Euripides (Donne)/Chapter 5
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 plays not scrupled to immolate Polyxena and Macaria. Perhaps in the case of Iphigenia consistency required of him to save her, since in the play, of which the scene is laid at Tauri, the princess is alive twenty years after her appearance at Aulis. Pausanias, as diligent a collector of legendary lore as Sir Walter Scott himself, says that a virgin was offered up at Aulis to appease the wrath of the divine huntress, and that her name was Iphigenia. This victim, however, was not a daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, but of Theseus and Helen, whom her mother, through fear of Menelaus, did not dare to own. In the Iliad, that common source of the stage-poets when they dealt with the tale of Troy, nothing is said about substitute or sacrifice, nor about Iphigenia's ministering to Diana at Tauri. On the contrary,[1] the Homeric Iphianassa—for that is her epic name—is safe and well with her mother and sisters at Argos, and ten years after her supposed death or escape is offered by Agamemnon as a bride to Achilles.
The "Iphigenia in Aulis," in its relation to the Grecian world, possessed, we may fairly surmise, universal interest. For an audience composed, as that in the Dionysiac theatre was, of Athenians, allies, and strangers, there were associations with the first general armament of the Greeks against foreigners, with which a modern reader can but imperfectly sympathise. Priam, Paris, Hector, Agamemnon, Achilles, Helen, and Iphigenia had indeed, centuries before, vanished into the shadow-land of Hades, and the quiet sheep fed or the tortoise crawled over the mounds where Troy once stood. Yet if the city built by Gods now excited neither wrath nor dread in Greece, Persia and the great King, though no longer objects of alarm, were not beyond the limits of Hellenic anxiety or vigilance, and were still able to vex Athens by their "mines of Ophir," as once they had made her desolate by their Median archers and the swarthy chivalry of Susa. To Greece and the islands, the dwellers beyond Mount Taurus represented the ancient foe whom it had taken their ancestors ten years to vanquish; and scenic reminiscences of their first conflict with an eastern adversary were still welcome to the third and fourth generation of spectators, whose sires had fought beside Miltiades and Cimon.[2]
The opening scene of the "Iphigenia in Aulis" has, for picturesqueness, rarely if ever been surpassed. The centre of the stage is occupied by the tent of Agamemnon: supposing ourselves among the audience, we see on the left hand of it the white tents and beyond them the black ships of the Achæans; on the right, the road to the open country by which Iphigenia and her mother Clytemnestra will soon arrive. The time is night, the "brave o'erhanging firmament" is studded with stars. The only sounds audible are the tramp of sentinels, and the challenge of the watch: the camp is wrapt in deep slumber:—
"Not the sound
Of birds is heard, nor of the sea; the winds
Are hushed in silence."
"The king of men" is much agitated by some secret grief. By the light of a "blazing lamp" he is writing a letter:—
"The writing he does blot; then seal,
And open it again; then on the floor
Casts it in grief: the warm tear from his eyes
Fast flowing, in his thoughts distracted near,
Even, it may seem, to madness."
The cause for the perturbation of his spirit is this: the Grecian fleet has been detained at Aulis by thwarting winds, and Calchas, the seer, has declared that Agamemnon's daughter must be sacrificed to Diana, irate with him because he has shot, while hunting, one of her sacred deer. Unwittingly the Grecian commander has, in order to conciliate her, vowed that he will offer to her the most beautiful creature that the year of his child's birth has produced. He has been persuaded by his brother Menelaus to summon Iphigenia to Aulis, on the pretext of giving her in marriage to Achilles. He has sent a letter to Argos, directing Clytemnestra to bring the maiden to the camp without delay. Soon, however, the father recoils from this deceit, and he prepares a second letter, annulling the former one, and enjoining his wife to remain at home. This he commits to the hands of an old servant of Clytemnestra's, with injunctions to make all speed with it to Argos; but just as the messenger is passing the borders of the camp, he is seized by Menelaus, who breaks the seal, reads the missive, and hurries to upbraid his brother with treachery to himself and the general cause of Hellas. A sharp debate ensues between the brothers—one twitting the other with bad faith; the other taxing the husband of Helen with want of proper feeling for his niece and himself, and chiding him for taking such pains to get back that worthless runaway, his wife. "If I," he says,
"Before ill judging, have with sobered thought
My purpose changed, must I be therefore judged
Reft of my sense? Thou rather, who hast lost
A wife that brings thee shame, yet dost with warmth
Wish to regain her, may the favouring Gods
Grant thee such luck. But I will not slay
My children.
My nights, my days, would pass away in tears,
Did I with outrage and injustice wrong
Those who derive their life from me."
The brothers part in high dudgeon, Agamemnon remaining on the stage; and to him a messenger enters, bearing the unwelcome tidings that Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and the infant Orestes, will soon make glad his eyes, after their long separation. They are close to the camp, though they have not yet entered it, for—
"Wearied with this length of way, beside
A beauteous-flowing fountain they repose,
Themselves refreshing, and their steeds unyoked
Crop the fresh herbage of the verdant mead."
"Thou hast my thanks—go in," says the now utterly wretched father to the messenger, and then tells in soliloquy his woes to the audience. He is caught in inextricable toils. Shall he cause the assembled host to rise and mutiny, or shall he keep his rash vow, and sacrifice his darling to the irate goddess—"what ruin hath the son of Priam brought on me and my house!"
It is now early morning, and the camp is astir, and a murmur, gradually getting louder, is heard. The chieftains and the soldiers are greeting the queen of Argos and Mycenæ, her fair daughter, and her infant son. But before they enter, Menelaus has hurried back, and is reconciled to his royal brother. The younger king tells his liege lord that speedy repentance has followed on the heels of his late hasty passion. He has been moved by the tears of the distracted father: he yields to the arguments used by him:—
"When from thine eye I saw thee drop the tear,
I pitied thee and wept myself: what I said then
I now unsay, no more unkind to thee.
Now feel I as thou feelest—nay, exhort thee
To spare thy child; for what hath she to do,
Thy virgin daughter, with my erring wife?
Break up the army, let the troops depart.
Within this breast there beats a loving heart.
Love or ambition shall not us divide,
Though they part brethren oft."
A second choral song follows this reconciliation scene; and then the chariot that has brought Clytemnestra and her young children appears on the right hand of the royal tent. She is welcomed by the Chorus, and assisted by them to alight. In Clytemnestra, Euripides shows how delicately he can delineate female characters, and how happily he has seized the opportunity for exhibiting the Lady Macbeth or Lucrezia Borgia of the Greek stage as a loving wife and mother. The seeds of evil passions were dormant in her nature, but until she was deeply wronged they bore not fruit. Clytemnestra in this play is a fond mother, a trusting wife, a very woman, even shy, unpretending, unversed in courts or camps. To the Chorus, after acknowledging their "courtesy and gentleness of speech," she says:—
"I hope that I am come
To happy nuptials, leading her a bride.
But from the chariot take the dowry-gifts,
Brought with me for the virgin: to the house
Bear them with careful hands. My daughter, leave
The chariot now, and place upon the ground
Thy delicate foot. Kind women, in your arms
Receive her—she is tender; prithee too,
Lend me a hand, that I may leave this seat
In seemly fashion. Some stand by the yoke,
Fronting the horses; they are quick of eye,
And hard to rule when startled. Now receive
This child, an infant still. Dost sleep, my boy?
The rolling of the car hath wearied thee:
Yet wake to see thy sister made a bride;
A noble youth, the bridegroom, Thetis' son,
And he will wed into a noble house."
She enters without pomp or circumstance, with only an attendant or two. Knowing his name, she displays no further curiosity about the supposed bridegroom: whatever her husband has designed must, she thinks, be good. She, a half-divine princess of the race of Tantalus, the sister of Helen and of the great Twin-Brethren, the consort of "the king of men," is nevertheless an uninstructed Grecian housewife. She knows nothing of the genealogy of Achilles, at least on the father's side. She has never heard of the Myrmidons: she knows not where Pthia may be: she asks what mortal or what goddess became the wife of Peleus; and when told that she is the sea-nymph Thetis, who but for a warning oracle would have been the spouse of Jupiter, she wonders where the rites of Hymen were celebrated, on firm land or in some ocean cave. The childlike amazement and delight of Iphigenia also are drawn by a master's hand. Not Thecla, when first entering Wallenstein's palace and seeing the royal state by which her father was surrounded; not Miranda, gazing for the first time upon "the brave new world,"[3] are more delicate creations of poetic fancy than Iphigenia.
Bearing in mind what the representation of strong emotions can be on the modern stage, where the face and limbs of the actors are free to exhibit the varying moods of a tragic character, it is most difficult, or rather impossible, to understand how passion or pathos could be interpreted by men so encumbered as the actors were on the ancient stage by their masks, their high boots, and their cumbersome robes. And as the scene in which Agamemnon receives the newly-arrived Clytemnestra and his daughter is a mixed one,—joy simulated, fear and grief suppressed, on his part—happiness in the unlooked-for meeting with a husband and father, and hope for the approaching nuptials, on theirs,—it is impossible to conceive how it can have been adequately represented. The painter who drew Agamemnon at Diana's altar veiling his face that he might not look on his victim, had at least an opportunity for conveying the presence of grief "too deep for tears." But how could the father's emotions in this scene have been imparted to an audience? The Greek actor differed little from a statue except in the possession of voice, and in a certain, though a limited, range of expressive gesture. That these imperfect means, as they appear to us, sufficed for an intelligent and susceptible audience, there is no reason to doubt; and we must content ourselves with the assurance that the performer and the mechanist supplied all that was then needed for the full expression of terror and pity.
The character of Achilles is delineated with great skill and felicity. The hero of the Iliad is a most dramatic portraiture of one who has, in spite of his pride and wilfulness, many compensating virtues. If his passions are strong, so are his affections; if he is implacable to mailed foes, he is generous and even tender to weeping Priam: he knows that he bears a doomed life if he tarries on Trojan ground, yet though highly provoked by Agamemnon, he abides constant to the oath he had taken as one of the suitors of Helen. But the Achilles of the "Iphigenia," although a peerless soldier, the Paladin of the Achæan host—a Greek Bayard, "sans peur et sans reproche"—is a modest, nay, even a shy stripling, blushing like a girl when he comes suddenly into the presence of his destined bride and her mother: not easily moved, yet perplexed and indignant in the extreme when he discovers that his name has been used as a lure, and full of pity for, and prompt to aid, the unhappy victims of a cruel and unnatural plot, Achilles, indeed, in the hands of Euripides, is an anticipation of the Knight in the Canterbury Tales:—
"And though that he was worthy, he was wys:
And of his port as meke as is a mayde:
He never yit no vilonye ne sayde,
In al his lyf unto no manner wight:
He was a verry perfit gentil knight."
No chance of extricating himself from the dreadful consequences of his summons to Clytemnestra remains for Agamemnon, except the very slender one of persuading her to return alone to Argos. This she stoutly, and, in her ignorance of his secret motive, reasonably refuses to do. A sharp connubial encounter ensues, in which Agamemnon does not get the best of it. A very short extract only can be afforded to their controversy. After asking sundry pertinent questions about the young bridegroom and the marriage ceremony—in which the speakers are at cross-purposes, Clytemnestra meaning the wedding, while Agamemnon's replies covertly allude to the sacrifice—he astonishes her by a most unexpected demand upon her obedience! "Obey you!" she exclaims; "you have long trained me to do so, but in what am I now to show my obedience?"
"Agam.To Argos go, thy charge the virgins there.
Clyt.And leave my daughter? Who shall raise the torch?
Agam.The light to deck the nuptials I will hold.
Clyt.Custom forbids; nor wouldst thou deem it seemly.
Agam.Nor decent that thou mix with banded troops.
Clyt.But decent that the mother give the daughter.
Agam.Let me persuade thee.
Clyt.By the potent Queen,
Goddess of Argos, no. Of things abroad
Take thou the charge: within the house my care
Shall deck the virgin's nuptials, as is meet."
Agamemnon, now at his wits' end, says he will go and consult Calchas, and hear from him whether anything can be done to set him right with Diana.
Matters are hurrying to a crisis. Achilles enters, after the choral song has ceased, thinking to find Agamemnon, and then to inform him that the Myrmidons are on the very edge of mutiny, and that he cannot hold them in much longer. He says:—
"With impatient instance oft
They urge me: 'Why, Achilles, stay we here?
What tedious length of time is yet to pass,
To Ilium ere we sail? Wouldst thou do aught,
Do it, or lead us home: nor here await
The sons of Atreus and their long delays.'"
Instead of his commander-in-chief he finds Clytemnestra, who greatly scandalises him by offering her hand to her destined son-in-law. She, on her part, is surprised at a modesty so uncommon in young men. The old slave, the same whom Menelaus so roughly handles at the opening of the drama, now comes forward and unfolds the mystery. Clytemnestra sues to the captain of the Myrmidons for protection against the cruel "black-bearded kings:" he is highly incensed at having been made a cat's-paw of by Agamemnon, Calchas the seer, and the crafty Ulysses, and promises to do all in his power to rescue Iphigenia from her fearful doom, even at any risk to himself from his impatient soldiers.
Agamemnon now reappears. Ignorant that his wife is now furnished with all the facts he had withheld, he is greatly discomfited by her upbraiding him with his weak and wicked consent to the sacrifice of Iphigenia. After threatening him with her vengeance—a threat she some years later fulfilled—she descends to entreaties, and prays him to spare their child. And now comes the most affecting scene of the tragedy. Iphigenia, aware that she is not the destined bride but the chosen victim, implores her father to change his purpose; and the more to prevail with him, brings in her arms her infant brother, Orestes, to move him to spare her. Agamemnon, however, declares, he is so compromised with the Greeks that he cannot recede. His own life will be in danger from the infuriated host, if he any longer withholds the appointed victim. Again Achilles rushes on with the news that his soldiers have sworn to kill him, if for the sake of a young maiden he any longer detains them at Aulis. And now the daughter of a line of heroes shows herself heroic. She will be the victim whom the goddess demands. Troy shall fall: Greece shall triumph: in place of marriage and happy years, she will die for the common weal. Her father shall be glorious to all ages: she will be content with the renown of saving Hellas. "With much compunction, and with some hesitation on the part of the chivalrous Achilles, all now accept the stern necessity. In solemn procession, and with a funeral chant sung by the victim and the Chorus, she goes to the altar of Diana. The end of the tragedy, as we have it, is probably spurious, so far as the substitution of the fawn is concerned. The real conclusion seems to have been the appearance of the goddess over the tent of Agamemnon, to inform the weeping mother that her daughter is not dead, but borne away to a remote land, the Tauric Chersonese. They are parted for ever, yet there may be consolation in knowing Iphigenia has not descended to the gloomy Hades, "the bourne from which no traveller returns."
Mr Paley remarks, with his unfailing insight into the pith and marrow of the Grecian drama, that "Aristotle cites the character of Iphigenia at Aulis as an example of want of consistency or uniformity; since she first supplicates for life, and afterwards consents to die. It is difficult to attribute much weight to the criticism, though it comes with the sanction of a great name. The part of Iphigenia throughout appears singularly natural. Her first impulse is to live; but when she clearly perceives how much depends on her voluntary death, and how Achilles, her champion, is compromised by his dangerous resolve to save her—lastly, how the Greeks are bent on the expedition, from motives of national honour—she yields herself up a willing victim. It would be quite as reasonable to object to Menelaus's sudden change of purpose, from demanding the death of the maid, to the refusing to consent to it."
IPHIGENIA AT TAURI.
Twenty years have passed since the concluding scene of "Iphigenia in Aulis" before the opening of this drama. Ten years were spent in the siege of Troy, another ten in the return of the surviving heroes to their homes. From the moment when the young daughter of Agamemnon is borne away from the altar at Aulis, she has been devoted to the service of Diana at Tauri—a goddess who, like the ferocious deities of the Mexicans, delighted in the savour of human blood. From that moment, also, Iphigenia has remained Ignorant of the great events that have taken place since her rescue. She knows not that Troy has fallen; that her father has been murdered and avenged; that her brother Orestes and her sister Electra yet live, but under the ban of gods and men; or that Helen, the "direful spring" of so many woes to Greece, is once more queen at Sparta. Little chance, indeed, was there of her getting news of her country or kindred in the inhospitable country to which she had been brought. The land where Tauri[4] stood was shunned by all Greeks, for the welcome awaiting them there was death on the altar of the goddess, to whom men of their race were the most acceptable of victims.
But the end of her long exile and the hour assigned for her restoration to home and kindred were at hand. A Greek vessel arrives at this remote and barbarous region; and two strangers, immediately after the priestess of Diana has spoken a kind of prologue, come upon the stage, and cautiously, as persons afraid of being seen, survey the temple. Though they have had foul weather and rough seas, they are not shipwrecked, but have come with a special object to this perilous land. That object is apparently of the most desperate kind, for the strangers are not only Greeks, but have come, in obedience to an oracle, to carry off and transport to Attica the tutelary goddess of Tauri. In the prologue the audience is prepared to recognise in the two persons on the stage Orestes and his friend Pylades; for Iphigenia relates a dream she has had on the previous night, but which she misinterprets. She believes it to mean that Orestes, whom she had left an infant at Aulis, is dead, and proposes to offer libations to his shade. Orestes and his friend, having satisfied themselves that this is the temple whence the image, by force or fraud, must be taken away, retire and give place to the Chorus, not indeed without some misgivings on the part of Orestes as to the possibility of executing their enjoined task. "The walls are high," he says—"the doors are barred with brass; even if we can climb the one and force the other, how shall we escape the watchful eyes of those who guard the shrine or dwell in the city? If detected, we shall be put to death:—
"Shall we, then, ere we die, by flight regain
The ship, in which we hither ploughed the sea?"
"Of flight we must not think," rejoins Pylades; "the god's command must be obeyed. But we have seen enough of the temple for the present; and now let us retire to some cave where
"We may lie concealed
At distance from our ship, lest some, whose eyes
May note it, bear the tidings to the king,
And we be seized by force."
What Pylades had dreaded happens. The Chorus, as soon as their song, in which Iphigenia takes a part, is ended, say to her,—
"Leaving the sea-washed shore an herdsman comes,
Speeding with some fresh tidings."
The herdsman's report of what he has seen is most strange and exciting to the hearers of it. He opens it with apprising the priestess that she must get all things ready for a sacrifice, for
"Two youths, swift rowing 'twixt the dashing rocks
Of our wild sea, are landed on the beach,
A grateful offering at Diana's shrine.
"At first one of my comrades took them, as they sat in the cavern, for two deities; but another said, they are wrecked mariners: and he was in the right, as soon it proved; for one of the twain was suddenly seized with madness, while the other soothed him in his frenzy,—
"Wiped off the foam, took of his person care,
And spread his fine robe over him.
"The mad one had assailed our herds, mistaking them, it seems, for certain Furies that hunt him; whereupon we, seeing the havoc he was making, blew our horns, called the neighbours to our aid, and at last, after a desperate resistance from these strange visitors, we captured them both,—
"And bore them to the monarch of this land:
He viewed them, and without delay to thee
Sent them, devoted to the cleansing vase
And to the altar."
Hitherto the hand of Iphigenia is unspotted by the blood of human victims. The prisoners are the first Greeks who have landed on this fatal coast. She is still under the influence of her dream. Her conviction that Orestes is dead, her remembrance of the wrong done to her at Aulis, combine to harden her against the prisoners before they are presented to her. When, however, she has seen and interrogated them as to their nation and whence they come, her mood changes. Her ignorance of what has taken place since she left Argos is now dispersed. Not only does she learn that the Greeks have taken Troy and returned to their homes, but also that Orestes is living. He evades, indeed, her questions as to himself; he will not disclose his name and parentage, and is unaware that his sister stands before him. "Argives both are ye?" she says, "then one of you shall be spared, and he shall take a letter from me to my brother." Then follows the celebrated contest between the pair of friends as to which of them shall do her commission. The deeply affecting character of this scene was felt in all lands where the tragedy was represented. "What shouts, what excitement," says Lælius, "pervaded the theatre at the representation of my friend Pacuvius's new play, when the contest took place between Orestes and Pylades, each claiming the privilege of dying for the other!"[5] Then comes the recognition between the long-parted brother and sister. Iphigenia will not trust to mere oral communication. She will write as well as give a verbal message. She reads the letter to the captives. She takes this precaution for two reasons:—
"If thou preserve
This letter, that, though silent, will declare
My purport; if it perish in the sea,
Saving thyself my words too shalt thou save."
Brother and sister are now made manifest to each other. The priestess is the long-lost Iphigenia: the stranger is the brother whom she had held an infant in her arms, and whom she was mourning as dead. The method by which Æschylus and Sophocles bring about the discovery is consistent with their sublimer genius; that which Euripides adopts is equally consonant with his more human temperament, no less than with his views of dramatic art.
The deliverance of the friends and the priestess is still hard to accomplish; they are begirt with peril. Iphigenia knows too well the religious rigour of the Taurian king. Thoas is a devout worshipper of Diana; is an inexorable foe to Greeks. His subjects and his guards are equally hostile towards strangers and loyal to their goddess. If they cannot escape, the intruders will be immolated, and the priestess be a third victim on the blood-stained altar. And now Iphigenia proves that she is Greek to the core. She can plot craftily: she will even hazard the wrath of a deity by a timely fraud. King Thoas, little more than a simple country gentleman, dividing his time between field-sports and ceremonies sacred or civil, is no match for three wily Greeks. "The statue of Diana," she tells him, "must be taken down to the beach and purified by the sea; the two strangers, before they are sacrificed, must undergo lustration." "Take the caitiffs by all means," he says, "to the shore. A guard must attend you, for they are stalwart knaves; one of them has murdered his mother, and the other prompted and allotted him in that foul 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.
"Haste then, O king,
Take chains and gyves with thee; for if the flood
Subside not to a calm, there is no hope
Of safety for the strangers."
Thoas needs no prompter. He calls to the people of Tauri to avenge this insult to their goddess:—
"Harness your steeds at once: will you not fly
Along the shore, to seize whate'er this ship
Of Greece casts forth, and, for your goddess roused,
Hunt down these impious men? Will you not launch
Instant your swift-oared barks by seas, on land
To catch them, from the rugged rock to hurl
Their bodies, or impale them on the stake?"
To the Chorus he hints that, inasmuch as they have known all along and concealed the dark designs of the recreant priestess and her two confederates in this sacrilegious crime, he will, at more leisure, "devise brave punishments" for them.
The capture of the fugitives is unavoidable; and if they are once more in his grasp, the pious and wrathful king will leave no member of Agamemnon's family alive except the sad and solitary Electra. Euripides now settles the matter by his usual device, an intervening deity. Pallas Athene appears above the temple of Diana, and apprises Thoas that it is her pleasure that both the priestess and the image shall be carried to Greece by Orestes, where the worship of the Taurian Artemis, purged of its sanguinary rites, shall be established at Halæ and Brauron in Attica. Thoas is satisfied. Agamemnon's children are free to depart; and Pylades, as a reward for his long-enduring friendship, is to marry Electra.
Should this drama, in virtue of its happy conclusion, be accounted, along with the "Alcestis" and the "Helen" of Euripides, a tragi-comedy? In one respect the "Iphigenia at Tauri" stands apart from these plays. In the former, there is something approaching to the comic in the person of Hercules; in the latter, something even risible in the garb of Menelaus, and in his conversation with the old woman who is hall-porter in the palace of Theoclymenus. The drama, however, that has now been examined, is from its beginning to its end full of action, excitement, suspense, dread, and uncertainty. The doom of a race, as well as individuals, is at stake; and the prospect of the principal characters is gloomy in the extreme, until their rescue by a deity delivers them from further suffering. Both "Iphigenias" derive much of their attractions for all times and ages from the deeply domestic tenor of the story. "How many 'Iphigenias' have been written!" said Goethe. "Yet they are all different, for each writer manages the subject after his own fashion."
- ↑ "In his house
He hath three daughters: thou may'st home conduct
To Pthia her whom thou shalt most approve.
Chrysothemis shall be thy bride, or else
Laodice, or, if she please thee more,
Iphianassa."
—Iliad, ix. (Cowper.) - ↑ When Agesilaus, king of Sparta, was about to pass into Asia, as commander of the Greek army, he offered sacrifice to Diana at Aulis, so lively an impression still remained of the rash vow of "the king of men."
- ↑ "Oh wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! Oh, brave new world
That has such people in it!"
—"Tempest," act v. sc. 1. - ↑ The action of the play is fixed at the now historic Balaclava, in the Crimea.
- ↑ Cicero on Friendship, c. 7.