Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Classical
Antiquity.
http://www.jstor.org
I would like very much to thank for their comments and criticisms Seth Benardete, Carolyn
Dewald, Helene Foley, Albert Henrichs, Sally Humphreys, Gregory Nagy, and the anonymous
readers.
1. On the play's construction see, e.g., Anne Pippin Burnett, Catastrophe Survived: Euripides
Plays of Mixed Reversal (Oxford, 1971) 47-72, esp. 50; and for a nice summary of the paradoxical
web of its plot, Ernst Buschor in the introduction to his German translation (Munich, 1946) 92-93.
Burnett, however, inwhat is overall the best account of IT, says nothing about the aetiologies. With
Goethe she considers the play "themost humane and good-tempered of the classical tragedies" (47);
but in his version Goethe excised all the substance of the ritual material (and so of course the
aetiologies). For a recent reading that sees IT in a more problematic light, cf. E. Masaracchia,
"Ifigenia Taurica:Un dramma a lieto fine?"QUCC, n.s., 18 (1984) 111-23.
2. D. Lanza ("Una ragazzaofferta al sacrificio,"QS 22 [1989]5-22, esp. 13, 16-18) stresses the
importance of cult in IT. Cf. also A. Spira, Untersuchungen zum deus exmachina bei Sophokles und
Euripides (Kallmiinz, 1960) 118-20. For extensive discussion of ritual in the fabric of Euripidean
drama, see H. P. Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice inEuripides (Ithaca, 1985). I know of no
comprehensive discussion of ritual aetiology in tragedy.C. Codrignani, "L' 'aition'nella poesia greca
prima di Callimaco," Convivium, n.s., 26 (1958) 527-45, is a preliminary outline. There are sugges
tive reflections on (Greek) aetiology generally by J. Redfield, inD. M. Halperin, J. J.Winkler, and
then, is a reading of the play in the light of its aetiologies that intends to show
that the play's formal, paradoxically turned elegance contains stronger, perhaps
more unruly strains than are usually acknowledged, and that thiswider scope is
brought about particularly through the aetiologies.
Along theway, then summarilyat the end (sectionVI below), Iwould like to
suggest a kind of metatheatrical attention in the play to the process of interpreta
tion. Aetiology here is both a dramatic instrument and, more abstractly, an
explanatory mode. Formally it is addressed to an audience in a way somewhat
different from the rest of the play's dramatic speech, song, and action. This
difference encourages interpretation and opens up the possibility of questioning,
and somay effect that sometimes more discontinuous and unsettling reception of
the drama that is especially associated with Euripides.
The aetiologies come in the latter part of the play. I would like to consider
first a passage earlier on that illustrates a character interpreting and how we are
induced to supplement that interpretation-a passage having to do with the
nature of divinity and a ritual.
After a report of the capture of twoGreek youngmen and on the expectation
that she, as priestess of Artemis, will directly prepare them for sacrifice, Iphigenia
concludes a speech of remembered grief, despair, and vengefulness as follows:
Ta fflg OEO'i 6i [tLEJ9potciaL
oocpfIatcTca,
iTtLgPgQOT'V TiEVlyV TLng&acpvTat qCpvoV
% r VrEXQOV
xci koXElag OiynXEQOLV
Powicov a&JEdQyEL, (IvoaaQov (cog yovqvF,v
caiTYi 6& 0voiacg M6ETcat PQoToxTxvoLg.
OVx Eo0' Oinog ETEXEV v fi A i6g 66ataQ
ATlDO) Tooca6Xr v aca9clav. Eyid) iV[ owv
la TavTdlkov 0EOLotV EOTlEt1aa'Ta
aTtoTca XQivw, JTaCL66g of0Jvacl (30oa,
Txoig 6' EV06a6', coav'toig vxctg aV0QcoJoxTovoUg,
Eg TqV OE0V TO cpauXov avaCpEQELv 6oxC
o166Eva yaQ o0tcfl 6acti6vcov ELval xax6v.
(380-91)
She would separate out in the goddess whom she serves a pure, and by implica
tionHellenic, aspect that is authentically divine, and a corrupt, Taurian one that
F. I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in theAncient Greek
World (Princeton, 1990) 123-25; and G. Nagy, The Best of theAchaeans (Baltimore, 1979) 279 n. 2.
For recent accounts of the complex of Artemis's cults andmyths, seeW. Burkert, Greek Religion, tr.
J. Raffan (Cambridge,Mass., 1985) 149-52; J.-P. Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Es
says, ed. F. I. Zeitlin (Princeton, 1991) 195-219; F. Graf, Nordionische Kulte (Rome, 1985) 59, 227
49, 410-17.
sophismata of gods, cf. Phoen. 871, Ba. 489, IA 444, fr. 972.
5. The revision of Tantalus's myth recalls Pindar, 01. 1.36-53. For a link of this revision to the
aetiology of Olympic ritual, see T. K. Hubbard, Helios 14 (1987) 3-21; G. Nagy, Pindar's Homer
(Baltimore, 1990) 116-35; W. J. Slater, "Pelops at Olympia," GRBS 30 (1989) 485-501. In a
valuable study,M. J. O'Brien ("Pelopid History and the Plot of Iphigenia in Tauris," CQ 38 [1988]
(98-115) argues for the paradigmatic importance of Pelopid myth for the play (but not so convinc
inglywhen referring specifically to the courtship of Pelops andHippodameia).
aetiological link to a general ritual procedure. And saving the myth of Tantalus's
crime means maintaining a strong sense of ambivalence in human beings' transac
tions with the gods. We are also prepared for the development of the play's
subsequent action.
6. Contrast Pindar, who offers at least a nominal explanation of how the aspect of the myth that
he correctsmistakenly gained currency (01. 1.46-51).
7. For the intellectual background of this attempt to redefine divinity, extending back to
Xenophanes, see now the discussion of HF 1340-46 in Yunis (above, n. 4) 157-66, and in a wider
context, including the remarkable reflections on divinity and purifying rituals in theHippocratic On
the Sacred Disease, see G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in theOrigins and
Development of Greek Science (Cambridge, 1979) 10-58; for the expression of nonstandard views on
religion and morality, and prosecutions for impiety in the fifth century, see K. J. Dover, "The
Freedom of the Intellectual inGreek Society," in The Greeks and Their Legacy 2 (Oxford, 1988)
135-58 (originally in Talanta 7 [1976]24-54), with particular reference toEuripides, 148-51. Euripi
des here allows Iphigenia to use an alternative intellectual discourse about religion and the "moral
ity"of gods, but in a context of cultic discourse about ritual purity that, integratedwith the drama's
narrative, will be subject to tensions and changes in that narrative's development; the intellectual
discourse then is elided.
8. Cf. W. Burkert, Homo Necans (Berlin, 1972) 114-15; Slater (above, n. 5) 497-98. For
sacrifice and cooking generally, see the extensive account of G. Berthiaume, Les roles du mageiros
(Leiden, 1982).
II
Athena appears suddenly at the end of the play, on (or possibly suspended
above) the roof of the skene, which representsArtemis's temple. She intervenes
in the dramatic action, ensuring the final success of the protagonists' escape plot.
She thus closesoff the dramatic narrative, the play's construction of its myth,
and, at the same time, in her aetiological exposition shifts attention to ritual. The
drama's linear, narrative movement is brought to closure by a link to ritual
practices that by virtue of their cyclical repetition have a kind of permanence.
The aetiology makes a transition from a onetime fictional construction-our
getting out of a nightmarish realm of the barbarian other and returning home to
Greece.
There are separate aetiologies for Orestes and Iphigenia. First Athena in
structsOrestes as follows:
9. Burnett (above, n. 1: 58-61) has a fine account of this play of deception, though she sees it in
a purely benign light.
TTCOflgoMpayrli
&cJTIV'etJLtoXETo
Lcipog
6En JtQO av6Q oc aLfiLd T' etavlTco,
'
6oact ExacTLOedra towsgTtiRag
5EX.
(1446-61)
A temple is to be built in which to relocate the Taurian Artemis's statue; a
new epithet will be given the goddess (the textwavers between reference to the
statue or herself: 1448, 1453, 1456-57); and a new sacrificial ritualwill be insti
tuted at Halae. Like the effect of closure on the play's action-and indeed on all
the action's antecedents, the long story of this family's vicissitudes-building a
new temple indicates stability recovered. It also balances Iphigenia's dream
vision, at the start of the play, of the physical ruin of her paternal house (46
49).10The new epithet for Artemis-Tauropolos, whose aetiology is extracted
by etymology,1 will fix thememory of the statue's savageTaurian origin (Tauro-)
and itsmovement (-polos), Orestes' driven wanderings standing in for the latter
(1454-55).12
Athena's intervention stops theTaurians' pursuit of the escapingGreeks and
negotiates with Poseidon a change to favorableweather (1435-45). The Greeks
might have escaped but for a sudden shift of the wind driving them back to shore
(1392-95). This must recall the contrary winds at Aulis, which occasioned the
intended sacrifice of Iphigenia (cf. 15-27, 215, 354-58, 1082, and, concluding
the messenger's speech just preceding, 1418). What had been carried out at
Aulis, as a human sacrifice, made fair sailing weather possible. Now, in a gener
ally benign and concluding reversal,Athena arranges good weather and provides
an aetiological account of a ritual of nonlethal human sacrifice.
This sacrifice of blood drawn from an anonymous human victim is (1) to
serve as apoina, compensation; (2) hosias hekati, (provisionally) "for religion's
sake"; and (3) so that the goddess Artemis may have her honors, timai (1459
61). Each of these explanatory features reflects back on elements in the preced
ing drama, bringing them into a new focus. At the same time the drama as it
unfolds to this point gives a complex substance to what Athena's aetiological
explanations encapsulate.
10. Compare the earthquake that in the dream causes the house to fall, oetovetvai oakw (46),
and the stormyweather that checks the ship's escape, nJovTi) ...ok..a (1443; cf. 262); Poseidon is
concerned with both phenomena. (In Artemidorus 2.41 dreams of earthquakes, generally of bad
omen, are favorable for thosewho want tomake a voyage and be free of their debts. They signify a
shake-up of the dreamer's life.)
11. Surely Euripides' invention for this play. For otherwise more plausible explanations of the
epithet, see H. Lloyd-Jones, "Artemis and Iphigenia," JHS 103 (1983) 96-97 = Greek Comedy,
Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and Miscellanea: The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh Lloyd
Jones (Oxford, 1990) 321-22; F. Graf (above, n. 2) 415 and n. 58.
12. The statue is reported to have come first to the Taurians "from the sky" (88, 1384; cf. 977,
986), like a number of ancient sacred images (see Burkert [above, n. 2] 91, 384 n. 84). Tradition,
though perhaps in a number of cases post-Euripidean, locates it in a wide range of places (Paus.
3.16.7-9; and see F. Graf, "Das Gotterbild aus dem Taurerland," AW 10.4 [1979] 33-35; A. Brelich,
Paides e parthenoi [Rome, 1969] 244-45).
The word apoina occurs in the phrase T; onig oGpaync; a&rTLv' (1459), which
must mean that the riteAthena describes constitutes compensation forOrestes'
evaded sacrificial death at Artemis's altar. However, ifwe take orlg subjectively
and allow owpayis to refer to the killing of Clytaemnestra, the phrase might have
referred toOrestes' payment formatricide.13The immediate context, the ritual
being explained here, blocks such a possibility, but insofar as payment formatri
cide and appeasement of the Furies (twicementioned inAthena's speech: 1439,
1456) are the basis of Orestes' story in this play, the alternative reading is not
entirely erased. The notion of compensation helps to confirm Orestes' final
release from the Furies.
Compensation or requitalmay also be appropriate for the stealing of Arte
mis's statue
from its temple. Whatever myth may tolerate, the theft of a sacred
object, hierosylia, is a very serious crime in the everyday world, on a level with
treason and punishable by death, refusal of burial in one's native land, and
confiscation of property.14 Orestes feels the need to excuse it-on the grounds
that Apollo's oracle had commanded it (1012-14). And when the escape is at
greatest risk Iphigenia asksArtemis to forgive the stealing of the statue (1400; cf.
995-97, 1358-59). Nevertheless, both Orestes and Iphigenia imply, as does
Athena, that the theft is justified because the statue is being taken from barbari
ans and brought to Athens (1014, 1399-1400; cf. 1086-88).15 The rescue of
Iphigenia by Artemis was described in the language of stealing ('x)FtjhEv,
28).16There are productive thefts by gods in themyths of Prometheus and of
Hermes, stealing from existing religious powers in order to advance human
culture and redefine relations between human beings and gods. Such a process is
illustrated in the play's third stasimon, the account of Apollo's violent appropria
tion from the dragon Pytho and Earth's daughter Themis of the Delphic shrine
and its prophetic authority. It is on that authority that Orestes has acted, first in
13. For the ellipse whereby sphages at 1459 refers to the complex notion of a sacrificial death
owed by Orestes to theTaurian goddess, but not yet paid, compare the use of phonou (as corrected
by Badham) at 1418 referring to the killing at Artemis's altar at Aulis, which threatened Iphigenia,
but from which she was saved. In each case an appropriate meaning emerges, but the semantic
compression allows a flickering sense of something else related to the primarymeaning: inOrestes'
case, his sphage of Clytaemnestra; in Iphigenia's, her actual phonos atAulis assumed by theGreeks
(563-64, 770-71; cf. 26-27, 338-39, and 359-61 with 1418-19) and recounted,without mitigation, in
Aeschylus's Agamemnon.
14. Xen. Hell. 1.7.22; David Cohen, Theft inAthenian Law (Munich, 1983) chap. 3; Robert
Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford, 1983) 170-75. For
statue stealing involving punishments like those in IT, see Hdt. 5.83.2-86 (earthquake andmadness);
Athen. 672b-d = Menodotus, FGrHist 541 F 1 (attempted statue theft foiled by inability of thieves
to row their ship clear of land);Hdt. 7.129.2-3 (tidal irregularitiesdestroy Persians who had dese
crated a shrine and its statue). It may be worth noting that in Plato Laws 9.869b2-3 crimes of
hierosylia are associated with the killing of parents.
15. One may think also of the Palladium theft, for which see Burkert (above, n. 2) 140, 404 n.
11.
16. A common usage: see, e.g., 11. 3.380, 5.390; Aesch. Ag. 662; Soph. El. 1133; Thuc.
1.115.5; Eur. El. 16, 286, 540.
killing his mother and then in carrying out the theft of Artemis's statue (cf. 77
79, 85-88). Apollo commands matricide and sacrilege. His own story sanctions
killing associates of older female deities, and greed (1275; cf. HH Herm. 335).
At the same time his command of truth (1254) and a general sense of confidence
in the newly acquired oracle (1282) are asserted. Apollo's theft prefigures
Orestes' and Iphigenia's. Just as the god's theft ismeant tomake a progression
from older, female, potentially deceiving and chaotic powers to Zeus's new
dispensation, so the humans' theftmarks a progression from barbaric toGreek.17
The ideological resonance of such "progressions" is clear enough. But in the
drama they are traced in an ambivalent light, characterized by amix of violence,
deception, and reordering, of the criminal and restitutive. Compensation,
apoina, is applicable to that criminal aspect. The aetiology, then, explains the
ritual while making of it a commemoration of an ambivalent strain of the drama,
a strain that appropriate compensation, through the ritual,would now resolve.
Theft from an altar, it is also worth noting, is attested for a ritual. In Sparta a
well-known ordeal required select youths to try stealing offerings fromArtemis
Orthia's altar. They were whipped in the attempt so that blood flowed on the
initiatory proceedings for ephebes. Its staged (though potentially quite danger
ous) "impiety" belongs to the inversion or transgressionof norms and social rules
characteristic of the liminal world of rites of passage. That Orestes' and Iphige
nia's stories involve initiatory motifs is now well recognized.'9 Such motifs, and
17. This has now been explained with exemplary clarity by C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Myth as
History: The Previous Owners of theDelphic Oracle," in J. Bremmer, ed., Interpretationsof Greek
Mythology (Totowa, 1986) 229-31 = C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Reading"Greek Culture: Texts and
Images, Rituals andMyths (Oxford, 1991) 230-32.
18. Paus. 3.16.7-10. Further sources and full discussion of the rite in Brelich (above, n. 12)
133-36; see also Vernant (above, n. 2) 235-37. Burkert (above, n. 2: 152) relates the Spartan rite to
the sacrificial ritual atHalae; so too A. Henrichs, "Human Sacrifice inGreek Religion: Three Case
Studies," Entr. Hardt 27 (1981) 205 n. 4. Cure for madness linked to an end of the practice of human
sacrifice is found in a story told by Pausanias (7.19), which also involves a priestess of Artemis and
the Delphic Oracle. See also H. J. Rose, "Greek Rites of Stealing," HTR 34 (1941) 1-5 (on Hdt.
3.48 and the Spartan rite).
19. For Orestes, see J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragedie en Grece ancienne
(Paris, 1977) 151-53; F. I. Zeitlin, "The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth andMythmaking in the
Oresteia," Arethusa 11 (1978) 170-84. For ephebic and initiatory themes generally in Attic tragedy,
see J. J.Winkler, "The Ephebes' Song: Tragoidia and Polis," Representations 11 (1985) 26-62, esp.
32-38 (omitted in a revised version of this essay in J. J.Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do
with Dionysus? [Princeton, 1990] 20-62). For sharper focus on the historical development of the
ephebeia, see P. Vidal-Naquet, "The Black Hunter Revisited," PCPS 32 (1986) 126-44; Sally
Humphreys, "Lycurgus of Butadae: An Athenian Aristocrat," in J. W. Eadie and J. Ober, eds., The
Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in Honor of Chester G. Starr (Lanham, 1985) 206-9. For
their associations with liminal and transitional states, are also important aspects
of this play.20
There are ritual aetiologies involving compensation and replacement at the
end of Euripides' Medea (aeFoCviv I?OQTYV
xai TXk ... &aVT To6E b6vooafC3oV
p6ovov,1382-83) andHippolytus (&vxiTcZFv6E TY xaxXO)vtlJag oEyioag, 1423
24). In each of these plays compensation is for fatal, terribleevents-infanticide,
a young man's death because of a father's curse. In IT the compensation indi
cated by Athena is for a near-fatal but avoided act, the sacrificial death of
Orestes through his sister's agency. Itmarks a positive turn of events, a hopeful
move into the future. This
is achieved, however, to the extent that attention is
drawn away from the truly irretrievable and criminal act in the past, the matri
cide. It is achieved by a kind of substitution.
Compensation and substitution are closely linked notions-substituting is a
way of compensating. Both are central principles in the operation of ritual sacri
fice,21 and in the stories of Orestes and Iphigenia. The latter had been saved when
Artemis put a deer in her place on the altar (avT&Lboioa, 28, 782-83; cf. 359). Both
Orestes and Iphigenia undergo the experience of sacrifice, all but the final blow.
She recalls vividly the anguish of having been deceived and, as far as he knew, sacri
ficed by her father (211-12, 359-71, 852-53; cf. 541). Orestes endures a pro
longed expectation that his sacrificialdeath is inevitable (cf. 482-91, 691-705).22
20. In general, there is the shape of the youthfulOrestes' story as a quest ina remote, dangerous
place difficult of access (cf. 90, 94, 241-42, 422-26, 884-91), the culmination of a period of roaming
about away from his city (cf. peripolon, 84 = 1455,where theword and thenotion are absorbed into the
Tauropolos aition; on the ephebes as peripoloi see P. Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of
Thought and Forms of Society in theGreek World, tr.A. Szegedy-Maszak [Baltimore, 1986] 107).
"Cunning, deception, disorder and irrationality" (ibid. 113) are notable in the drama (for deception,
cf. 89, 112, and below; for irrationality there isOrestes' madness, 281-94, 307-8; and for disorder, cf.
570-73). Growing up and hunting together is recalled (709; cf. perh. 284; Vidal-Naquet 117-19).
Exploits at night are proposed (110, perh. 1024-26; cf. Vidal-Naquet 118), though not in fact carried
out. Interestingly the initiative and plan for achieving the quest are Iphigenia's (see furtherbelow, and
F. I. Zeitlin, "Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine inGreek Drama," in
Winkler and Zeitlin [above, n. 19] 80-82). Initiatory themes involving Iphigenia are recollected from
the past and "subverted":preparations formarriage (24-25,214-17,364-73,538,856,859), including
a suggestion of prenuptial bath (818) and cutting of hair on leavinghome (820-21); sacrifice (28, 211
12, 359-60, 770-71,783-84, 860-61, 1082-83); also the denied dancing forHera (221) andweaving of
PallasAthena's image (222-23). See R. A. S. Seaford, "TheTragicWedding," JHS 107 (1987) 106-10;
andmore generally C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Studies inGirls' Transitions (Athens, 1988), esp. 111-13; S.
G. Cole, "The Social Function of Rituals of Maturation: The Koureion and the Arkteia," ZPE 55
Iphigenia in her anguish declares she will show no more pity toward theGreeks
who are brought to her for sacrifice: any Greek victim will serve as a substitute
object of revenge, replacing thosewhom she takes to be the originating causes of
her suffering, Helen andMenelaos (356-57; cf. 337-39, 439-46; 8, 13-14, 521
26). (This is also a significant displacement away from the immediate agent of
hermisfortunes, her father,Agamemnon.) Euripides next manages a plot turn in
which, immediately on Iphigenia's determination for substitute revenge, her
next victim is to be the unknown Orestes, who has himself been brought to
Plynteria.25 This play, within the drama, of deceptive contrivance and "real"
effect, involved with ritual material, runs parallel to the way the drama itself
may be seen to work: as a fictional construction (performed on the ritual
23. Cf. too Iphigenia's readiness to die ifOrestes survives the escape (1002-6)-and Orestes'
readiness to die if they cannot escape together (1007-11). The theme of sacrifice is given a secular
turn. Euripides' extensive interest in willing human sacrifice is well known: cf. E. A. M. E.
O'Connor-Visser, Aspects of Human Sacrifice in theTragedies of Euripides (Amsterdam, 1987), with
a survey of earlier discussions, 5-17; to which add S. Trenkner, The Greek Novella in the Classical
Period (Cambridge, 1958) 69-77; and now Hughes (above, n. 21) 82-86.
24. Cf. Seaford (above, n. 20) 108-10. Iphigenia says she was offered inmarriage to anAchilles
who was son of Hades, not of Peleus (369-71). Her failed marriage is underscored by recurring
references to Achilles in the first half of the play (25, 537, 663, 856; cf. 375); his association with
Hades is reinforced by reference to his ghostly raceson the nearby islandof Leuke (436-38; cf.Andr.
1260-62), and he is perhaps linked to Thoas (so named because "swift of foot," 32-33), king in
something like a land of death (so H. Hommel, Der Gott Achilleus, SB Heidelberg, Phil.-hist. K1.
[1980] 1.Abh., 36).
25. The Plynteria association was suggested by U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube
der Hellenen, 3d ed. (reprint: Basel, 1959) 1.22 n. 3. But not much is known about the particulars of
the festival: see Parker (above, n. 14: 26-27) with references to earlier literature. For the washing by
the sea of the Palladium and the distinction of this ritual and the Plynteria, see W. Burkert, "Buzyge
und Palladium," ZRGG 22 (1970) 357-64.
occasion of the festival of Dionysus)26 that produces meanings that are symboli
cally or psychologically "true," that engage in some way with the audience's
sense of reality.
Athena's aition for theHalae ceremony articulates the principle of apoina,
compensation by means of substitution, a principle applicable both to sacrificial
ritual as such and, pervasively, to Euripides' play.27In the end Orestes' release is
predicated on a final payment for his criminal revenge, for thematricide. Substi
tution becomes a way out of the dilemma of revenge. The aetiological link to a
sacrificial ritual using token substitution takes the place of the Tantalids' self
generating chain of intrafamilialkilling-the last, avoided and replaced, instance
of which would have been Iphigenia's involvement in the death of Orestes (cf.
866-72, 1007-8).
The new sacrificial procedure described by Athena is also instituted hosias
hekati (1461). For the sense of this hosion I follow Benveniste's definition: "the
act which makes the 'sacred' accessible."28 What was previously a barbaric prac
tice, inaccessibly (among remote Taurians) and unmanageably (because involv
ing human sacrifice) sacred, will become properly available toGreeks, or more
particularly to Athenians. This notion identifies what the compensatory rite
achieves, a state of being, in Burkert's words, both "pious and free," operating
in the human world after having settled one's accounts with the purely sacred,
the sacrificial practice in its rawest form.
Finally the new ritual intends that Artemis, coming to Attica as Tauropolos,
maintain her prerogatives, her timai (1416). She must not lose her divine force,
her sacredness, in the transfer. Thus her timai continue to include offerings of
human blood, and therefore she can be a powerful guarantor of the efficacy of
the ritual substitution. Iphigenia had offered the goddess a kind of salvation in
Athens, a "blessed" city (eudaimona, 1088) and a "pure" home (katharon,
1231). Athena, however, certifies that the Taurian goddess who comes to Athens
brings with her an ineradicable, original nature. This final association of Artemis
with human blood also decisively negates Iphigenia's earlier attempt to recon
ceive the goddess as a simply pure, and, from a human viewpoint, morally
transparent divine being (383, 386, 391). Athens will receive a powerfully am
26. For the importanceof the festival setting and some possible implications for the understand
ing the drama performed in it, see S. Goldhill, "TheGreater Dionysia and Civic Ideology," JHS
of
107 (1987) 58-76 (rev. in Winkler and Zeitlin [above, n. 19] 97-129); also W. R. Connor, "City
Dionysia andAthenian Democracy," C&M 40 (1989) 7-32.
27. It also pervades the play's language; in addition to d¬va (1459), cf. JIOLtv (200; 446,
with &vTi7Jakog),JtoLvcoOat (1433), (djTo-)Tivetv(78, 338-89), (&vTL-)Tllo0tQev (357, 558, 925),
CavTlTlOEvact(358), avti6L66val (28, 737, 783), (E?-)akudooelv (135, 193, perh. 292), &vtarmoXXvwal
(715), &vTiLpacXkog (179), [teOLorival (775, 991, 1177), [tet6atTalS (816); cf. also 821, and 61bx
(339, 944), 6ixaLov (559, 1469), and X6adL(14, 507, 602, 631, 847, 1444).
28. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes 2 (Paris, 1969) 200. Cf. Burkert (above, n.
2) 270: "hosion signifies that one is done with the sacred and thereby at once pious and free" (my
transl.).
bivalent goddess inwhose nature purity and blood, life support and killing are
inextricably combined.29
III
(1462-67)
Two sanctuaries aremarked off, one just accounted for, of Artemis Tauropolos
at Halae, the other of Artemis at Brauron. Iphigenia's story ends in the latter.
Athena next will mention the chorus briefly, then turn again to Orestes. Five and
a half lines for Iphigenia are framed by some twenty for Orestes. What might so
far have seemed a near symmetrical balance of focus and treatment between the
play's two central figures is now qualified.
Orestes' aition involves a new foundation, a death-evading substitution, and
release from the past. Iphigenia appears to go nowhere. At Brauron, repre
sented as a preexisting site, she will still carry on her offices as the goddess's
kleidouchos (cf. 131, 1463). She is saved from further attendance at blood sacri
fices, but the aition relates her death and a subsequent cult practice commemorat
ing death: the dedication of garments of women whose "death agony was in
childbirth."30Throughout the play Iphigenia repeatedly expresses passionate
29. For this ambivalence of Artemis's nature generally, see, e.g., Burkert, Vernant, and Graf
(above, n. 2). The text of IT ismost revealing at 402-6, where Artemis, designated as "maiden
daughter of Zeus," koura(i) dia(i), is the one forwhom "humanblood soaks altars and shrines," and
at 1097, where Artemis is goddess of childbirth, lochia, followed by 1113-16, where she is the
goddess "who slays the deer" and the goddess at whose altars "sheep are not sacrificed" [Musgrave's
correction of the text at 1116 seems inevitable and is adopted by all recent editors], marking firsther
role as huntress and suggesting the (wild) animal substitute sacrifice, then, euphemistically. human
sacrifice. For a lexical association of the Taurian sacrifices and the Halae ritual, note heorte at 36, of
the former, and heortazei at 1458, of the latter (the only occurrences of thisword family in the play).
I have been much helped inmore clearly seeing unfolded in the play this double, ambivalent yet
integrated, nature of Artemis by comments fromAlbert Henrichs, who also draws my attention to
the acute observations on the play's aetiological conclusion by CedricWhitman, Euripides and the
Full Circle of Myth (Cambridge,Mass., 1974) 32-34, esp. on the link of Athena and Artemis as
parthenoi, both virginal and implicated in violence and blood (a link extending to Iphigenia); on the
"paradoxical conflicts in Artemis," her "contradictory aspects," which the transfer to Halae "brings
into unity . . .without losing sight of them"; and on the drawing of blood in the ceremony "lest the
cost of purity ever be forgotten."
30. Iphigenia's actual tomb contrasts with the mistaken and so canceled funeral rites for
desire for return to Argos and reunion with her brother. The latter is achieved
temporarily.Athena recalls the hope of return toArgos right to the end (1440;
Argos is named here for the last of thirty-two times in the play), only now to
deny it.31
Iphigenia's prospective death and the reference to her burial indicate her
heroization and shift her into a chthonic realm. Her humanity, finely suggested
in the play's action (and prized and idealized in later times), is submerged. There
were signs of an Iphigenia as heroic counterpart to Artemis. Both are addressed
as potnia (463, 1123; 533, 1082), both are called kouralkora (402, 1114). Both
have interrelated timai (748, 776; cf. 54, 1461). Both-Artemis as statue
dropped on the Taurians out of the sky (29-30, 88, 977) and are objects of theft
and rescue (28, 1400; 1359).32Through the aetiology applicable to her Iphigenia
is definitively drawn into that realm of the goddess's fearful ambivalence, which
she had earlier sought to deny (380-91).
Athena confirms Orestes as the young man who successfully survives and
overcomes his trials and tribulations (cf. 1441b, 1454-55; 89-92, 114-15, 121
22). But Iphigenia's indispensable role as her brother's rescuer is now passed
over, usurped by Athena. Reassociated with death and blood Iphigenia could
now even be said to draw off some of Artemis's harsher aspect. As the chorus
recallwith her epithet Lochia (1097), Artemis is also associatedwith childbirth.33
Dedications to her of women's garments, especially in connection with marriage
and childbirth, are well attested in the treasure records of Artemis Brauronia
and in dedicatory epigrams in the sixth book of the Palatine Anthology. In the
case of childbirth the inscriptions imply and the epigrams clearly indicate that the
mothers survived (IG II2 1514-25, 1528-30; AP 6.201-2, 271-72, 274). As it
happens, cult commemoration of death in childbirth is attested only in this
passage of our play, and focused specifically on Iphigenia.34
Birth and marriage (not fully achieved without the production of offspring)
as well as the close relations of parent and child are important in the play. The
choruswomen elaborately celebrate Artemis Lochia inDelos, Leto's giving birth
there, and the locheia kleina of Apollo (1097-1102, 1234-42). The dangers of
pollution attendant on birth and approachingmarriage are evoked (382, 1228).
Stories of intergenerational violence and conflict partly reflect these dangers
which in the case of birth at least are real enough in everyday life-as well as
issues of social ideology. The infant (brephos) Apollo leaped out of his dear
mother's arms to kill the monstrous guardian of Earth's shrine at Delphi; she
gives birth (eteknosato) to dream visions to defend the rights of her child (paid')
Themis, whom Apollo had "removed" (1260; cf. 175); Apollo "with childish
hand" supplicates his father for restitution, which in amusement at the child's
(tekos) greed Zeus allows (1247-75). The partly humorous and poetically dis
tanced account of Apollo's glorious birth and success in divine generational and
sexual conflict counterpoints Iphigenia's story. The very fact that she was "the
most beautiful thing the yearmight give birth to," "the childClytaemnestra gives
birth to in the house" (20-22), is what marks her for death at her father's (tou
tekontos, 363) hands. Her supplication of her father fails (363-64). She laments
her unfortunate life from the night her mother consummated marriage and con
ceived her, when the "Moirai lochiai drew tight a cruel and barren early child
hood" (sterran paideian) for her, whom her mother bore to be "a victim for
sacrificial slaughter, for a father's outrageous treatment" (203-11). The sacrifice
of the child-maiden Iphigenia coincided with and replaced what was to have been
her marriage (25, 214-17, 364-71, 538-39, 818-19, 856-61). In the ritual that
ends her story, Iphigenia, once the child a father meant to kill, becomes the
focus of mothers who are killed by the offspring they have given birth to.
Orestes is glimpsed as an infant (asApollo is) by hismotherly sister (231-35,
834-36; the phrase eti brephos in both passages is used of Apollo, 1249). Iphige
nia is then nearly the instrument of Orestes' death as a young man, which causes
her to recall her father's attempt to kill her (852-53, 864-72; cf. 992-95).
Clytaemnestra may also be recalled, who had rejected, and may have tried to kill,
her son; but was then killed by him so that, among other things, he could get on
with his life. The matricide, that most radical violation of a family bond, is
throughout the play both drawn to our attention (79, 556, 924-25, 957, 1007)
and, as said before, displaced or evaded. It is even made the subject of a kind of
folk etymology hears "Iphigenia" as "Strong inBirth," her connection here to death in childbirth is a
paradoxical reversal. Historical etymology has been elusive: see, e.g., C. Calame, Les choeurs de
jeunesfilles en Grace archaique 1 (Rome, 1977) 292 n. 234; K. Dowden, Death and theMaiden: Girls'
Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology (London, 1989) 46, 212 n. 62. Perhaps the iph- element may
suggest heroic strength in the face of life or death throughpopular association with epic ip0OLCog.
This
epithet is found in the epitaph of awoman who died while giving birth (IG II/III211907), cited byN.
Loraux, "Le lit, la guerre," L'Homme 21 (1981) 39. Loraux (45 n. 38) refers to IT 1464-66 in the
context of her discussion of marriage with childbearing as themost glorious and "manly" achieve
ment allowed a Greek woman, though such an association seems muted in the IT passage.
[above, n. 32], Sourvinou-Inwood [above, n. 20]; inDHA 16 [1990] 9-90, there are state-of-the
question contributions by P. Brule, Dowden, and Sourvinou-Inwood, with full current bibliography),
start of Iphigenia's story, the sacrifice byAgamemnon (with rescuing bear substi
tution instead of the deer as at Aulis), and its end.39 Perhaps one dramatic fiction
cannot quite manage to include both a connection of Iphigenia to bears at
Brauron, as the local Attic cult suggests, and the pan-Hellenic myth of the
substitute deer sacrifice at Aulis (28, 783; cf. 1113). Yet when the aition's text
begins by framing Iphigenia's name within "the holy terraces of Brauron" (1462
63), theArkteia may well have been evoked, especially ifwe recall the initiatory
themes relating to girls and marriage in the play. But if such an evocation is
made, it also underscores the absence of any explicit mention of the Arkteia and
its positive ritual purposes. At any rate, what Euripides has chosen to have
Athena speak about are dedications on occasions of failure-the deaths of moth
ers, and nothing is said about whether or not the children survived.40
Why is this aetiology so arranged? One could attempt to answer from the
Delphi, Gaia and her daughter Themis (1259-69), and like that of her mother,
but Iphigenia's possible connection to the bear ritual is rarely addressed directly. It may not be
possible for the time being to go beyond a formulation likeHenrichs's (above, n. 18: 207): "In the
Brauronian cult of Artemis, the Iphigenia myth and animal substitution existed side by side as
mutually supportive elements in a coming-of-age ritual inwhich preadolescent girls called 'bears'
lived in seclusion in her temple." Two items, though,may still be worth considering. Phanodemos in
the 330s B.C.E.said that a bear, not a deer, was substituted at Iphigenia's sacrifice (see below, n. 39).
And a reading of the texts of Ar. Lys. 644-45 together with Aesch. Ag. 239 may be seen to link
Athenian girls as bears at Brauron to Iphigenia (C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "Aristophanes, Lysistrata
641-647," CQ 21 [1971] 339-42; cf. Sourvinou-Inwood [above, n. 20] 132-33; a slightly different
reading of the text, but still supporting the link, is offered by T. C. W. Stinton, "Iphigenia and the
Bears at Brauron," CQ 26 [1976] 11-13, followed by J. Henderson in his Lysistrata edition [Oxford.
1987], on 645; the interpretation of the Agamemnon passage is also controversial: see now D.
Armstrong and E. A. Ratchford, "Iphigenia's Veil: Aeschylus, Agamemnon 228-48," BICS 32
[1985] 1-12).
39. Phanodemus, FGrHist 325 F 14; the Leiden scholion on Ar. Lys. 645; cf. Euphorion fr. 91
Powell. My assumption, necessarily tentative, is that traditional elements predating IT are repre
sented in these texts.
40. Offerings on occasions of failure seem unusual. The Halae ceremony of the neck cutting is
also unusual ("seltsame Ritus": Graf [above, n. 2] 414). The ritual information in both cases is
uniquely attested in this play, and in each case information otherwise known (Arkteia; the
Tauropolian pannuchis attested inMenander's Epitrepontes) is omitted. Yet Euripides' choice of
these apparently unusual cultic features is not due to some sort of antiquarianism, but to his dramatic
purposes. Hence his silence about the Arkteia need not imply that a heroized Iphigenia had no actual
involvement in the bear rituals.One could say thatEuripides' aetiologizing is significantly selective.
On rituals in Greek tragedy as part of a dramatic fiction, and partly "fictionalized," see P. E.
Easterling, "Tragedy and Ritual," Metis 3 (1988) 87-109, esp. 98-99, 109 (though she considers
elements of ritual dramatically represented, not rituals reported in aetiologies).
41. She herself states it plainly: "a man lost to his house / in death is sorely missed [potheinos];
what concerns a woman is of no account [asthene]" (1005-6). For the complex representation in the
Oresteia, see Zeitlin (above, n. 19); also Zeitlin inWinkler and Zeitlin (above, n. 19) 78-87. Cf. now
thewidely contextualized discussion of David Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement
of Morals inClassical Athens (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 133-170.
who took up sword and axe against her menfolk,42 Iphigenia's strong presence is
represented, acknowledged, and then displaced. The play shows her as both an
unwilling and a dangerous agent of savage barbarian practices (cf. 34-41 [not all
of which is textually secure], 225-26 [again, the gist is clear, the text hard], 585
87, 595-96, 617-18)-dangerous especially because of her justified grievances
againstGreeks, including immediatemembers of her family (cf. 356-58, 440-46;
336-39; 8, 17-24, 211, 360-68, 784-85, 852-53, 862-63, 920, 1083) and danger
ous in her association with Artemis.43 Iphigenia has sharedwith the other human
actors limits and failures of understanding,44notably of her dream, inwhich her
brother appears as her sacrificialvictim (53-55; female and dream are associated
in the Delphic story, 1261-67: contrast 570-71), and of the complex nature of
Artemis. Orestes is one step ahead of her at the climax of the recognition scene
(777), though she then takes control by her careful insistence on the proofs of his
identity (806-22). The process of recognition had been initiated by her sympa
thetic questioning (resisted by Orestes), and furthered by her plan to send a
letter toArgos. She is the first to call passionately for escape (873-99) and then
devise and direct it. But, as said, this positive movement in the characterization
of Iphigenia is checked. There is a tension at once within the play's action (the
myth as dramatically shaped) and between that action and the aetiological conclu
sion. The latter marks a degree of discontinuity between the humanized and the
sacral Iphigenia, between an Iphigeniawho insistson a pureArtemis, untouched
by human bloodshed, birth, or death (380-91; cf. 1228), and one who is recast in
the service of and then, as a figure of heroic cult, in closest association with an
Artemis still connected to human bloodshed and, through Iphigenia, to death in
childbirth. The force and effect of this is hard to gauge. Iphigenia's role as
priestess and then heroine at Brauron, though succintly registered, carries cul
tural weight. Yet Euripides' choosing to make such an elliptical and muted final
42. Aesch. Ag. 1379, 1384; Cho. 889; cf. IT552, 926.
43. The ambivalence of the sacred as represented by human sacrifice toArtemis throughout
the play inevitably rubs off on the figure of Iphigenia. Ovid neatly catches this and makes Orestes
parallel: "virgo Pelopeia . . . / sacra deae coluit qualiacumque suae. /Quo postquam, dubium pius an
sceleratus, Orestes" (Tristia 4.4.67-69). Thus too the (I believe) unresolvable question about the
nature of Iphigenia's participation in the actual sacrificing: cf. J. C. G. Strachan, "Iphigenia and
Human Sacrifice in Euripides' Iph. Taur.," CPh 71 (1976) 131-40; and D. Sansone, "A Problem in
Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris," RhM 121 (1978) 35-47. Note the ambivalence implied at 463-68,
where both the chorus and Iphigenia express a need to satisfy properlywhat Artemis requires for the
human sacrifice, yet the chorus simultaneously indicate their distance as Greeks from what the
Taurians do.
44. On doxa, delusion and misunderstanding in the play, see the fine observations of H.
Strohm, Euripides: Iphigenie im Taurerland (Munich, 1949) 24, 35-36.
IV
45. Strohm (ibid.) on 958-60 says that honoring Attic tradition takes precedence over dra
matic plausibility.
46. J. Diggle's OCT text (Oxford, 1981), which accepts corrections by Hermann at 951 and
Housman at 952.
47. Cf. the quasi-formulaic eTL xai (vuv) in aetiological passages at, e.g., HH Herm. 125-26,
Hdt. 3.48.3; cf. also the form of II. 24.614-17.
48. Burkert (above, n. 8) 236-55, esp. 242, 245 (link of Choes to initiation: cf. above, nn. 19,
20), 246 (ancient evidence linkingOrestes toChoes). Also on theChoes, see J. Bremmer, The Early
Greek Concept of theSoul (Princeton, 1983) 109-20.
49. Aesch. Eum. 448 (cf. 276-78); Eur. HF 1218-19, Or. 75; Parker (above, n. 14) 371. At
Aesch. Cho. 291-94 sanctions imposed on a homicide, including refusalof participation in communal
drinking (cf. the law cited inDem. 20.158), are paradoxically threatened by Apollo ifOrestes does
not become a killer and avenge his father.
50, '.EXeyEaL (955); cf. Aesch. Eum. 433. There are other suggestions of legal language in these
lines: ixtbv (948), and perhaps ai6bs (949) in the sense of forgiveness in a homicide case (LSJ s.v.
ai6og I 2, acieotta II 2; law cited in Dem. 43.57), though the word also evokes the Athenian
reputation formercy and assistance to outsiders in trouble. The judicial aspect of the story is thus
drawn into the Choes aetiology and so anticipated and partly preempted (the trial fails to resolve
Orestes' case).
51. For this seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of silence and naming, here in the case of a
religiously charged crime whose consequences involves the Erinyes, one may compare A. Hen
richs, "Namenlosigkeit und Euphemismus: Zur Ambivalenz der chthonischen Machte im attischen
Drama," in A. Harder and H. Hofmann, eds., Fragmenta Dramatica: Beitrage zur Interpretation
der griechischen Tragikerfragmente und ihrerWirkungsgeschichte (Gottingen, 1991) 161-201, esp.
162-79, on the paradoxical unity of naming and not naming (and euphemistically naming) of
chthonic deities, esp. the Erinyes; see also 175-76 on IT 944 (after 931, 941). One may note that in
a religious setting silence is a barrier marking off sacred and polluted from the profane. The chorus
Iphigenia had been both silent and not silent about the sacrificial rites of
Taurian Artemis (37, perhaps 41; 384, 618, 775-76).52 Matricide and human
sacrifice, interconnected in the play's dramatic muthos, are also parallel as at
once unspeakable and yet spoken. Like the Choes festival, marked by silence,
they have a double force. And in each case an aetiological principle is at work
indicating how, bymeans of ingenious and guileful substitution, narrative events
in the past (themyth) become symbolic constructions in the present (the ritual).
In each case, too, the animating force is a movement from death to survival and
celebration-and perhaps, for the spectators, from undifferentiated reception to
some kind of understanding.
The Athenian task described by Orestes of accommodating his sacred and
criminal person is comparable to the action of transferring the bloody Taurian
Artemis toAttica. Iphigenia devises the notion of using the ritualof washing the
goddess's statue, the essential part of the plan to steal it.53 The Athenians'
reception of Orestes is also a contrivance, a kind of religious trick54 that inge
niously satisfies both ritual restriction on one who has shed blood and a complex
of social purposes represented by the "new" Choes ritual. By a kind of inocula
tion with the polluted hero, communal bonding is reinforced; an ideological
point ismade-a matricide has become acceptable-and a principle of xenia has
enter into Artemis's precinct with the ritual call EiCpacEiT' (123), and they call for silence when the
sacred victims Orestes and Pylades are brought in (458). But silence must be broken-in sacrificial
ritual by prayer, and then at the moment of killing by the wild outcry of women, the ololuge (e.g.,
Aesch. Sept. 269; E. Fraenkel on Ag. 597; Burkert [above, n. 2] 127). Silence is amark of religious
power; breaking it, an assertion of human life and presence (cf. J.-P. Vernant, Mythe et pensee
chez les grecs, 2d ed. [Paris, 1969], 260). Once purified, Orestes can speak (cf. Aesch. Eum. 445
53). Iphigenia disguises the escape plot by pretending that "a ritual action is in progress," raising
the ritual cry (vcok6okvE) and chanting incomprehensible spells (xctn&6e PdQPactac/ [El
uayEcouv'),"as though," the Taurian messenger reports,more suggestively than he knows, "wash
ing away bloodshed" (1336-38). When the escape is nearly successful, it is accompanied by the
auspicious singing of the paean- prEvqpft? ov ...JT.. cva (1403-4), euphemia shifting from its
negative silent pole to a positive, celebrational one. There had been secular versions of this
movement from silence to speech too. Orestes being first brought before Iphigenia refuses to give
his name as a defense against ridicule, in the old style of heroic resolution (500, 502) and in
despairing resignation. The silence about his name allows the recognition to be unfolded to its full
extent. To be finally realized, it requires that Iphigenia's letter not "speak itswriting in silence"
(cpgqoELt otCyoa TcyyeyQct[Evcta) but that she herself "declare in speech" (k6oy cpqdoow) its con
tent, and her identity (760-71). Note also the conspiratorial silences marked at 723-24, 1056-64
been maintained (in symmetrical reversal of the signal violation of that principle
by the Taurians-whose king emphatically rejects for his people the possibility
of matricide: 1174).55
The midaction aition of the Choes registers a successful ritual negotiation
whose effects have been experienced by theAthenians in their own lives.Yet the
drama actually runs a somewhat different course because it is predicated, as
Orestes next recounts, on the failure of his trial at Athens. He appears towin
vLxcov 6' &arflca (967)-but only some of the Furies are persuaded by the judicial
decision, 6ixn (968). The rest are unpersuaded by nomos (970), and drive
Orestes out of Athens again and back to Apollo at Delphi, who sends him to the
Taurians and into the action of our play, the Furies still in pursuit. A religious
observance has been accounted for, but its potential complement, the aetiology
of a court and a civil, judicial procedure, acquittalwhen a jury'svote is equally
divided, is sidestepped.56
This of course recalls Aeschylus's Eumenides, with notable and particular
differences.57Orestes' purification atDelphi, for example (Eum. 204-5, 237-39,
280-83, 578; cf. 445-52, 473-74; Choeph. 1059-60), gets no mention, leaving in
clear relief Iphigenia's purification scheme (described in full technical detail:
1222-29; cf. 1207, 1218, 1338). In Aeschylus the Areopagus is founded for
Orestes' trial (Eum. 483-84); in IT reference ismade to the (doubtless earlier)
55. The xenia of the Athenians is matched at the "new" Apolline Delphi, Jrokv6voQL... v.
EVOEVTI OQo6vO(1281). And Iphigenia, who has been possessed of a technenxenoktonon (53) and
xenophonous timas (776), emphatically refuses to harm Thoas because thatwould be terrible xeno
phonein (1021), thoughOrestes has no such compunction (1020, 1022; cf. Eur. El. 896-900). Gener
ally on xenia in the Greek world, see now G. Herman, Ritualized Friendship and theGreek City
(Cambridge, 1978). For xenia and the Choes aetiology, see Bremmer (above, n. 48: 109): the
Anthesteria "recalled . . . among other events, the threat of strangers who could destroy the social
fabric"; also 113-19, and Burkert (above, n. 8) 250-52.
56. This context would explain the shift from dike to nomos in the parallel phrases 6octtl &v
'
ov .... . eo oaL 6ixn (968) and 6oal 'EQLtvUov oi'x rTelio09(oav v6ot) (970). Platnauer and
Strohm ad loc. each say that dike and nomos here are roughly equivalent, requiring for nomos the
meaning "judgment," "judicial decision," which is, I believe, unparalleled. Though dike and nomos
can be complementary (e.g., Theognis 54, Hdt. 4.106), they are not equivalent. Nomos at 970 should
have the sense of "institutionalized practice," as at 959 of the new Choes rites. The practice at 970 is
the one whereby a jury's equally divided vote means acquittal, the practice according to which
Orestes would have won his case, but which some of the Erinyes refused to accept. Only when this
number are satisfied, as implied somewhat obliquely by Athena at the end of the play (1439-41b.
1455-58), can the aition for the judicial practice, referred to as nomisma, be certified (1470-72).
Religious nomos is a precondition of judicial nomos and dike (cf. 1458, 1471, also the surprising
1469).
57. The extensive Aeschylean references in the play have long been variously observed and
interpreted: e.g., Burnett (above, no. 1) 71-72; Caldwell (above, n. 30); D. H. Roberts, Apollo and
His Oracle in theOresteia (Gottingen, 1984) 102-8; B. Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia: Studien
zum komischen Elementen in der griechischen Tragodie (Gittingen, 1982) 202-3, who observes a
shift from "political" to "private" resolution in IT, though each of these terms needs further consider
ation (for the former, see C. W. Mcleod, "Politics and the Oresteia," JHS 102 [1982] 124-44); see
also Sourvinou-Inwood (above, n. 17) 225-32 = 227-33; R. W. Wallace, TheAreopagus Council to
307 B.C. (Baltimore, 1989) 87-93, 209-10.
IT shows a possible conclusion of the story of the Tantalid line and a resolution
of a last, notable dilemma: what to do with the young matricide. The story of a
sister figure (as in the Electra plays, which culminate with the matricide) is drawn
into the process and located at the center of its dramatic representation. She is the
moving force of the escape plot, and her survival and very presence may suggest
thatAgamemnon's crimewas not irredeemable, thatClytaemnestra therefore had
after all no adequate basis for her vengeance, and that Orestes had a stronger one
for his.63This implied narrative logic is part of the comprehensive ideological
scenario that supports the young male's story of survival and final success. In
general, resolution isachieved partly by divine fiat-through Apollo's (obscurely)
guiding oracle and Athena's (unexpected) final intervention-and partly by hu
man initiative. In the play's language, divinely guiding tucheand human techno(cf.
89) combine to bring about something like a culturally appropriate ending. These
two forces also partly overlap. Human action involves the appropriation of reli
gious procedures, and its techno is a form of dolos, of tricky negotiation, that is
akin to theway religious institutions are shown to originate and work.
Of the three ritual aitia in the play the one for Halae follows most continu
ously on Orestes' story. The themes of this aition-new foundation, new cult, a
principle of replacement (apoina), the social channeling of a divine power whose
sources and connections are represented as archaic, non-Hellenic, and wild
come together as part of a conclusion that must be considered beneficial to the
community. But an audience surelywill not have forgotten the drama leading up
to the aition, a drama of delusion, mortal risk, and escape involving the highly
charged and ambivalent powers of the sacred, of human sacrifice and in
trafamilial violence. Iphigenia's aition picks up allusively a theme of women's life
transitions, but she herself is not to experience them. The aition cuts off her
human story, and in such a way that her promotion to a final sacred status seems.
from the viewpoint of the preceding drama, a darkly colored, abrupt interven
tion. Iphigenia acquires-in the perspective of dramaticmyth; in the perspective
of ritual she reacquires-her final association with the ambivalent sacredness of
Artemis. This and her femaleness also fit an ideological pattern in which the
female is at once intermediary or instrumental and powerful in ways difficult but
necessary to control. In the case of the Choes a successful
negotiation
aetiology
is described and affirmed by something very close to a direct appeal to the
Athenian audience. Yet this aetiology is embedded in an account of the failure of
the Areopagus council, and involves the crime of matricide and Athenian subter
fuge, though the matricide, again, has an ideological dimension whereas subter
fuge need not be problematic in Greek culture.64
These aetiologies bring into focus interactions as well as tensions between
the play's construction of dramatic myth and its evocation of real-life ritual. The
question may be raised whether Euripides means
thereby to suggest a challenge
or questioning of the ritual's meaning, its capacity to seem to be effecting some
thing worthwhile, or whether the play's effect is in the end to reinforce the
viability of ritual by suggesting that the ritual absorbs disturbing elements in the
myth. There is, I think, no determinable answer, because the aetiologies through
which the rituals are brought to an audience's attention are themselves part of a
total dramatic and fictional structure, and indeterminacyor ambivalence is intrin
sic to such a structure-to the nature of tragic drama.65 One could say that in IT
both drama and ritual are generally aligned toward what is said to be a benign
and desirable aim, soteria,66 that is, deliverance, safe return, safe passage. Its
achievement, however, for both dramaturgical and ritual reasons, cannot be
easy. Itmust be earned by the experience of anguish, despair, risk, and danger.
The quality and seriousness of the final achievement depend on the force of the
obstacles to reach it, on a price paid. A delicate balance is required
overcome so
that the final victory or resolution is neither hollow nor cheap. The tensions in
the fabric of the play are part of its dramatic dialectic and signs of a balance in
the process of adjustment.
VI
65. This is a large issue whose adequate treatment would go well beyond the limits of the
present article. Briefly, though, I have inmind, on the one hand, the general sense of Attic tragedy
developed by J.-P. Vernant (above, n. 19: chap. 2) as a historically definable fabric of "tensions and
ambiguities," and the view recently articulated by Goldhill (inWinkler and Zeitlin [above, n. 19],
esp. 123-24, 126-27; cf. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy [Cambridge, 1986] 112-13) of a tension
and dialectic between transgressive elements in tragicmyth and normative features both within the
drama (e.g., the role of the chorus) and implied by the festival context of the drama's performance.
With regard to IT in particular, I note the remark of E. Hall (above, n. 60: 148) that in this play "the
layers of irony become almost impenetrable." On the other hand, I am thinking of the likely
heterogeneity within a late fifth-century audience and signs that Euripides' drama is accordingly
attuned, thus open to a range of possible "readings," say, between a play of exotically colored high
adventure and a self-reflective, ironic and paradoxical representation of religious phenomena. A
specific instance of differing audience response is related at IT 264-80, polarized between pious
credulity and reckless skepticism; cf. the spectrum of responses toOrestes' trial reported (by a clearly
partisanmessenger) at Orestes 866-949. For Euripides' special interest in crowds and spectators see
H. Diller, "Umwelt undMasse als dramatische Faktoren bei Euripides," Entr. Hardt 6 (1960) 87
105; and cf. the suggestive if not altogether convincing contribution by D. Lanza, "Lo spettatore
sulla scena," inD. Lanza, M. Vegetti, et al., L'ideologia della citta (Naples, 1977) 57-78. For the
changing character and responses of elements of later fifth-century "audiences" attending the older,
more obscure rituals, see S. C. Humphreys, "Dynamics of theGreek Breakthrough: The Dialogue
between Philosophy and Religion," in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age
Civilizations (Albany, 1986) 100-101. One might also keep inmind the variety of audience implied
byAristophanes' comedy, including rural, urban, "conservative," "democratic," intellectual, nonin
tellectual, citizen, and noncitizen.
66. On soteria in the play, see Burnett (above, n. 1) 47-48.
67. In various forms this is basic to Attic tragedy. For Aeschylus, see, e.g., S. Goldhill.
Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia (Cambridge, 1984); for Sophocles, esp. in the use of
oracles, see, e.g., R. W. Bushnell, Prophesying Tragedy (Ithaca, 1988). See also 0. Taplin, Greek
Tragedy inAction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978), esp. index s.vv. "riddles"and "silences."
68. He is interested in fostering a "criticalattitude in the spectator" (cf.Ar. Frogs 954-61) vis-a
vis a representation of the world as "caught up in development and continuous process" and in a
produced by the Furies (294). Orestes then, it is reported, "like a lion," rushes
upon the cattle and starts cutting them up with his sword, "supposing [dokon]
thus toward off the divine Erinyes" (296-99). The passage is remarkably sugges
tive. Orestes is vividly shown still subject to the aftereffects of his crime. The
sudden evidence of his instability energizes the dramatic action and adds sus
pense to what may follow. But the representation of Orestes' madness is framed
so that we are put inmind of the theatrical or representational process itself. This
ismanaged by language that draws attention to what is seen or not seen-in the
verbal report of an observer (285, 291)70-and that refers in quasi-technical
terms to representation as such, both visual and acoustic: morphs schemata
We are presented with a pair of interpretations thatwe
(292), mimemata (294).71
must ourselves interpret: the mad perceptions of Orestes and the ordinary,
common-sense account of the messenger. The latter appears to be a correction of
didacticism realized inways emotionally and aesthetically pleasurable to that actively engaged specta
tor (B. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 15 [Frankfurt, 1967] 275, 358). A consideration of such spectator
involvement inGreek drama is encouraged by the comparisons drawn between the theater and the
political and juridicalassemblies atAthens by J.Ober andB. Strauss, inWinkler andZeitlin (above, n.
19) 237-70.
69. This isDiggle's OCT text, which accepts Jackson's ingenious emendation at 288 for the
and themore straightforward
pretty much impossible (if no lacuna isposited after it) qi6' iXXLTdvwov,
if not so necessary (cf. Ba. 945-50) correction &aog for 6X0ov at 290.
70. Cf. the emphasis on seeing at the entrance of Orestes and Pylades (67-76) in themore usual
context of indicating a stage setting (e.g., Soph. Phil. 16-39); and cf. the parodos of Ion with its
visual evocations of representations imagined to be on stage (190-218). For dok6n at IT 299, cf.
Aesch. Cho. 1051, 1053; and for seeing what others do not see, Cho. 1061. Cf. also Athena at the end
of the play, seen by the audience but not by Orestes and Iphigenia (1447).
71. Add to this the account of Orestes' movements at the onset of madness (282-83), and we
have all the parameters of theatrical representation. In spite of the surrounding textual difficulties I
see no need to change L[tLF[taTa(294); the proposed alternatives only repeat the sense of (pOoyy6g
and/or vd.yu.ala in the previous line (cf.G. F. Else, " 'Imitation' in the Fifth Century," CP 53 [1958]
89 n. 38; more generally, E. C. Keuls, Plato and Greek Painting [Leiden, 1978] 14-22). The scene as
a whole, the deluded hero killing animals, is itself a partial imitation of Soph. Ajax 1-70.
the former. Orestes confuses cattle and dogs with Furies and perhaps something
in the rocky landscapewith the stone weight of hismother about to drop on him
(290; cf. 263, 281, 324). (And the imagined threat of that stony thing becomes
actual when the herdsmen attack with their stones: 310, 318-19, 326-27, 331
32.) Yet the audience also knows those Furies to be an integral, indispensable
part of Orestes' story. Even in the eyes of the messenger the escape of Orestes
and Pylades, "the goddess's sacrificial offerings," from death by stoning has
something uncanny and providential about it (328-29).72
We have here Euripides' characteristic interplay between a heroic, aristo
craticworld drawn from the repertoire of myth and an everyday, contemporary
view of thatworld. But, to put it another way-encouraged by themessenger's
use of the condensed epic simile comparing Orestes' mad attack to a lion's (297),
the hero's mad are closer to the imaginative world of poetry and theater
visions
than is the herdsman's prosaic view of things.73 Aetiology makes a kind of bridge
between two such worlds, one imaginatively constructed, the other ordinarily
experienced. In this way aetiology is like the drama itself and lets us see that the
bridge is also between a quasi-rational mode-the consciously manipulated con
struction of myth in dramatic form-and the surface irrationality of ordinary life,
including its religious practices. The present passage points to no ritual as such,
but does suggest how divine Furies might have come into being through the
hallucinations of a matricide. The play as a whole, however, brings this extreme,
subjective experience into balance with the overall coherence of itsmythic struc
ture, a structure that still includes the Furies as a necessary part of its coherence.
In the process an audience may be instructed as to how to think about them, as it
is about the various elements of this story forwhich the play offers aetiologies.
Dartmouth College
72. Note a&iLTov (328; cf. above, section I), EVTiJXEl (329), and e'exXecttaev (331, where
Bothe's emendation is unnecessary: see above, n. 16).
73. For madness and theatrical, mimetic behavior, cf. the terrible account inHF922-1009, esp.
947-49, 952-63, 998-99, and Pentheus's last scene on stage in Ba. 912-76 (both in ritual contexts).
The link, of course, isDionysus.