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[1] 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
- ↑ The action of the play is fixed at the now historic Balaclava, in the Crimea.
