Because Iphigenia in Taurus is not as tragic or as compelling a story as such works as Sophocles's Oedipus the King or Antigone, (or even Euripides's own Medea), it is not produced as often on the modern stage or studied in the classroom as frequently. This play, written by a septuagenarian Euripides, pales in comparison to the violent action films of today's cinema, a genre of entertainment familiar to most students. Iphigenia in Taurus does not carry the legitimizing title of tragedy; it is often more accurately labeled a melodrama or romance. It has also frequently been dismissed as ancient Greek "escape" literature.

In a 1974 article for Classical Journal, R. Caldwell compared the play to a "pleasant daydream" because "the danger is quite unreal, the escape is quite fantastic, the gods are clearly literary inventions. We are invited to indulge our fantasies, to subject repression to a process of catharsis, precisely because the work of art assures us, by its tone, that the dangers of such a task are not to be taken seriously. Yet despite these judgements, this play has much to offer contemporary viewers. The world of television and cinema is filled with sensationalism—violence, profanity, exaggerated special effects. Subtle works such as Iphigenia in Taurus can be a thought-provoking antidote to such mind-numbing sensationalism, offering an invitation to the art of active thinking while viewing.

Iphigenia in Taurus is filled with subtle ironies. It has been said that the ability to detect irony is a sign of mental aptitude, but this aptitude requires practice if it is to be developed to its full potential. To perceive irony the viewer must follow closely the unraveling of the plot, yet also remain aloof enough from the action to compare what is seen with his or her own experience and to make judgements accordingly. This means that the viewer cannot subsume critical thinking to emotional involvement or passively submit to the ideas presented in the play. Euripides knew this, and he portrayed the foolishness of accepting things at face value. Both Iphigenia and Orestes model the negative consequences of submitting passively to one's anticipated fate: they each assume the other is dead and only begin to use their own thinking capacities fully when they find each other alive and begin to work out a plan of escape.

Irony is a reversal of expectations, a difference between appearances or perception and reality. One can express irony through tone of voice, saying one thing and meaning another, such as when Shakespeare's Antony repeatedly states that "Brutus is an honorable man" in Julius Caesar when it is clear from his inflection and body language that he thinks the exact opposite. Dramatic irony consists of situations that the characters themselves accept at face value but which the audience understands in a different, usually opposite, way. Iphigenia in Taurus abounds in moments of dramatic irony where the audience perceives a truth to which the characters are blinded, for various reasons.

Euripides's characters misread situations, such as when Iphigenia misinterprets her dream of one column still standing in the House of Atreus as an indication of Orestes's death, rather than considering the possibility that the standing column may mean her brother is alive. Orestes, in a moment of madness, stabs wildly at cattle which he misperceives as the Furies. At these times as well as in numerous verbal or situational oxymorons, the audience easily recognizes the true meaning that the characters themselves do not fathom or guess.

Iphigenia's oxymoron, a "just evil," aptly describes both the necessity and the criminality of Orestes's murder...

The Iphigenia in Tauris is the type of romantic melodrama with a happy ending characteristic of the later work of Euripides. Its setting is appropriately exotic: the forecourt of a temple of Artemis on the Taurian coast in the modern Crimea. The play tells how Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon, is serving as a priestess of the Taurians, having been rescued when on the point of being sacrificed at Aulis by her father, who was leading the Greeks to Troy. Her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades come to the Crimea in search of a statue of Artemis which will release Orestes from his sufferings. A report that a pair of men has been captured is brought to Iphigenia whose responsibility it is to sacrifice arrivals from Greece on the altar of Artemis. When they meet, brother and sister fail to recognise one other, but a desire on the part of Iphigenia to have a letter smuggled back to Greece leads to a realisation that the two men are Iphigenia's own brother and his companion. Now reunited, they plot an escape to Greece together with the statue, but their plan is threatened by the arrival of King Thoas who, however, is persuaded that the statue must be cleansed in the sea. Once they reach the shore, escape is achieved, but only after a fight and a most opportune intervention by the goddess Athene. Throughout the play intense excitement is sustained by the seemingly endless twists and turns of a far from simple plot.

Iphigenia delivers a lengthy prologue of a type common in Euripides' plays. This does more than just impart basic information; it also reveals the pathos inherent in the woman's present plight. Furthermore, we learn of a dream which, ironically, is both optimistic (in depicting Iphigenia's restoration at home) and pessimistic (in seeming to anticipate the sacrifice of Orestes). It appears almost inevitable that as Iphigenia vanishes into the temple, Orestes and Pylades should take her place, busying themselves in careful examination of the bloodstained altar of Artemis. A reference to the goddess's statue and the instruction from Apollo to present it to Athens completes all we need to know in the way of information; Orestes' hesitation but Pylades' stern determination to fulfil their mission similarly complete our picture of the play's major characters.

The herdsman's account of the capture of Orestes and Pylades is certainly long, but any danger of tedium is eliminated by vivid description of an Orestes stricken by madness as he imagines himself pursued by a Fury and falls upon cattle in a belief that these too are Furies. The actual capture is almost hilarious as the herdsmen are scattered and then regroup and stone the young men into submission. The chorus finds a story so rich in detail astounding. And Iphigenia herself has another long speech in which, yet again, a heavy vein of irony is exploited: believing her brother dead, Iphigenia declares her heart now to be hardened while, at the same time, delivering a pathetic account of how she came to Aulis ostensibly to be married, and then indulging in typical Euripidean philosophizing when she claims that it is men and not the gods who are evil.

The scene between Iphigenia and Orestes, who both talk vigorously but at cross-purposes, is a masterpiece of misunderstanding although it does reveal that Orestes is still alive. At every point it is expected that the full truth will come out, but it never does and our expectations are constantly frustrated. Euripides has a fondness for simple stage props and one is then introduced: Iphigenia offers not to kill Orestes if he will carry a letter back to Argos for her, but Orestes proposes that Pylades performs the mission and proceeds to persuade his friend to do this in an exchange of an especial appeal to a Greek audience (deeply appreciative as it was of the art of rhetoric). But a complication is raised: what if Pylades' ship sinks and the letter lost but Pylades saved? The obvious solution to this dilemma is to tell Pylades the contents of the letter and this information, thus conveyed in such a way as not to strain credulity, identifies Iphigenia to the captives.

It is also quite natural that Iphigenia should delay the planning of their escape by seeking all the family news from Orestes. If Euripides drags out this episode at what initially appears inordinate length, it is done deliberately to heighten suspense. Less realistic, but again characteristic of Euripides, is the request for secrecy made to the chorus. But Thoas has still to be deceived, and Iphigenia's claim that the intended victims were unclean and so unfit for sacrifice and that Artemis's image must be purified illustrates, again surely to a Greek audience's considerable delight, its proponent's cleverness and superiority over a "barbarian." There remains one more drawn-out exposition: the messenger's description of the actual escape. In spite of their suspicions, the guards entrust the prisoners to Iphigenia; eventually they decide to investigate and find a Greek ship ready to depart and the two heroes climbing on board; both groups fight with fists in an attempt to secure Iphigenia and the Taurians are forced to fall back and use stones; the Greeks retaliate with arrows as Orestes carries his sister and statue safely aboard the ship which sails away but is then driven to the shore again by the wind. Thoas and his men make off to the shore, and it is at this point that Euripides plays his last card—the goddess Athene appears and orders Thoas to desist. The playwright has wrung an audience's every emotion and brought the most devious of plots to a happy conclusion. But Euripides adds a last detail with the obvious intention of pleasing his Athenian audience: Athene also orders the building of a sanctuary on the borders of Attica to house the statue of Artemis. The establishment of a local cult centre gives the play a special relevance to the original spectators and stresses the Athenian context of the drama.

Source: Peter Walcot,"Iphigenia in Taurus'' in The International Dictionary of Theatre I: Plays, edited by Mark Hawkins-Dady, St. James Press, 1992, pp. 372-73.

The plot of Iphigenia in Taurus is usually thought to be Euripides' own invention. Its basic assumption can be found in Proclus' summary of the Cypria, viz. that a deer was substituted for Iphigenia during the sacrifice at Aulis and that she herself was removed to the land of the Taur. Her later rescue by Orestes and Pylades, however, cannot be traced with probability to any work of art or literature earlier than Euripides' play. In this play, in which Orestes recognizes and then saves the sister whom he had long thought dead, it is assumed that her replacement by a deer went unseen by those present at the sacrifice. The sequel which this assumption allowed Euripides to invent (if it was he who invented it) is original only in a limited sense, since it bears the imprint of several familiar story types. These types include the following: (1) the murder of a kinsman is narrowly averted by a recognition; (2) a reunion is followed by an intrigue; and (3) a maiden is rescued. Each is used elsewhere by Euripides. The first two, for example, are found in Cresphontes, the second in Electra, and the third in Andromeda. Correspondences of this sort, based on plot patterns, will naturally gain in interest if it can be shown that they throw light on a play's meaning or on the process that led to its creation. The student of dramatic plots, however, soon discovers that analogies between them are easy to draw and can be quickly multiplied. It is much harder to decide which analogies are genuinely enlightening. This study addresses that question as it applies to I.T. (Iphigenia in Taurus) and suggests certain criteria which may help to answer it for other plays as well.

The recurrence of patterns in tragic plots has been extensively discussed in recent decades, and it is now well understood how readily plots and their components can be classified and parallels drawn between them. Richmond Lattimore deals with this subject in a broad but enlightening way in a book which takes all of tragedy (and much else) for its subject. He shows that, since stories tend to crystallize in certain forms, these forms are encountered again and again in drama. T.B.L. Webster, in reviewing the evidence for Euripides' lost plays, also calls attention to recurrent plot elements but speaks as if these repetitions were the result of rapid composition and the pressure of time. Anne Burnett, in contrast, tabulates patterns in order to dwell on their variations, since she is convinced that Euripides' art lay partly in manipulating the educated expectations of an audience familiar with all the standard plot forms. She illustrates this theory by analysing seven Euripidean plays, one of which is I.T., as combinatory adaptations of a limited set of six matrix plots. These three scholars write in English, but important work on plot forms had appeared earlier in German in such publications as Strohm's book on Euripides. It is sometimes alleged against such studies that they tend to confuse the tabulated results of scholarly analysis and generalization with the creative thoughts of poets and, at their worst, reduce the art of tragedy to the management of abstractions; furthermore, that these classifications too readily generate dubious norms of critical judgement. There is some truth in these charges. For all that, the practice of speaking of the tragic art in this way is well established; it is at least as old as Aristotle, who divides plots I.T. the simple and the complex (which are said to be better), and whose other listings of typical plots and plot elements include a catalogue of recognition types in which these too are ranked by merit. Even he has not escaped the charge that his exercises in classification were "slightly artificial."

Whatever criticisms may be made against their excesses, these studies have undeniably advanced our understanding or traditional plot forms and shown to what degree tragic poets in the act of creation were constrained by precedent. But the kind and degree of attention that an audience was expected to pay to these recurrent forms is another matter. On this point, Burnett at least has probably gone too far. She assumes that the typical spectator of a new tragedy was a man enthralled by its Interplay of structural commonplace and constantly mindful of the formal precedents being followed or broken in the development of its plot. In questioning this view I do not mean to deny that audiences were often aware of broad similarities between stories and poets ready to turn this fact to account. Tragedy may sometimes appeal to this awareness by its use of generalizations. Such generalization as occur, however, tend to carry an ethical or religious point and the sum of them would not match very well the list of plot types developed by modern scholars. This is to be expected: not every plot follows the lines of a maxim. Aside from examples like these, we should be wary of assuming that poets and audiences were preoccupied with general patterns or 'norms' of tragic action or that an awareness of deviations from these norms could have been a central element governing anyone's reaction to a play. The Greeks understood well enough that almost nothing in myth is unprecedented, but the most striking evidence for this in the plays is neither commonplace patterns nor general statements but the large number of passages where the legend being dramatized is compared with some other specific legend. In these passages what occupies the foreground and engages the attention is the concrete detail of the counterpart legend itself. These mythological paradigms or exempla may fill an entire stasimon or a mere single line of dialogue and may refer to the whole action of a play or a passing moment. Their use in tragedy is an inheritance from earlier poetry, where meaning is often clarified or emotion heightened through the well-known names and incidents of some legend not itself the main subject of a poem. Beyond these familiar facts, two less obvious point about exempla deserve particular notice. (1) Although in tragedy they are often linked to their contexts by some expression of comparison, at times there is no such link and their function as paradigms must be inferred. The latter is also true of some Pindaric myths used as exempla, if common interpretations of these are valid. (2) Although any analogy between a dramatized story and another legend will be based on similarity of form and will to that extent appeal to an awareness of pattern, the other legend may be chosen for its particular associations as much as for the general features which the two happen to share with many others. Whenever this is true, the relation of greatest interest will be one that joins specific legends, and the shared story pattern will be no more than one aspect of it.

This paper is meant to illustrate these last two points. It is a study of I.T. which finds analogies between its story and two other legends mentioned prominently in the play, the courtship of Pelops and Hippodameia and the sacrifice at Aulis. It will argue that the poet perceived a special relation between these legends and the action of his play and found means to convey this to the audience. In each case the relation is made perceptible through a shared pattern of action, but its affective power derives primarily from the blood tie which unites the principal agents of all three legends. Pattern repetition in this case is therefore the formal aspect of family history repeating itself, a subject of undeniable interest to fifth-century tragic poets. Since Euripides may actually have invented the story of Iphigenia's rescue, these related legends may also be the story's models. If that is so, his new sequel to Atreid history is fully organic. That assumption, however, will not be essential to the argument. It will be enough to show that these legends are present in I.T. as paradigms of the action, helping to colour and define it and foreshadowing its outcome. As I have argued elsewhere, Euripides made a similar use of the Tantalus myth in Orestes; therefore the technique displayed in I.T. is no isolated example.

Pelops' marriage contest is expressly referred to twice in I.T., at the start of Iphigenia's first speech and at the climactic moment when she recognizes Orestes.

For some reason, out of the long and complicated legend of the house of Atreus, Euripides has chosen to put at the beginmng of his play an allusion to Pelops' successful contest with Oenomaus and his marriage to Hippodameia. The career of Tantalus is left out; he is mentioned only as Pelops' father. The gap in generations between Pelops and Iphigenia herself is bridged in steps as economical as the iambic metre allows. The family history is therefore effectively compressed into two events, the victory of Pelops and the sacrifice at Aulis. The latter will be narrated at length in the passage immediately following. Its great prominence in Iphigenia's opening speech requires no explanation, but it is not immediately apparent why she begins her speech, and the play, with Pelops.

At the beginning of the second episode. Orestes is brought into Iphigenia's presence, and after a long dialogue he realizes her identity. His identity, in turn, is revealed by Pylades, who addresses him by name in her presence at line 792; but 35 lines will pass before she accepts the fact that this is her brother. He first calls her "dearest sister" (795) and attempts to embrace her. When the chorus (or Iphigenia herself, according to Monk's reattribution) rebukes him and she turns away, he invokes the name of Agamemnon (801). Another expression of disbelief follows. But by line 806 her interest seems aroused.

His way of affirming his identity, as Pelops' descendant, is worth noting, though it cannot carry much weight by itself. Iphigenia now asks for evidence to support this claim. His reply, given in dialogue, is measured and orderly and designed to lead to a climax. First, what he has heard from Electra: that Atreus and Thyestes quarrelled over the golden lamb, and Iphigenia once wove this story on a tapestry; that the sun changed course, and she wove this too; that her mother gave her bathing water in preparation for what was supposed to be her marriage at Aulis; that before she was to be sacrificed she gave her mother locks of her hair as a relic. So much Orestes had from hearsay.

[The] mention of the spear of Pelops, which Orestes saw hidden in Iphigenia's chamber, accomplishes the recognition and breaks down her reserve. [823-6]

These lines mark the end of an unusually prolonged and suspenseful recognition-scene and receive much emphasis from their position. Once again, as at the beginning of the play, what is said in 811-26 constitutes a selective review of family history: the quarrel of the brothers and the consequent reversal of the sun's course, the sacrifice at Aulis, and Pelops' victory. All three involve memories personal to Iphigenia, but in the first case and the last this connection is established by contrivance (the tapestry, the hidden spear). Why did Euripides choose these three episodes? It is the beginmng of an answer to observe that only the third is a happy memory. The recognition, itself a triumphant moment in the stage action, is achieved through the memory of an ancestral victory. The other memories, all bitter, serve as preamble and contrast. They end with a line and a word designed to stand in the sharpest emotional opposition to what follows... (821).

Even this partial explanation of 811-26, which speaks only of the emotional development of the lines, involves difficulties. In most accounts, the outcome of Pelops' contest with Oenomaus was not an unreserved triumph. At Orestes 988ff and 1548, a version is assumed in which Pelops won with the help of Myrtilus, Oenomaus' chararioteer; his help is explained in other sources as the removal of the linch-pins of his master's chariot which caused it to crash. Pelops later killed Myrtilus, and his dying curse became the source of endless troubles in the house. For this reason, at Sophocles' Electra 505 Pelops' ride is called "a source of many sorrows." But at least one notable literary version of the legend before Euripides, that of Pindar's Olympian I, left out Myrtilus and allowed Pelops to win with the help of winged horses provided by Poseidon. The presence of different versions in the tradition means that care is needed in deciding whether Myrtilus' trick and his later curse are meant to be assumed in I.T. The matter cannot be decided by saying that in the late fifth century they had become part of the standard version of the legend and could be presumed even when not explicitly mentioned. In a recent article, T.C.W. Stinton has discussed several tragedies in each of which important features or some legend in its standard version are purposefully ignored. He shows that suppression of such detail is one aspect of an author's freedom to adapt myth. Moreover, it hardly needs argument to say of the author of Helen that he was not bound to treat his myths consistently from play to play. We cannot simply fill in I.T. 823-6 with details drawn from Orestes 988ff. In Murray's Oxford text of I.T.the evidence on this point was blurred by a conjecture printed exempli causa in a corrupt choral passage at 192-3, one which introduced the killing of Myrtilus to the text. But Myrtilus is not otherwise to be found in the play; nor can any claim be made that he is required in order to explain how Oenomaus died. In accounts in which Oenomaus is killed in the crash of his chariot, Myrtilus is the agent of his death and to that extent indispensable. But at I.T. 825, as at Pindar, O. 1.88, Pelops is named as the one who kills him; in neither version is Myrtilus mentioned, and in neither can his presence be assumed. If he is absent from I.T., then so is his curse, and the contest for the hand of Hippodameia need not be judged. The troubles in the house may be thought of as beginning later, with the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes, mentioned in the corrupt passage at 193-7 and again at 812ff. The career of Pelops himself will figure only as an example of good fortune. To say that much helps to justify an allusion to it in the very limited context of this moment of recognition, where good fortune again prevails.

Its appearance at the beginning of the play, however, as the point of departure for family history, may mean that it has a less limited relevance. To begin with what is most obvious, this play, like Euripides' summary version of the Pelops legend, ends happily. A review of the basic details of the legend reveals further analogies. The conditions imposed by Oenomaus upon anyone wishing to marry Hippodameia were that the suitor and his intended bride should ride off in a chariot while Oenomaus, armed with a spear, rode in pursuit. Pelops won where others had lost and paid with their lives. Even in its barest outline, the legend implies a cruel Oenomaus. By the fifth century, he was being portrayed as a savage who cut off and exhibited the heads of unsuccessful suitors. This practice was attributed to him in Sophocles' Oenomaus, thought by some to have been an early production. One of the few fragments from that play is a reference to scalping "in the Scythian fashion." This is probably to be explained, in accordance with Herodotus 4.64, as an indignity like that practised by the Scythians upon the severed heads of slain enemies In Sophocles' play, the impaled heads may have been part of the stage setting. Less is known about Euripides' Oenomaus, the fragments of which throw little light on how the legend was handled. Hyginus 84.3 appears to summarize a tragic scene in which Pelops is so fnghtened by the heads of Oenomaus' victims that he regrets having come to challenge him; his source is sometimes taken to be Euripides' play. Though individual authors certainly embellished the picture, the legend readily lent itself to the portrayal of Oenomaus as an ogre to be classed with several other mythical figures famous for outrages against strangers. Seen in this light, Pelops' successful courtship of Hippodameia was also her rescue from cruel and savage surroundings.

Calder and Sutton, in writing about Sophocles' Oenomaus, have noticed that in extant tragedy the closest parallels to the vanquished ogre-king of Oenomaus' type are Thoas of I.T.and Theoclymenus of Helen. They do not connect this fact with the references to Pelops and Oenomaus in I.T.; but Calder, in speaking of the probable display of skulls in the prologue of Sophocles' play, calls the similar spectacle at I.T. 74—5 an "imitation" of it. This is a reference to Orestes' and Pylades' first sight of the temple of the Taurian Artemis and the altar stained with human blood; here Orestes immediately points out the "spoils" attached under the cornice (74) and Pylades answers, "Yes, first fruits of the foreigners who perished." It seems almost certain that these words refer to a display of severed heads. This would tally with Herodotus 4.103, where the Taurians are said to sacrifice victims of shipwreck and fugitives from storms, then cut off and exhibit then-heads. In other ways too, Euripides represents the king of the Taurians as the ruler of a barbarous country and a man personally willing to enforce its customary abuse of strangers. The parallel with Oenomaus, including the specific detail of line 74 with its probable reminiscence of Sophoclean staging, is clear. It is significant, however, only as part of a larger analogy that includes three of the play's characters. Iphigenia, like her ancestress Hippodameia, is held captive by a savage but finds a deliverer.

The name of her captor is Thoas.

Wilamowitz, in Analecta Euripidea, cited this etymology as a mere display of sophistic erudition. If that is true, the charge is graver than it may seem, because Euripides, in attaching this name to Iphigenia's captor, has probably gone out of his way to create an opportunity for the etymology. If one sets aside the doubtful possibility that Sophocles' Chryses was both a sequel to the rescue of Iphigenia and an earlier play than I.T., there is no evidence that Thoas was the name of a Taurian king in legend or fact before the date of I.T. Thoas the Lemnian, the son of Dionysus, who is known to Herodotus (6.138), is another man, even though he is identified with the Taurian by two late authors in defiance of mythical chronology. Euripides' character is "a mere name," in Immisch's phrase, endowed with definable traits but with no place in any genealogy. Why this name should have been chosen for Orestes' adversary is not immediately clear, as Wilamowitz himself later pointed out. Significant names in Euripides, however, often make an important dramatic point. To take two other examples from prologues, Theonoe's "godlike knowledge" gives her the power to ruin Helen and Menelaus, and the name of Dionysus declares the paternity that is the point at issue in Bacchae. Why is the long of the Taurians swift? Learned irrelevance is not the only possible answer. This is an escape play, and the threat which Thoas represents is that of a swift pursuer: at 1325-6 and 1422-34 he threatens to overtake the fugitives, and at 1435 he must be stopped by Athena. To that extent, his name fits: like Theonoe's name, it marks his function in the story. But even if it is strictly beyond proof that this is so by design, there should be little doubt about the nature of Thoas' role. As the pursuer, no less than as the warder of Iphigenia, he is the counterpart of Oenomaus, whose speed as a charioteer enabled him to run down and kill thirteen suitors with his spear. In both contests, the maiden flees with the young hero. Iphigenia rides in the ship with her brother; and, though the flight of Pelops is commonly described as a race with Oenomaus, it takes the form of a bride-theft. Hippodameia rides on Pelops' chariot she does not wait at home for the outcome.

Analogies can be carried only so far, and there are important and obvious differences between the two stories: in I.T., the maiden rescued is a sister, not a bride; the flight is by ship, not by chariot and Iphigenia's captor is stopped by divine intervention, not killed. The first two arise from the intractable data of the Iphigenia legend. The killing of Thoas, on the other hand, is considered at 1020-3 and is expressly rejected by Iphigenia on moral grounds. Here the desire to make a pointed ethical distinction between Iphigenia and Thoas, has caused a departure from the pattern of the older story. In other respects the correspondences are striking; they constitute the main reason for thinking that the references to one story foreshadows the outcome of the other The emphatic position of these references, at the beginning of the play and at its emotional climax, also argues for their significance; standing where they do, they claim attention. It is fair to ask why Euripides, who had other choices in each passage, chose them. The answer proposed here is that they are suitable in a play that dramatizes an escape from danger and from barbarism. Mythical allusion, elsewhere common in the form of paradigms of misforture, here foreshadows deliverance. I.T., therefore, in adding an epilogue to Atreid history, has also reshaped that history, I.T. one circumscribed by two episodes of good fortune.

The pattern so far discussed accounts for only a part of the plot, viz. the arrival of Orestes and his escape with Iphigenia. It omits the near-sacrifice of Orestes. As Burnett has explained it, this is not a simple rescue story but one which has embedded in it a misdirected and interrupted vengeance plot. This is true, provided one accepts a broad definition of "vengeance plot"; but the terms used, being general, may not be the most useful ones. They are appropriate if we think of the poet as manipulating "structural commonplaces" and arousing in the audience its "combined memories" of all other rescue plots and vengeance plots. But here again particular memories are the ones most obviously being aroused, and the structural analogy insisted upon in passage after passage links two stories, not many: the sacrifice of Orestes and the sacrifice of Iphigenia.

They are first associated in Iphigenia's opening monologue. This speech encompasses the allusion to Pelops (1-2), three transitional lines consisting largely of proper names (3-5), the sacrifice at Aulis (6-30), her life as priestess of Artemis (31-41), her recent dream (42-60), and her present intentions (61-6). The bulk of the speech is occupied by the sacrifice and the dream. The latter turns out to have taken the form of preparations for another sacrifice, that of Orestes, in which she plays the role of priestess. Her interpretation of it is wrong (that Orestes is already dead), but the dream itself is a true augury of her preparations to sacrifice him later in the play. Her speech, therefore, is largely occupied with her own apparent death, about which only she knows the truth (see line 8), and Orestes' apparent death, about which only she is deceived. Both deaths are cast in the form of sacrifices. Some parallelism of treatment is already discernible in all this.

It continues to be discernible in the parodos and kommos at 123ff. Here the two subjects recur, and there is more formal symmetry in the way they are balanced than in the earlier speech If one omits the introductory lines before 143, the passage falls into three distinct parts, of which the first and last belong to Iphigenia (143-77, 203-35). The first is a lament for Orestes, with a brief reference to her own illusory sacrifice and death in the closing lines. The last is devoted to the same two subjects, but with their order and proportions reversed. The shorter chant of the chorus (179-202) which separates these is about the woes of the house, now reaching their final stage. As far as the corrupt text allows one to say, these begin with the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes.

Up to this point the correspondence between the two imagined deaths is merely something implicit in the poetic form. At 337-9 it becomes explicit, and it takes the special form of a claim that sacrifices of victims such as those now in hand can serve as retribution for the sacrifice at Aulis. The speaker is the herdsman who brings news of the capture of Orestes and Pylades. Iphigenia responds to this report in a speech (342-91) full of bitter reminiscence about her two sources of grief, the supposed death of Orestes and her own slaying, here spoken of without mention of her final rescue. The two captives, she says, will find her unsympathetic and fierce, as she never was before with Greeks (344-53). Her preferred victims would be Helen and Menelaus, whom she would gladly pay back by a reenactment of Aulis.

She does not speak of the sacrifice of two innocents now in prospect as a new Aulis; that would erase the moral distinction between her and the sanguinary Taurians, and this distinction will be consistently maintained in the play. But she does say that she has turned savage and that her victims will find her hostile. Euripides allows her no further comment in that vein, but her words seem designed to place her for a moment in the attitude of a vengeful killer about to balance her own sacrifice with the one to come. This attitude will not be maintained when the victims appear, but while it lasts it keeps alive the herdsman's notion of retributory correspondence.

The intended sacrifice is forestalled by the revelation of Orestes' identity. In the amoibaion which follows this recognition, it becomes clear that what happened at Aulis and what has just now happened here are linked both in Iphigenia's thoughts and in the design of the poet; this fact is reflected in the structure of the central section (850-72). Orestes begins this by stating a theme [at 850-1].

Of the many misfortunes that might have illustrated this statement, only two are mentioned, and the language used of these is chosen to reflect their essential similarity. Aulis comes first: the knife at the throat, the ruse of the betrothal to Achilles, the holy water. Then there is a transition to the attempted sacrifice of Orestes, which is linked with Aulis by a simple responsion of the idea "reckless action committed against one's own kin. When she goes on to say that Orestes has barely escaped an unholy death...her language is not easily reconciled with her statement at 622-4 that she sprinkles holy water on the victims but others do the killing (cf. 40, 54). A possible explanation is that what she says here is meant to make her more clearly the counterpart of her father in the role he plays earlier in this same passage. A specific reminiscence may also be intended, since the verb she uses is unparalleled in Euripides but is used by Aeschylus at Ag. 208 of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. At all events, this lyric exchange is so managed as to concentrate attention equally upon these two averted misfortunes while charting a pattern I.T. which both will fit. It becomes clear that, in a sense she did not
foresee, Iphigenia has performed the reenactment she envisaged at line 358.

The reenactment is closer than the imagined sacrifice of Menelaus and Helen because it too ends with the victim's escape from the knife. For Iphigenia this was a swift flight through the air; for Orestes the escape has just begun and will be less simple. Its completion will require the intrigue, the deception of Thoas, the flight to the ship, and Athena's intervention. In the development of this part of the tragedy, where a young man and woman flee before a savage pursuer, the paramount analogy is the flight of Pelops. But both of these myths in the background of the story, the sacrifice at Aulis and the flight of Pelops, end with an escape from death; to that extent both are mirrored in the conclusion of I.T. The connection with Aulis is made explicit at lines 1082-4, here Iphigenia asks Artemis to play once more the role she played at Aulis so that the present story will end as that one did.

She asks Artemis to save them once again at 1398-1402, when the wave threatens to bring them back to shore. The active agents in her rescue, however, turn out to be three other gods: Athena, who stops the pursuit by Thoas; Poseidon, who stills the sea; and Apollo, by whose command Orestes is acting (1435-45) Iphigenia's repeated pleas do not cause any direct intervention by Artemis, though Artemis' acquiescence in the outcome can be assumed. Their principal effect, in reminding us of the goddess's more active role in the rescue at Aulis, is to keep alive the parallel between that former rescue and the more complicated present one, which began with the recognition and is now about to be completed.

Of the two legends reflected in the plot of I.T. the sacrifice at Aulis comes to the surface more often in the utterances of the characters. This is natural, since it is part of Iphigenia's own past, whereas the story of Pelops is a distant part of family tradition. Aulis means several things to Iphigenia- a betrayal of her hopes for marriage, a threat of death, an escape, and the beginning of exile. In the prologue of the play, the meaning she reads into her dream seems to put beyond remedy her separation from her family. In spite of her rescue at Aulis, the end result for her has not been happy, and it has left the need for another deliverance. In allowing his story to develop partly along the lines of that earlier averted sacrifice, Euripides has done more than fall into the familiar general pattern of kin-slaying averted by recognition; he has found a way to interweave two particular stories, in each of which Iphigenia has a role. While one story is acted out, the other emerges by reminiscence. Both arouse powerful emotions, and the lyric that follows the recognition is in equal measure about both. That dramatic moment is strengthened by the coincidence of theme which this interweaving allows: a brother has almost been killed by a sister as she once was by her father; brother and sister have until now each thought the other dead. Since each now knows the other's identity, their present emotions, like their past experiences, are matched and complementary. Earlier, while they were both still in ignorance, the recollection of Aulis was used to give the present story an ironic cast. For example, at 344ff, Iphigenia speaks of her harsh feelings towards the present victims; though these arise from the recent dream, her speech turns mainly on Aulis and the unfeeling treatment she suffered there from her father. We cannot fail to be made aware that at this moment her own actions are unwittingly moving in a pattern similar to his.

Unlike the sacrifice at Aulis, the courtship of Pelops and Hippodameia is no part of Iphigenia's personal experience and seems at first sight an unlikely cause of strong emotion in her or in Orestes. What sets it apart from the other legends of the house and gives it a claim to special relevance is the correspondence of form between its story and the plot of I.T.: both are escapes from a barbarous pursuer, and both end happily. Euripides, however, has also contrived a place for it in Iphigenia's Me, in the form of the spear hidden in her chambers. Moreover, he has so placed the recollection of this token that it brings about the recognition and releases the strongest outburst of emotion in the play (822ff). As far as anyone knows, the hidden spear is his own invention; as a means of recognition it stands well apart from the usual repertoire of necklaces, rings, scars, and articles of clothing. But if Euripides' purpose was to remind the audience of Pelops' victory over Oenomaus, nothing could have served better. The degree of artifice in all this should not be underestimated. A similar artifice, found at the start of the play, is that of beginning the family's history with the same victory, rather than earlier or later. In spite of their prominent positions, the two passages are short, and they are given little attention by modern scholars. Here the ancient spectator of I.T. undoubtedly had the advantage, since the legend of the contest with Oenomaus is known to have been a theme of sculpture, painting, and lyric in the fifth century and, it is likely, of at least one tragedy before I.T. In stating what that spectator was likely to be alert to we must therefore include the readily visible coincidences of plot line between one story and the other and at least one striking reminiscence of the Oenomaus legend in the staging of I.T. (72-5). Admittedly, the capacities of the ancient spectator to grasp and interpret such references are not well understood. The direct testimony about his knowledge of myths is inconclusive. It is clear, however, from tragic parodies in comedy and from the often fleeting allusions to myth in tragedy itself that poets habitually wrote as if for a knowing audience; and the relevant issue is the practice of poets rather than the culture of spectators. The long tradition of the exemplum in epic, lyric, and drama had, in any case, familiarized both poet and audience with the use of mythological paradigms. By convention, any legend can become part of the presentation of any other legend if it resembles it in some way and if mythical chronology allows its use. But poetic logic is not always explicit, and not every paradigm will have its function announced so clearly. Euripides does not have Iphigenia or Orestes say after I.T. 826 that their fates have been similar, though by that point the similarity should be clear to us, as it was to Polyidus the sophist and Pelops' contest is mentioned only before the pattern it foreshadows is complete.

My argument has been about a single Euripidean tragedy but may point the way to more general conclusions about recurrent plot patterns in Euripides. Among the many echoes of previous stories which these patterns bring into a play, some may be more important than others. Some plots, admittedly, may lend themselves to nothing more than formal analysis, couched in general terms. Even here, we might keep in mind that our ability to interpret allusions and recognize particular analogies is limited by the loss to us of most of the literature known to Euripides. In deciding whether any of the many possible prototypes of an action has special significance, we should take into account Euripides' interest in the continuity of family history, a topic now given much less than its due. Euripidean characters and choruses, like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, often mention family history and sometimes do so as an explanation or a model for the events being dramatized. These references are frequently dismissed as mere undigested relics of the tradition, since Euripides, unlike Aeschylus, is thought to be more interested in the inner life of his characters than in the actions of their ancestors. He is, of course, but there is no need to think of these interests as mutually exclusive or to judge Euripides incapable of combining them. It is clear, for example, that many of his characters retain a strong sense of their origins. Whenever they present their own experiences as the latest episodes of family history they call attention to family continuity and solidarity. One effect of this is to give added significance to any present crisis or success. Iphigenia's dream is threatening because it seems to mark the end of the house as well as the death of her brother. When she sees that she has misread it, both the house and her brother are in sight of rescue. The recurrence within that rescue of old patterns of action is a reminder of the continuity of the house and of the involvement of its fortunes in the outcome of the play. As a tragedy with a happy ending, I.T. contains more than it might seem to at first sight: not only a cheering sequel to the Orestes and Iphigenia legends, but also an alternative history of the Pelopids, one that begins and ends with a tale of success.

Source: Michael J. O'Brien, "Pelopid History and the Plot of Iphigenia in Taurus," in Classical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. I, 1988, pp. 98-115.