Iphigenia in Aulis

Iphigenia in Aulis is a tragedy by Euripides and the last of his surviving plays. It was written between 408 BC, after Orestes, and 406 BC, the year of the author's death. It was first staged the following year by his son or nephew, Euripides the Younger, as part of a trilogy with The Bacchae and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and won first prize at the City Dionysia in Athens.

The action is set before the outbreak of the Trojan War. The Greek fleet waits at Aulis, in Boeotia, its ships ready to sail, but no wind blows. After consulting the seer Calchas, the leaders learn that this is the will of the goddess Artemis, who is withholding the winds because Agamemnon has offended her by killing a sacred stag. To appease her, Agamemnon must sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. The conflict between military duty and paternal love drives the whole play. Agamemnon, horrified but fearing a mutiny among his troops, summons his daughter under the pretext of a marriage to Achilles, then sends a corrective message that Menelaus intercepts. The brothers argue, each seems to persuade the other, and in the end Agamemnon resigns himself to the sacrifice, claiming that the army would otherwise storm his palace at Argos and kill his whole family.

The tragedy gives prominence to Clytemnestra's fierce resistance as she confronts her husband, and to the moment when Iphigenia and Achilles discover the deception. Achilles offers to defend the girl, at first largely for the sake of his own honour, but when he tries to rally the Greeks he finds that the army demands the sacrifice and he barely escapes being stoned. Iphigenia, realising there is no escape, accepts death so that Achilles will not throw his life away in a lost cause, and asks her mother not to bear resentment against her father. She prefers to die heroically, as the saviour of Greece, rather than be dragged unwilling to the altar. The ending as preserved, in which a messenger reports that a deer was substituted for her, is generally considered probably not an authentic part of Euripides' original text.

The play had considerable influence. It inspired Jean Racine's Iphigénie (1674) and was the basis of numerous eighteenth-century operas, among them Apostolo Zeno's libretto and, above all, Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), still one of the most performed. On screen, Michael Cacoyannis adapted it in 1977 with Irene Papas as Clytemnestra. The tragedy remains a reference point on sacrifice, the responsibilities of power and the price of war.