The One Antigone, one was Phaedra however there were no Antigones, Phaedras and Iphigenes in the ancient amphitheatre in fifth-century Athens as spectators. This, moreover, constitutes the popularity (not the populism!) of the ancient Greek theatre. Eminently acoustic, classical culture (how many Athenians, even rich ones, had read manuscripts of historians, rhetors, lyricists, philosophers and tragedians?) relied on oral tradition and the auditory experience in the Pnyx, at games, courts and festivals?
So when the archon who selected each year the three tetralogies that competed in the Great Dionysia received the candidate plays that made up the tetralogy (three tragedies – one satirical drama) proposed by Euripides, no Athenian expressed the question of which Iphigenia in Avlidis was included in the tetralogy. Everyone knew the Atreides, their passions, their sins, their mistakes and often their monstrous criminal actions.
Tradition informs us that Aeschylus also wrote “Iphigenia,” but it did not reach us. Orestes plays the leading role in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in the eponymous plays of Sophocles and Euripides, and in Orestes and Euripides’ Andromache.
And here is the spiritual revolution. While persons (for in tragedy we are dealing with persons and not yet with characters – come from the depths of the ages and refer to specific relationships, actions and springs, the genius poets of the thymel use them as dough, as yeast, to mould completely different in motives, manners and intellects persons embedded in the circumstances in which they choose to act at any given time.
Thus, when the Renaissance rediscovered the ancient Greek world, archetypal myths invaded the visual, musical, theatrical and literary realms. There are over 50 “Iphigenes”, operas, plays and visual art works.
This is the fertility of the versatile ancient myths, many of which have fuelled new perspectives in philosophy (from Hegel to Heidegger) and in psychiatry and psychoanalysis (Freud, Adler, etc.).
Euripides left us two “Iphigenes”. First, he wrote the ‘In Taurus’ and at the end of his offering the ‘In Avlid’.
On the occasion that the latter is now being performed in Greece for the umpteenth time, it should be stressed that it was written when the glorious classical Athens was sinking in the Peloponnesian War and the intellectual market was overwhelmed by the sophistical questioning of morals, values, ideas and institutions. Socrates is on trial and shall be drinking the hemlock, accused of immorality, perversion of the concept of education and atheism.
Iphigenia in Avlidis” along with other works of Euripides’ last period of creation have been called ironic works.
And irony is an oblique look at the familiar, and therefore an unexpected and subversive approach to what had hitherto been considered established moral, pedagogical and political correctness. With Iphigenia en Avlidi and the West bringing it back into the limelight after the medieval boom, the matters of her hermeneutic approach are contradictory.
And it is a paradoxical perspective, considering that at the time they did not see irony in Euripides’ text, they celebrated Socratic irony as the foundational anchor of education. For many years and in Greece, from the Revolution onwards, Iphigenia en Avlidi
was interpreted theoretically, pedagogically and staged as a patriotic drama! A girl who willingly sacrifices herself for the country that is being insulted by the barbarians.
How convenient !
-Anyone who can read the text soberly, unbiasedly, what do they see? The Chorus with little girls from Chalkida who have read “men’s cleaves” in the “Iliad” come to admire, as fans, the heroes of the tradition. They wander dumbfounded outside the camp and the “heroes” who have taken notice of the stoned little girls put on a show, one throws a bow, one rides, one runs, one fights. And the demonic dramatist slowly silences the “lens”, zooms in on the faces and reveals a cowardly Agamemnon, a villainous Menelaus, a deceitful Odysseus, an intriguing Calchas and a ridiculous starving Achilles.
Into this flock, a Clytemnestra brings Iphigenia for a fake marriage, a fraud. And a little girl who, after vainly pleading with the wretched father who prefers the military rod, in disgust throws her naked body to them as a carcass, in a ceremony in which the would-be false bridegroom Achilles strews her with flowers before the axe.
How can the situation be reversed? How can we break the cycle of apnea that has pinned down the Greek ships at Avlida, postponing the war’s winding down? How can Greece regain its prestige, the one that the “barbarians” injured by the abduction of the beautiful Helen? Or else, how can everything regain its lost meaning? Iphigenia will provide the solution.
An innocent, young woman with her idealism untainted will shed her blood to wash away doubt, hesitation, to end the moral and ideological paralysis of men, who cannot even start a war, the predominantly male activity, on their own. And here the really important question arises: what does the awakening of Iphigenia serve? What is it that, in the end, is saved through her self-sacrifice?
