Euripides' drama is accordingly
attuned, thus open to a range of possible "readings," say, between a play of exotically colored high
adventure and a self-reflective, ironic and paradoxical representation of religious phenomena. A
specific instance of differing audience response is related at IT 264-80, polarized between pious
credulity and reckless skepticism; cf. the spectrum of responses toOrestes' trial reported (by a clearly
partisanmessenger) at Orestes 866-949. For Euripides' special interest in crowds and spectators see
H. Diller, "Umwelt undMasse als dramatische Faktoren bei Euripides," Entr. Hardt 6 (1960) 87
105; and cf. the suggestive if not altogether convincing contribution by D. Lanza, "Lo spettatore
sulla scena," inD. Lanza, M. Vegetti, et al., L'ideologia della citta (Naples, 1977) 57-78. For the
changing character and responses of elements of later fifth-century "audiences" attending the older,
more obscure rituals, see S. C. Humphreys, "Dynamics of theGreek Breakthrough: The Dialogue
between Philosophy and Religion," in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age
Civilizations (Albany, 1986) 100-101. One might also keep inmind the variety of audience implied
byAristophanes' comedy, including rural, urban, "conservative," "democratic," intellectual, nonin
tellectual, citizen, and noncitizen.
66. On soteria in the play, see Burnett (above, n. 1) 47-48.

332 CLASSICAL
raised. The aitia will have an effect of distancing, of creatingwider perspectives,

and of drawing particular attention towhat is being explained, opening it up to
reflection. Explanation may be a form of reinforcement, of overdetermined asser
tion. But a dramatic context encourages the possibility of questioning, of starting
a dialogue rather than justmaking statements. This metatheatrical strain is sup
ported throughout the play by occasions where our attention is drawn to the
process of interpretation.67Iwould like to conclude by sketching out this sugges
tion, first by listing a selection of examples and then by discussing one in detail.
Here are the examples: Kalchas's interpretation of the crisis at Aulis and
Agamemnon's vow (18-24; cf. anapheron, 23); the explantion of Thoas's name
(33); the nature of Artemis's Taurian festivalwhose name is kalon, though, says
Iphigenia, Ta6' atkka x o (36-37); Iphigenia's dream and her attempt to under
stand it (44-58; cf. sumball6, 55); the question of how to realizeApollo's oracle
toOrestes (77-94); the furthermisinterpretation of Iphigenia's dream (149-77);
the question of Orestes' name (248-51, 499-504); the identity of the two young
Greeks as worked out by a pious herdsman and an aggressive skeptic (267-79;
the latter gets it right); Iphigenia's attempt to reinterpretArtemis and her ritual
(380-91); Orestes' despair of intelligible order in oracles and the world as a
whole (570-75); much, of course, of the recognition scene; Iphigenia's letter,
whose message she can convey only by memory because she cannot read (584
90, 760-65); the authentication of remembered recognition tokens (808-26, cf.
tekmerion, tekmeria, 808, 822); Orestes' unnamable crime of matricide (927-28,
940; cf. 938); Thoas's failure to interpret Iphigenia's ironic deceptions (1153
1233; cf. saphos, 1156, 1162; i 6' aic(a Tig, 1168; cf. 926, 1232-33); the third
stasimon (1234-82), concerned with who will control prophecy and the sources
of its interpretation (speech or dreams; cf. 1084-85); the second attempt of the
Taurian countrymen to interpret the behavior of young Greeks (1326-53; as in
the first messenger speech there is an effect like that of a play within a play as we
hear about the Taurians sitting at a distance in silence, watching the Greek
heroes and to figure out what
trying is going on: cf. 296, 1342-43); and the
returning messenger's effort to understand where Thoas is and what the chorus
have been up to (1296-1303)-he asks for an hermeneus (1302).
This is of course a rough listing, but it may suggest how control of the
sources of understanding shifts about-among the characters, between gods and
humans, and also between the course of the play and our understanding of it.
The audience will be drawn into-in a way akin to what Bertolt Brecht calls
for68-the process of interpretation, or at least they must notice the conditions
67. In various forms this is basic to Attic tragedy. For Aeschylus, see, e.g., S. Goldhill.
Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia (Cambridge, 1984); for Sophocles, esp. in the use of
oracles, see, e.g., R. W. Bushnell, Prophesying Tragedy (Ithaca, 1988). See also 0. Taplin, Greek
Tragedy inAction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978), esp. index s.vv. "riddles"and "silences."
68. He is interested in fostering a "criticalattitude in the spectator" (cf.Ar. Frogs 954-61) vis-a
vis a representation of the world as "caught up in development and continuous process" and in a

WOLFF: 333
and choices of interpretation. Finally, one more example of such inducement:

the firstmessenger describes Orestes' fit of madness and how he cries out to
Pylades:69
Tiv6?; 6b' o)X oQag
IHvu6aq, 6e6oQxag TIv&6
"ALbov be6xaclvav 6 ?[3LE
[1oCToa xTavEtv
8EtvaLSg eXVi6aLg EigS Ei EoTotCOEVY];
ri 'x YElTo6vov 6E JVrQ TrvEovoCXxCal P6ovO
TTFQgoigEQEg(oa, tlq]T:Q'ayxdakglS Erqv
EXovoaa, jtETQvov aX&og, W)g EJEtipaktrq.
(285-90)
But, themessenger continues in response to these crazed visions, "one could not
see the outlines of their [the Erinyes'] shape"-xtaTlCa toQ(cpiS
oxiCtaT' (292)
and he seems to say that the lowing of cattle and barking of dogs are somehow
(the condition of the text does not allow us to be more exact) taken for sounds
produced by the Furies (294). Orestes then, it is reported, "like a lion," rushes
upon the cattle and starts cutting them up with his sword, "supposing [dokon]
thus toward off the divine Erinyes" (296-99). The passage is remarkably sugges
tive. Orestes is vividly shown still subject to the aftereffects of his crime. The
sudden evidence of his instability energizes the dramatic action and adds sus
pense to what may follow. But the representation of Orestes' madness is framed
so that we are put inmind of the theatrical or representational process itself. This
ismanaged by language that draws attention to what is seen or not seen-in the
verbal report of an observer (285, 291)70-and that refers in quasi-technical
terms to representation as such, both visual and acoustic: morphs schemata
We are presented with a pair of interpretations thatwe
(292), mimemata (294).71
must ourselves interpret: the mad perceptions of Orestes and the ordinary,
common-sense account of the messenger. The latter appears to be a correction of
didacticism realized inways emotionally and aesthetically pleasurable to that actively engaged specta
tor (B. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 15 [Frankfurt, 1967] 275, 358). A consideration of such spectator
involvement inGreek drama is encouraged by the comparisons drawn between the theater and the
political and juridicalassemblies atAthens by J.Ober andB. Strauss, inWinkler andZeitlin (above, n.
19) 237-70.
69. This isDiggle's OCT text, which accepts Jackson's ingenious emendation at 288 for the
and themore straightforward
pretty much impossible (if no lacuna isposited after it) qi6' iXXLTdvwov,
if not so necessary (cf. Ba. 945-50) correction &aog for 6X0ov at 290.
70. Cf. the emphasis on seeing at the entrance of Orestes and Pylades (67-76) in themore usual
context of indicating a stage setting (e.g., Soph. Phil. 16-39); and cf. the parodos of Ion with its
visual evocations of representations imagined to be on stage (190-218). For dok6n at IT 299, cf.
Aesch. Cho. 1051, 1053; and for seeing what others do not see, Cho. 1061. Cf. also Athena at the end
of the play, seen by the audience but not by Orestes and Iphigenia (1447).
71. Add to this the account of Orestes' movements at the onset of madness (282-83), and we
have all the parameters of theatrical representation. In spite of the surrounding textual difficulties I
see no need to change L[tLF[taTa(294); the proposed alternatives only repeat the sense of (pOoyy6g
and/or vd.yu.ala in the previous line (cf.G. F. Else, " 'Imitation' in the Fifth Century," CP 53 [1958]
89 n. 38; more generally, E. C. Keuls, Plato and Greek Painting [Leiden, 1978] 14-22). The scene as
a whole, the deluded hero killing animals, is itself a partial imitation of Soph. Ajax 1-70.

334 CLASSICAL
the former. Orestes confuses cattle and dogs with Furies and perhaps something
in the rocky landscapewith the stone weight of hismother about to drop on him
(290; cf. 263, 281, 324). (And the imagined threat of that stony thing becomes
actual when the herdsmen attack with their stones: 310, 318-19, 326-27, 331
32.) Yet the audience also knows those Furies to be an integral, indispensable
part of Orestes' story. Even in the eyes of the messenger the escape of Orestes
and Pylades, "the goddess's sacrificial offerings," from death by stoning has
something uncanny and providential about it (328-29).72
We have here Euripides' characteristic interplay between a heroic, aristo
craticworld drawn from the repertoire of myth and an everyday, contemporary
view of thatworld. But, to put it another way-encouraged by themessenger's
use of the condensed epic simile comparing Orestes' mad attack to a lion's (297),
the hero's mad are closer to the imaginative world of poetry and theater
visions
than is the herdsman's prosaic view of things.73 Aetiology makes a kind of bridge
between two such worlds, one imaginatively constructed, the other ordinarily
experienced. In this way aetiology is like the drama itself and lets us see that the
bridge is also between a quasi-rational mode-the consciously manipulated con
struction of myth in dramatic form-and the surface irrationality of ordinary life,
including its religious practices. The present passage points to no ritual as such,
but does suggest how divine Furies might have come into being through the
hallucinations of a matricide. The play as a whole, however, brings this extreme,
subjective experience into balance with the overall coherence of itsmythic struc
ture, a structure that still includes the Furies as a necessary part of its coherence.
In the process an audience may be instructed as to how to think about them, as it
is about the various elements of this story forwhich the play offers aetiologies.
Dartmouth College
72. Note a&iLTov (328; cf. above, section I), EVTiJXEl (329), and e'exXecttaev (331, where
Bothe's emendation is unnecessary: see above, n. 16).
73. For madness and theatrical, mimetic behavior, cf. the terrible account inHF922-1009, esp.
947-49, 952-63, 998-99, and Pentheus's last scene on stage in Ba. 912-76 (both in ritual contexts).
The link, of course, isDionysus.


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Euripides' "Iphigenia among the Taurians": Aetiology, Ritual, and Myth

Author(s): Christian Wolff

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Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians:

EURIPIDES'Iphigenia among the Taurians is usually regarded as an excep

? 1992BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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can be dismissed as no more than a projection of human bloodthirstiness. The

3. Cf. D. J. Mastronarde, "The Optimistic Rationalist in Euripides," in M. Cropp, E.

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the gods Iphigenia finds unbelievable, is forefather of a line that includesAtreus

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Iphigenia's effort to regenerate the goddess Artemis is incomplete and com

particular play-to a world

(1448, 1462)-a move

[acOdv 6', 'OQE?Tc , Trag adg EJrtlOTOkCd

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goddess's altar. This bloodletting, as a reported aetiology explains, was insti

Iphigenia, see below, nn. 20, 38.

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(1984) 238-44. For Iphigenia and theArkteia, see below, n. 38.

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subjection because of those deities of strictest payment, the Erinyes (281-303).

thought up by Iphigenia to effect an escape, the ritual washing by the sea

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Athena next addresses Iphigenia:

oE 6' apA(pi oaEvaIg, 'IcplyEveLa, xkiuaxag

Cpd6g, "finely woven fabrics"

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the suggestive, if not altogether persuasive, discussion of R. Caldwell, "TragedyRomanticized: The

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double-edged joke. Thoas calls on Apollo inhorror, exclaiming that no barbarian

35. A connection of Clytaemnestra to Iphigenia's aition is tentatively suggested by Caldwell

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viewpoints of both ideological and dramaturgical considerations (and allow that

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representation of her has an unsettling effect. Is the play suggesting a final

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The relation of aition to drama raises questions that emerge first in an

XO0b)v6' XECToE tQ61rcTa RE'v (4a')ot6?LgS vCOv

`kyovv 6b otLynx&66xovv ovx E6ival,

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The Athenian Choes festival has a general, characteristic double aspect

Dionysus's Temple in theMarshes, are closed, a time of religiously hedged risk

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("Schweigebitte": seeMatthiessen [above, n. 37] 45-46), 1232-33.

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aition of its purely divine foundation (945-46).58 In Aeschylus Athena deter

58. See Jacoby, FGrHist IIIb Suppl. (Leiden, 1954) 24-25.

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63. I owe this suggestion to Seth Benardete.

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As indicators of a desirable conclusion as well as means of focusing the

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raised. The aitia will have an effect of distancing, of creatingwider perspectives,

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and choices of interpretation. Finally, one more example of such inducement: