Iphigenia

Also Known As: Greek Ἰφιγένεια, Iphigeneia, “strong-born”; called Iphimede in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Iphianassa in Homer and in Lucretius, and Orsilochia in Antoninus Liberalis
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A mortal princess whose death was demanded as the price of a favourable wind, and who in half the surviving versions is snatched off the altar and made something other than mortal.
Role in Mythos: She is the sacrifice that launches the Trojan War and the debt that gets her father murdered when he comes home from it.
Relation to Humans: Greek communities from Attica to Laconia claimed her, showed her grave or worshipped her as a goddess under Artemis’s name, and women who died in childbirth had their clothes carried to her shrine at Brauron. To later writers she became an argument rather than a person, the standing example of what people can be talked into doing.

The wind at Aulis came down off the Strymon and would not stop. A thousand ships lay drawn up on the shingle of a narrow strait opposite Chalcis, ropes slapping, hulls drying out, and every dawn the same wrong wind pushing the fleet back against the land. Aeschylus lingers on the waiting rather than the war: the rations thinning, the cables fraying, the men going idle and then sour. Something had to be paid before the sea would let anyone leave. The price was a girl who had not yet been told she was the price.

The offence behind it was small and stupid, which is most of the point. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the alliance, shot a deer in ground that belonged to Artemis and said something boastful about the shot. The goddess replied with weather. Calchas, the army’s seer, pointed to her as the cause and produced a remedy heavier than the storm, and the sons of Atreus struck the ground with their staffs and did not manage to stop weeping. The remedy was Agamemnon’s eldest daughter.

Getting her to Aulis required a lie, and the lie was a wedding. Word went to Clytemnestra at Argos that Achilles wanted the girl, and that the marriage would be held at the camp before the fleet sailed. Odysseus and the herald Talthybius carried the message. Her mother sent her, with the infant Orestes in tow. Iphigenia arrived dressed for a bridegroom she would never meet, and in most tellings she works out what the altar is for only when she is already standing at it.

Before any of that she had been a singer at her father’s table. When the third libation went round and the men fell quiet for the paean, it was her voice that carried the blessing, a girl’s voice among the drinking, honouring the man who was about to trade her. Aeschylus sets that memory directly beside the altar, which is the cruellest thing in the poem.

The altar scene is the only real description of her that antiquity left us, and it is not a portrait. Her father told his attendants to lift her, and they took her up over the stone the way you lift a young goat, face down in her robes where she had fallen supplicating. They put a bit in her mouth so she could not shout a curse on the house. Then the saffron robe went down onto the ground, and she looked from one man to the next with an appeal she had no way of speaking, like a figure in a painting that is trying to talk. Nobody who reads that stops to wonder what colour her hair was.

What happens next the record cannot agree on. Aeschylus lets the knife fall, because his whole trilogy needs it to; the sacrifice is what puts the axe in Clytemnestra’s hands ten years later. The lost epic Cypria, surviving only in a summary by Proclus, has Artemis snatch her off the altar at the last moment, leave a stag in her place and make her immortal among the Tauri. Apollodorus repeats the substitution and adds, in the flat manner of a compiler with too many versions on his desk, that some say the goddess made her immortal. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women calls her Iphimede, sets a phantom on the altar and turns the girl into Artemis Enodia, Artemis of the Roads; Pausanias, reading that centuries later, understood the new goddess to be Hecate. Friedrich Solmsen argued in 1981 that those rescue lines are a later insertion into the Hesiodic text, which is a useful reminder that even the oldest versions have been edited by people who could not bear the first one.

Homer does not mention the sacrifice at all. In the ninth book of the Iliad, Agamemnon lists three living daughters, Chrysothemis, Laodice and Iphianassa, and offers Achilles his pick of them, which is a difficult thing to do with a girl you killed on a beach. Whether Iphianassa is simply an older form of the same name has been argued both ways since antiquity. Thomas Nelson has made the case that the story is not absent from the Iliad so much as buried inside it, since the quarrel over Chryseis runs through the same six moves: the god offended, the seer naming the price, Agamemnon giving up a woman, Achilles losing a bride, the altar, and the wind finally turning.

Euripides gave her the version most people now know, and gave her something none of the older sources did, which was a choice. In Iphigenia at Aulis, written at the end of his life and staged after his death, she begins by begging for her life and ends by walking to the altar of her own accord, offering her throat to Greece and asking that no man lay hands on her. George Kovacs argues that the willing victim is Euripides’s own invention. The play’s ending, in which a messenger reports a stag gasping on the bloodied altar and the girl simply gone, rests on some of the most suspect lines in Greek tragedy; the verses after 1578 mishandle vowel quantities so badly that no fifth-century hand can have written them. The rescue that comforts everybody may be a later reader’s mercy.

Away from the stage she was a cult figure, and there she is harder to pin down than any play makes her. Herodotus, describing the Tauri of the Crimean promontory, reports that they sacrificed shipwrecked men and captured Greeks to a maiden goddess by clubbing them on the head, and that the Tauri themselves said this goddess was Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. Euripides softened that into a plot: his Iphigenia is only the priestess, held at the temple by King Thoas, until her brother Orestes arrives to steal the wooden image of Artemis and the two of them recognise each other over a letter she has dictated. At Brauron in Attica she had a shrine, and the garments of women who died in childbirth were brought there and left for her. At Megara they showed her grave. At Hermione there was an Artemis called Iphigenia outright. A heroine who keeps turning back into a goddess has convinced a number of scholars that she started as one.

Rome took her as an argument. Ennius put her on the Latin stage, Ovid retold the substitution, and Lucretius, wanting an image for what belief can talk people into, chose the girl at Aulis, called her Iphianassa, and closed the passage with a line that has outlived the poem around it: so much evil could religion urge. Etruscan workshops at Perusia were carving the same scene onto cremation urns in the second and first centuries BC, usually with Odysseus holding her over the altar while everyone else pleads.

For a figure with no strength, no weapon and no magic, she is remarkably hard to be rid of. Her one power, in the version that made her famous, is consent, and it works exactly as promised: the wind turns, the fleet sails, the war happens. What she cannot do is refuse. Every source that saves her saves her by taking her away from everyone she has, to a barbarian coast, to a shrine, to godhood, to the White Island where Antoninus Liberalis marries her to the dead Achilles under a name that is not even hers. The rescue and the sacrifice cost her the same thing. Her father is murdered in a bath for what he did at Aulis, and Clytemnestra’s last word about him is a promise that Iphigenia will be waiting at the ford to put her arms around him and kiss him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Iphigenia in Greek mythology?

Iphigenia was the eldest daughter of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and his wife Clytemnestra. When the Greek fleet was trapped at Aulis by contrary winds, the seer Calchas declared that Artemis would only release them if Agamemnon sacrificed her. She was brought to the camp under the false promise of a marriage to Achilles.

Did Iphigenia actually die at Aulis?

The sources disagree, and the disagreement is old. Aeschylus has her killed, which is what gives Clytemnestra her motive for murdering Agamemnon. The Cypria, Apollodorus and the surviving ending of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis all have Artemis snatch her away and leave a deer on the altar instead, while the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women turns her into the goddess Artemis Enodia.

Why did Artemis demand the sacrifice of Iphigenia?

Agamemnon killed a deer in a grove sacred to Artemis and boasted about the shot. The goddess answered by pinning his fleet at Aulis with the wrong winds until he paid for the insult with his daughter. The offence is trivial and the penalty is not, which is a large part of why the story kept being retold.

What happened to Iphigenia among the Taurians?

In the version told by Euripides in Iphigenia in Tauris, Artemis carried her to the land of the Tauri on the Crimean coast, where she served as priestess of the goddess under King Thoas and was obliged to prepare shipwrecked Greeks for sacrifice. Her brother Orestes arrived to steal the goddess’s wooden image, the two recognised each other, and they escaped together. Herodotus records that the Tauri themselves identified the maiden goddess they sacrificed to as Agamemnon’s daughter.

Why is Iphigenia important to Roman writers?

Lucretius used her as the central example in his attack on religion in De Rerum Natura, calling her Iphianassa and ending the passage with the line usually translated as “so much evil could religion urge.” Ennius adapted Euripides for the Latin stage and Ovid retold the substitution of the deer, and Etruscan workshops carved the altar scene onto cremation urns for two centuries.