crime." For a while the soldiers are persuaded to leave Iphigenia alone with the strangers, while she performs the necessary rites. At length her delay rouses their suspicion, and they discover that, so far from rendering the statue and the prisoners meet for the sacrifice, they are plotting not only flight, but theft. One of them brings the intelligence to Thoas:—
"At length we all resolved
To go, though not permitted, where they were.
There we beheld the Grecian bark with oars
Well furnished, winged for flight; and at their seats
Grasping their oars were fifty rowers: free
From chains beside the stern the two youths stood.
. . . . .Debate
Now rose: What mean you, sailing o'er the seas,
The statue and the priestess from the land
By stealth conveying? Whence art thou, and who,
That bear'st her, like a purchased slave, away?
He said, I am her brother, be of this
Informed, Orestes, son of Agamemnon;
My sister, so long lost, I bear away,
Recovered here."
Orestes and his crew release Iphigenia from the guards, and drive them up the rocks,—
"With dreadful marks
Disfigured and bloody bruises: from the heights
We hurled at them fragments of rock: but vainly.
The bowmen with their arrows drove us thence."
The sea, however, swept back the galley to the beach, and not even the fifty rowers can propel it out of harbour.
