Electra, Antigone, Phaedra, Medea – Greek women appear time and again as the central-figures on whose fate some tragic play was based. One wonders what the few women in attendance in the ancient theatres as spectators made of such dramas. (They were permitted in it seems, especially in Athens, but hedged around with restrictions and only with a male chaperone in all liklihood). The dramatic and largely oral/aural manner of delivery of a Greek play is in accordance with the levels of literacy of the time and accounts for the popularity (not the populism!) of the ancient Greek theatre. Classical culture (how many Athenians, even rich ones, had read manuscripts of historians, orators, lyricists, philosophers and tragedians?) relied on oral tradition and the auditory experience in the Pnyx, at courts and at festivals. Stories and tales, spoken rather than read, were the currency of learning: and so open to anyone with the time to listen and the ears to hear.
So when the archon selecting the three tetralogies that competed in the Great Dionysia received the offered tetralogy (three tragedies, plus one satyr-play for lighter relief) proposed by Euripides, there was no question of who Iphigenia in Aulis was. Everyone knew about the cursed Atreides – their passions, their sins, their mistakes and often their monstrous criminal actions.
Tradition informs us that Aeschylus also wrote an ‘Iphigenia,’ but it did not reach us; Euripides composed another companion piece – Iphigeneia in Taurus. Orestes is another of the family who appears over and over: the leading role in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and again in the eponymous play of Euripides and in Sophocles’ Electra.
And there is a spiritual aspect to all this. These persons (for in tragedy we are dealing with three-dimensional human beings and not with the stock characters of the comedies and satyr-plays) come from the depths of ages past – and yet are relevant and refer to timeless relationships, actions and consequences. People for all seasons. The genius of the tragedian poets of 5th century Athens was to use them as yeast within a dough – to fashion moral tales, clothing contemporary concerns in the guise of the doings of known characters of myth.
When the Renaissance rediscovered the ancient Greek world, these archetypal stories invaded the visual, musical, theatrical and literary realms. There are over 50 ‘Iphigeneias’ inhabiting operas, plays and visual art works. Nothing could better illustrate the fertility of these versatile ancient myths. Many have fuelled new perspectives in such fields as philosophy (from Hegel to Heidegger) and in psychiatry and psychoanalysis (Freud, Adler, etc.).
When next ‘Iphigeneia’ is performed in Greece for the umpteenth time, it should be remembered that the origibal was composed when the glorious Classical and Periclean Athens was foundering in the Peloponnesian War and that the intellectual market was overwhelmed and cheapened by the sophistical questioning of morals, values, ideas and institutions. A transitional time, when the assurances of but a few years past have given way to fear and uncertainty. Socrates is on trial and shall soon be drinking the hemlock, accused of immorality, perversion of the concept of education and atheism.
Iphigenia in Aulis along with other works of Euripides’ last period of creation have been called ironic works.
Irony might be termed an oblique way of looking at the familiar. Potentially therefore it comprises an unexpected and subversive approach to what had hitherto been considered established rightness – moral, pedagogical and political correctness. Interpreting and comparing the original Iphigenia in Aulis as against the Western revived versions reveal a host of often contradictory interpretations and readings of the woman.
Often the irony in Euripides’ text was missed. For many and much in Greece after the 1821 Revolution, Iphigenia in Aulis was interpreted, taught and staged as a patriotic drama! A girl who willingly sacrifices herself for the country insulted by barbarians.
How convenient!
But if you read the text soberly, unbiasedly, what do you see? The Chorus of young women from Chalkida have come to admire, as fans, the heroes they have heard of. They wander dumbfounded outside the camp and the ‘heroes’ within noticing them put on a show: one shoots a bow, one rides, one runs, one fights. And the cunning dramatist slowly zooms in on the faces revealed and exposes a cowardly Agamemnon, a villainous Menelaus, a deceitful Odysseus, an intriguing Calchas and an ineffective if decent Achilles.
Into this tainted group, Clytemnestra brings Iphigenia for a fake marriage, a fraud. The young maid, after vainly pleading with her wretched father who sees only the military endgame, in disgust delivers her naked self to them as a carcass for slaughter. Achilles initially acts to protect her, but gives way in face of the opposition of all the Achaeans and Iphigeneia’s own decision to die. In a ceremony Achilles bedecks her with flowers before the axe falls.
How can a stalemate be reversed, asks Euripides? How can we break the ill-wind that has pinned down the Greek ships at Aulis, postponing the war? How can Greece regain its prestige, the one that the ‘barbarians’ injured by the abduction of the beautiful Helen? Or to put in a contemporary persective, how can anything once lost regain its former value? Iphigenia – the willing sacrifice of innocence – provides a solution?
Can an innocent, young woman with her idealism untainted shed her blood to wash away doubt, hesitation, to end the moral and ideological paralysis of men, who cannot even start a war (that predominantly male activity) on their own? Is this believable?
And here lies the really important question: what does Iphigenia’s sacrifice serve? What is it that, in the end, is accomplished through her self-martyrdom? Is any of it worth it?
