CHAPTER V.
THE TWO IPHIGENIAS.
"I was cut off from hope in that sad place,
Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears:
My father held his hand upon his face;
I, blinded with my tears,
Still strove to speak: my voice was thick with sighs,
As in a dream. Dimly I could descry
The stem black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes
Waiting to see me die,"
About the fate of Iphigenia many stories were current in Greece, and the version of it adopted by Euripides is one among several instances of the freedom which he permitted himself in dealing with old legends, Æschylus in his "Agamemnon" and Sophocles in his "Electra" make her to have been really sacrificed at Aulis. Euripides chose a milder and perhaps later form of the story; and if we have the conclusion of the drama as he wrote it, Diana, at the last moment, rescues the maiden, and substitutes in her place on the altar—a fawn. To this change his own humane disposition may have led him, although he had in earlier
