| World Mythology Dictionary: Iphigenia |
(European mythology)
The daughter sacrificed by Agamemnon in order to gain a fair wind to Troy. The Athenians combined her worship with that of Artemis. At Brauron, on the eastern coast of Attica, a cave near Artemis' sanctuary was held to be Iphigenia's tomb or cenotaph. Another legend suggests that Iphigenia may have been Artemis' priestess, since she was charged with the sacrifice to the goddess of all strangers caught in the country of the Tauri, a Scythian tribe.
Dictionary:
Iph·i·ge·ni·a (ĭf'ə-jə-nī'ə, -nē'ə)  |
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Iphigeneia |
For more information on Iphigeneia, visit Britannica.com.
| Classical Literature Companion: Iphigeneia |
Iphigeneia, in Greek myth, a daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, whom Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice. The Greek fleet, when about to sail to Troy, was held by contrary winds at Aulis (see TROJAN WAR). The seer Calchas declared that Artemis required the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter (authorities vary on the reason), and Agamemnon sent for Iphigeneia on the pretext that she was to be married to Achilles. In Aeschylus' Oresteia the belief is that she was actually killed; the version of the Cypria, followed by Euripides in Iphigeneia in Tauris (see below), describes how, when she was about to be sacrificed, Artemis carried her off to be her priestess in the land of the Tauri (the Crimea), substituting a deer for her at the altar. The Tauri had a savage rite by which all strangers coming to their land were sacrificed to Artemis, and Iphigeneia was required to consecrate the victims.
Iphigeneia's brother Orestes, in order to expiate the blood-guilt incurred by his murder of Clytemnestra, was ordered by Apollo to secure the image of Artemis of the Tauri and bring it to Attica. He had been separated from Iphigeneia since he was a child and believed her dead. He and his friend Pyladēs were captured by the Tauri and ordered to be sacrificed, but Iphigeneia discovered her brother's identity and was persuaded to escape with him from the country, carrying off the image of the goddess. The latter was set up in a temple in Attica—both Halae and Brauron in historical times claimed the distinction—where Iphigeneia became the perpetual priestess of Artemis. Other stories tell that she was married to Achilles on Leucē or in Elysium.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Iphigenia |
| Wikipedia: Iphigenia |
Iphigenia (pronounced /ɪfɨdʒɨˈnaɪə/; Greek Ἰφιγένεια, Ifigeneia) is a daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Greek mythology. In Attic accounts,[1] Iphigenia is sometimes called a daughter of Theseus and Helen raised by Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The name means "strong-born", though more literally "born to strength".[2]
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Artemis punished Agamemnon after he killed a deer in a sacred grove and boasted he was the better hunter. On his way to Troy to participate in the Trojan War, Agamemnon's ships were suddenly motionless, as Artemis stopped the wind in Aulis. The soothsayer Calchas revealed an oracle that appeased Artemis, so that the Achaean fleet could sail. This much is in Homer, who does not discuss the aspect of this episode in which other writers explain that the only way to appease Artemis was to sacrifice Iphigenia to her. According to the earliest versions he did so, but other sources claim that Iphigenia was taken by Artemis to Tauris in Crimea to prepare others for sacrifice, and that the goddess left a deer[3] or a goat (the god Pan transformed) in her place. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women called her Iphimede/Iphimedeia (Ἰφιμέδεια)[4] and told that Artemis transformed her into the goddess Hecate.[5] Antoninus Liberalis said that Iphigenia was transported to the island of Leuke, where she was wedded to immortalized Achilles under the name of Orsilochia.
According to Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, Iphigenia features in the story of her brother, Orestes. In order to escape the persecutions of the Erinyes for killing his mother Clytemnestra and her lover, he has been ordered by Apollo to go to Tauris[6] carry off the xoanon (carved wooden cult image) of Artemis which had fallen from heaven, and bring it to Athens. He has repaired to Tauris with Pylades, son of Strophius and intimate friend of Orestes, but the pair are at once imprisoned by the Tauri, among whom the custom is to sacrifice all Greek strangers to Artemis. The priestess of Artemis, whose duty it is to perform the sacrifice, offers to release Orestes if he will carry home a letter from her to Greece; he refuses to go, but bids Pylades take the letter while he himself will stay and be slain. After a conflict of mutual affection, Pylades at last yields, but the letter brings about recognition between brother and sister, and all three escape together, carrying with them the image of Artemis. Here the play ends. After their return to Greece, Orestes takes possession of his father's kingdom of Mycenae and Argos and Iphigenia leaves the image in the temple of Artemis in Brauron, Attica, where she remains as priestess of Artemis Brauronia. According to the Spartans, however, the image of Artemis was transported by them to Laconia, where the goddess was worshipped as Artemis Orthia.
These close identifications of Iphigenia with Artemis have encouraged some scholars to believe that she was originally a hunting goddess whose cult was subsumed by the Olympian Artemis.
The people of Tauris/Taurica facing the Euxine Sea[7] worshipped the maiden goddess Artemis. Some very early Greek sources in the Epic Cycle affirmed that Artemis rescued Iphigenia from the human sacrifice her father was about to perform, for instance in the lost epic Cypria, which survives in a summary by Proclus:[8] "Artemis, however, snatched her away and transported her to the Tauroi, making her immortal, and put a stag in place of the girl upon the altar." The goddess swept the young princess off to Tauris where she became a priestess at the Temple of Artemis.
The earliest known accounts of the death of Iphigenia are included in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris, both Athenian tragedies of the fifth century BCE set in the Heroic Age. In the dramatist's version, the Taurians worshipped both Artemis and Iphigenia in the Temple of Artemis at Tauris.
Other variations of the death of Iphigenia include her being rescued at her sacrifice by Artemis and transformed into the goddess Hecate. Another example includes Iphigenia’s brother Orestes discovering her identity and helping him steal an image of Artemis. The reason for many discrepancies in telling of the myth is playwrights such as Euripides modified the stories about Iphigenia to make them more palatable for the audiences and make sequels using the same characters.
Many traditions arose from the sacrifice of Iphigenia; one prominent one by the Spartans. Rather than sacrificing virgins, they would whip the victim in front of a sacred image of Artemis, until an erotic reaction occurred and he ejaculated, fertilizing the land with blood and semen. However, most tributes to Artemis inspired by her sacrifice, were mere sacrifices themselves. Taurians especially performed sacrifices of bulls and virgins in honour of Artemis.[9]
Iphianassa (Ἰφιάνασσα) is the name of one of Agamemnon's three daughters in Homer's Iliad (ix.145, 287)[10] The name Iphianassa may be simply an older variant of the name Iphigenia. "Not all poets took Iphigenia and Iphianassa to be two names for the same heroine," Kerenyi remarks,[11] "though it is certain that to begin with they served indifferently to address the same divine being, who had not belonged from all time to the family of Agamemnon."
The episode of Iphigenia and Cymon that inspired such painters as Benjamin West (1773), John Everett Millais (1848) and Frederic Leighton (1884) is not a Greek myth, but a novella taken from Boccaccio's Decameron and developed later by the poet and dramatist John Dryden.
The tale intended to demonstrate the power of love. As Iphigenia sleeps in a grove by the sea, a noble but coarse and unlettered Cypriot youth, Cymon, seeing Iphigenia's beauty, falls in love with her and, by the power of love, becomes an educated and polished courtier.
In Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze vol. 2, "Sacrifice", (ISBN 1-58240-399-6), the substitution of a deer for Iphigenia was a pious lie invented by Odysseus to comfort the grieving Clytemnestra. It did not work: she angrily cursed the whole Achaean army, wishing they would all die in the war, the violent men who had been clamoring for the blood of her daughter.
Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country contained a similar idea, with a play named Iphigenia at Ilium running through the novel as a leitmotif. Within the novel, the ghost of Iphigenia tells Achilles that all the poets lied; she did not die willingly, and nor was a hind sent to take her place. Iphigenia also realises that these myths no longer have any power over her; when Achilles attempts to claim her as his wife, she reminds him that "women are no good to you dead".
In Glyn Iliffe's Gates of Troy, Iphigenia is in fact the daughter of Eperitus, a friend and bodyguard of Odysseus, who slept with Clytamnestra during the courtship of Helen.
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 | World Mythology Dictionary. A Dictionary of World Mythology. Copyright © Arthur Cotterell 1979, 1986, 2003. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Classical Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Copyright © 1993, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Iphigenia". Read more |
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