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This web site provides information about Euripides' play Iphigenia at Aulis, directed by Jac Royce at the University of Puget Sound, October 24-26, 30 -31, 2003. 

About the Play 

At the start of the Trojan War, Agamemnon's ships, on the point of sailing from Aulis to Troy, lie becalmed. The prophet Calchas has informed Agamemnon that he has offended the goddess Artemis and must atone by sacrificing his eldest daughter Iphigenia.  Agamemnon has instructed his wife Clytemnestra to send Iphigenia to him, ostensibly to marry the warrior Achilles. As the play opens, Agamemnon, distraught over the impending sacrifice of his daughter, sends a second message to Clytemnestra that cancels the first. But the new message is intercepted by his brother Menelaus, who is furious at Agamemnon's weakness. In a lengthy debate Agamemnon changes his brother's attitude to the point that the latter advises him to disband the army. Yet now it is Agamemnon who feels bound to proceed with the sacrifice. 

The joyful Clytemnestra, arriving with Iphigenia and her infant sons Orestes, meets Achilles, who is astounded at the news of his forthcoming marriage. When an aged servant discloses the real purpose of Iphigenia's presence in Aulis, Achilles, whose pride is wounded because he has been used as a lure, determines to prevent the sacrifice. The tears and pleading of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia cannot dissuade Agamemnon from doing what he now considers his duty. Achilles is about to intercede forcibly when Iphigenia herself, in a sudden mood of heroism, insists on the sacrifice. Clytemnestra and Achilles fail to dissuade her, and she is taken off to die. 

A later addition to the play relates, through a messenger, how Artemis places a dying deer on the alter in place of Iphigenia, who is carried away by the gods. 

Source: Horton, Andrew. "Euripides," McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama. 1984. 

Text of the Play 

• The University of Adelaide Library
• Iphigena at Aulis (scroll down to Iphigena)
• Internet Classics Archives
• Euripides, with an English translation / PA3973 .A2 1958 vol. 1
• Text in Perseus 

About the Playwright

"I portray men as they ought to be; Euripides shows them as they are."

Sophocles

Euripides, (c. 484-406 BC), ancient Greek tragic dramatist, born probably on the Athenian island of Salamis. Little is known of his life, but tradition represents him as a recluse living in a cave on Salamis; this may have arisen from his reluctance to take an active part in civic life. Unlike his contemporaries Aeschylus and Sophocles he seems to have given all his time to writing plays, and he stands out as an individualist in an age which still venerated the ideal of duty towards one's fellow citizens. He was also labelled a misogynist, in spite of the obvious sympathy with women's rights and problems displayed, for example, in his Medea.

Euripides is said to have written 92 plays, of which there survive 16 tragedies, one satyr-drama (the Cyclops, a burlesque version of Odysseus's adventures in Sicily), and a large number of fragments, testimony to his later popularity. The extant tragedies, with dates where known or conjectured, are: Medea (431), Hippolytus (428), the Children of Heracles (?also 428), Hecuba (?426), the Trojan Women (415), Iphigenia in Tauris (?414), Helen (412), the Phoenician Women (411), Orestes (408), and, of unknown date, the Madness of Heracles, the Suppliant Women (with a plot different from that of Aeschylus' tragedy of the same name), Ion, and Electra. The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were both produced posthumously. One other play, Alcestis (438), though usually classed among the tragedies, contains pronounced satyric elements. The plays fall into two clearly marked categories—tragedies in the modern sense, and plays which may be variously called tragi-comedies, black comedies, romantic dramas, melodramas, or even high comedies. The tragedies have often been much misunderstood and criticized because of their apparently episodic plot structure. Sometimes (as in Hecuba and the Madness of Heracles) the play is based on two stories which seem to have little in common except the leading characters. The first half of the play illuminates a set of incidents from one point of view, the second from a different point of view; and the audience is asked to judge between the two.

In his lifetime Euripides aroused great interest and great opposition with his realism, his interest in abnormal psychology, his portraits of women in love, his new and emotional music, his unorthodoxy, and his argumentativeness. He was critical, sceptical, interested less in the community than in the individual, dealing less with broad questions of morality and religion than with personal emotions and passions—love, hate, revenge—and with specific social questions such as the suffering of the individual in war. He tried to bring tragedy down to earth by using more colloquial language, popular forms of music, and characters who, though still drawn from myth and legend, had recognizable counterparts in 5th-century Athens.

Euripides was described by Aristotle as ‘the most tragic of the poets’, and it is in such tragedies as Medea, Hippolytus, the Bacchae, the Trojan Women, and Hecuba that his best work is probably to be found. Electra and Orestes, in which some critics have found a shrewish heroine and a pusillanimous hero, are powerful studies in morbidity and insanity; Alcestis, Ion, and Iphigenia in Tauris are excellent tragi-comedy or romantic drama; Helen is delightful high comedy; and the Phoenician Women is perhaps best described as a pageant-play. All except the last show Euripides as a master of non-tragic dramatic writing.

Euripides continued to use the three actors and chorus as finally established by Sophocles, with one important innovation. The opening song of the chorus as used by Aeschylus, or the scene in dialogue with which all the extant plays of Sophocles begin, were replaced by a formal prologos spoken sometimes by a character in the play, sometimes by an external god, which summarizes the story up to the point at which the action begins. Together with the progressive detachment of the chorus from the main action, inevitable once the play was concerned with private rather than public issues, this eventually, via Seneca, gave rise to the Elizabethan idea of an extraneous person called the Chorus speaking a prologue.

Source: "Euripides"  The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.  1 October 2003   <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t79.001025>

For More Information About Euripides

• Euripides Home Page 
      Includes biography, background, and texts.
• Imagi-nation 
• Theatre History 
      Articles about Euripides
• Theatre Database
• Perseus Encyclopedia 
• Euripides; a Collection of Critical Essays edited by Erich Segal/ PA3978.Z9 S4
• Euripidean Drama; Myth, Theme and Structure by D.J. Conacher/ PA3978.C74
• Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy by L. H. G. Greenwood/ PA3978 .G66
• Euripides and his Influence by F.L. Lucas/ PA3978 .L8 1963

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Theatre Dept. Liaison Librarian
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