Author: Euripedes
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5063]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on April 12, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK, the iphigenia in Tauris
***
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TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
Gilbert Murray, ll.D., D. Litt.
The Iphigenia in Tauris is not in the modern sense
a tragedy; it is a romantic play, beginning in a
tragic atmosphere and moving through perils and escapes
to a happy end. To the archaeologist the cause
of this lies in the ritual on which the play is based.
All Greek tragedies that we know have as their nucleus
something which the Greeks called an Aition—a
cause or origin. They all explain some ritual
or observance or commemorate some great event.
Nearly all, as a matter of fact, have for this Aition
a Tomb Ritual, as, for instance, the Hippolytus has
the worship paid by the Trozenian Maidens at that
hero’s grave. The use of this Tomb Ritual
may well explain both the intense shadow of death that
normally hangs over the Greek tragedies, and also
perhaps the feeling of the Fatality, which is, rightly
or wrongly, supposed to be prominent in them.
For if you are actually engaged in commemorating
your hero’s funeral, it follows that all through
the story, however bright his prospects may seem,
you feel that he is bound to die; he cannot escape.
A good many tragedies, however, are built not on
Tomb Rituals but on other sacred Aitia: on the
foundation of a city, like the Aetnae, the ritual
of the torch-race, like the Prometheus; on some great
legendary succouring of the oppressed, like the Suppliant
Women of Aeschylus and Euripides. And the rite
on which the Iphigenia is based is essentially one
in which a man is brought to the verge of death but
just does not die.
The rite is explained in 11. 1450 ff. of the play.
On a certain festival at Halae in Attica a human
victim was led to the altar of Artemis Tauropolos,
touched on the throat with a sword and then set free:
very much what happened to Orestes among the Tauri,
and exactly what happened to Iphigenia at Aulis.
Both legends have doubtless grown out of the same
ritual.
