- 112 Iphigenia is an asteroid.
The sacrifice of Iphigenia by the Illioupersis Painter
Iphigeneia (Eng. /ɪfədʒə'naɪə/ Ἰφιγένεια, also Iphigenia) is a daughter of
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Greek mythology. In Attic accounts,[1] Iphigeneia is sometimes called a daughter of Theseus and
Helen raised by Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The name means "strong-born" [1].
Post-Homeric Greek myth
Artemis punished Agamemnon after he killed a sacred deer in a sacred grove and boasted he was
a better hunter awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. On his way to Troy to participate in the Trojan War, Agamemnon's ships were suddenly
motionless as Artemis stopped the wind in Aulis. A soothsayer named Calchas revealed an oracle that appeased Artemis, so that the Aechaean fleet
could sail. This much is in Homer, who was unaware of the aspect of this episode in which the only way to appease Artemis was to
sacrifice Iphigeneia 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 or a goat (the god Pan transformed) in her place. The
Hesiodic Catalogue of Women called her
Iphimede/Iphimedeia (Ἰφιμέδεια)[2]
and told that Artemis transformed her into the goddess Hecate.[3] Antoninus Liberalis said that
Iphigeneia was transported to the island of Leuke, where she was wedded to
immortalized Achilles under the name of Orsilochia.
According to Euripides' Iphigeneia in
Tauris, Iphigeneia 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[4] carry off the xoanon 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 a 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 Iphigeneia 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 Iphigeneia with Artemis have encouraged some scholars to believe that she was originally a
hunting goddess whose cult was subsumed by the Olympian Artemis.
Among The Taurians
The people of Taurica (Mainland Ancient Greece) worshiped the maiden god Artemis, and believed that Artemis rescued Iphigenia
from the human sacrifice her father was about to perform on her. 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 plays by Euripides such as “Iphigenia at Aulis” and
“Iphigenia in Taurus”, both set in around the 1100’s BC. The temple of Artemis, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world, is
a monument that still stands today. The Taurians worshipped both Artemis and Iphigenia in this temple.
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. [Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, London: Penguin,
1955; Baltimore: Penguin pgs 73-75: “Iphigenia Among the Taurians”]
Iphianassa
Iphianassa (Ἰφιάνασσα) is the name of one of Agamemnon's three
daughters in Homer's Iliad (ix.145, 287)[5] The name Iphianassa may be simply an older variant of the name Iphigeneia. "Not
all poets took Iphigeneia and Iphianassa to be two names for the same heroine," Kerenyi remarks,[6] "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."
Cymon and Iphigenia
The episode of Iphigeneia 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 Iphigeneia sleeps in a grove by the sea, a noble but coarse and
unlettered Cypriot youth, Cymon, seeing Iphigeneia's beauty, falls in love with her and, by the power of love, becomes an
educated and polished courtier.
A Modern Viewpoint
In Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze
vol. 2, "Sacrifice", (ISBN 1-58240-399-6), the substitution of a deer for Iphigeneia 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.
Some modern sources
- Bonnard, A. Iphigénie à Aulis. Tragique et Poesie. Museum Helveticum, Basel, v. 2, p. 87-107, 1945.
- Croisille, J.-M. Le sacrifice d’Iphigénie dans l’art romain et la littérature latine. Latomus, Brussels, v. 22, p.
209-225, 1963.
- Decharme, P. "Iphigenia." In: c. d'Aremberg, and E Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines, v. 3 (1ère
partie), p. 570-572, (1877-1919).
- Jouan, F. "Le Rassemblement d’Aulis et le Sacrifice d´Iphigénie." In: _______, Euripide et les Légendes des Chants
Cypriens. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, pp 259-298, 1966.
- Kahil, L. "Le sacrifice d’Iphigénie." In: 'Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome'. Antiquité, Rome, v. 103, p.
183-196, 1991.
- Kerenyi, Karl, The Heroes of the Greeks (New York/London:Thames and Hudson) 1959, pp 331-36 et passim
- Graves, Robert (1955), The Greek Myths, London: Penguin, pgs 73-75: (Iphigenia Among the Taurians)
- Kjellberg, L. "Iphigeneia." In: A.F. Pauly and G. Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft.
Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, v. 9, 1916, pp. 2588-2622.
- Lloyd-Jones, H. '"Artemis and Iphigeneia" Journal of Hellenic Studies 103 (1983) pp 87-102.
- Peck, Harry. "Iphigeneia.' in Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898.
- Séchen, L. "Le Sacrifice d’Iphigénie" Révue des Études Grecques, Paris, pp 368-426, 1931.
- Shanower, E. Age of Bronze: Sacrifice, 2005.
- West, M.L. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
Some adaptations of the Iphigeneia story
- Iphigeneia at Aulis, play by Euripides.
- Iphigénie en Aulide, play by Jean Racine.
- Iphigénie en Aulide, opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck.
- Iphigenia, film by Michael
Cacoyannis.
- The Songs of the Kings, novel by Barry
Unsworth.
- Iphigenia, play by Mircea Eliade.
- Iphigenia at Aulis, play by Ellen McLaughlin (Part of Iphigenia and Other
Daughters)
- Ifigeneia, a rewrite of the play by Finn Iunker
- Iphigenia at Aulis, the first part of The Greeks trilogy, adapted and directed by John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company
in 1980.
- Iphigenia 2.0, modern
adaptation of the play, by Charles L. Mee[2]
- Iphigeneia in Tauris, play by Euripides.
- Iphigenia in Brooklyn, a solo cantata by P. D. Q.
Bach.(This version of the story may be less tragic than others.)
- Iphigénie, ballet by Charles le Picq.
- Iphigenia, play by Samuel Coster.
- Iphigenia in Orem, part of Bash: Latter-Day Plays, a collection
of three plays by Neil LaBute.
Notes
- ^ Pausanias, 2.21.6; a
scholium on Aristophanes' Lysistrata l.645, asserts that it was not at Aulis but at Brauron in
Attica that she was apparently sacrificed (noted Kerenyi 1959:238 and note 599).
- ^ This isolated fragmentary passage, found among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, has been restored to its proper place in Ehoeae, the Hesiodic Catalogue,
in modern times; the awkward insertion of eidolon — the image of Iphimede — and lines where Artemis saves her are
considered a later interpolation by Friedrich Solmsen, "The Sacrifice of Agamemnon's Daughter in Hesiod's' Ehoeae" The
American Journal of Philology 102.4 (Winter 1981), pp. 353-358.
- ^ this doesn't appear in any of the surviving passages of the Hesiodic
catalogue but is attested for it by Pausanias, 1.43.1.
- ^ Tauris is now the Crimea.
- ^ The three are Chrysothemis,
Laodice (the double of Electra) and Iphianassa. In Iliad
ix, the embassy to Achilles is empowered to offer him one of Agamemnon's three daughters, implying that Iphianassa/Iphigeneia is
still living, as Friedrich Solmsen 1981:353 points out.
- ^ Kerenyi 1959:331, noting Sophocles,
Elektra 157. Kerenyi clearly distinguishes between parallel accounts of Iphigeneia. "It is possible in the
Cypria Agamemnon was given four daughters, Iphigeneia being distinguished from
Iphianassa", Friedrich Solmsen remarks, (Solmsen 1981:353 note 1) also noting the scholium on Elektra 157.
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