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Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris offers an interesting and unusual ending to the Orestes myth. We are familiar with that story from the previous plays we read during the read-along: The Greek general Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis in exchange for favourable winds to sail to Troy; his wife Clytemnestra murders him in vengeance for her daughter; their son Orestes, acting on the command of Apollo & with the aid of his sister Electra & his companion Pylades, murders his mother in vengeance for his father; he is then pursued by the Furies, who seek to punish his blood-guilt & drive him to madness, until he is eventually acquitted at trial in Athens. In this version, Apollo tells Orestes he can only escape the Furies if he travels to the land of Tauris on the Black Sea, steals the statue of Artemis from the temple there, and returns it to Athens. When Orestes & Pylades arrive at Tauris, they are captured by the locals & taken to the temple, where they are to be sacrificed - as all Greeks who come to the land of Tauris are - to the goddess. The priestess who presides over this grizzly human sacrifice is none other than Orestes’ sister Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrificed all those years ago ...
The play shares a lot of similarities with Euripides’ Helen - it offers an alternate version of a myth, involving a heroine whisked away by a god, & revolves around a reunion of long lost family members, who then must plot an escape from a king & country hostile to Greeks. At the same time, it picks up on themes & tropes familiar from other plays about the House of Atreus.
We read Iphigenia in Tauris in August 2020 as part of the Greek tragedy read-along.
