In this introduction, I will 1) give an overview of the plot, 2) consider some of the unique features of the play, and 3) discuss the process I went through in adapting the play. Euripides’ Iphigenia offers a different take on the fall of the house of Atreus. Here is the story in its classic form as told in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. 1) The sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, become kings of Mycenae and Sparta and take as wives the sisters Clytemnestra and Helen. 2) Paris’s abducts Helen, igniting the Trojan War; the Greeks navy is led by Agamemnon. 3) Before they can sail for Troy, the fleet is grounded at the Port of Aulis, and Agamemnon is told that the goddess Artemis will not let him sail unless he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia. 4) Agamemnon instructs Iphigenia to come to Aulis where she will be married to Achilles, but when she arrives, he sacrifices her. 5) While the Greeks fight at Troy for ten years, Clytemnestra, enraged at Agamemnon’s murder of their daughter, takes a lover. 6) When Agamemnon returns from Troy, his wife kills him. 7) Many years later, Agamemnon’s son, Orestes returns home and, with the help of his sister, Electra (and the guidance of Apollo), kills his mother and her lover. 8) Because he is guilty of matricide, Orestes is chased by the Furies, but Apollo and Athena intercede for him, and he is declared innocent at a trial held in Athens. To this tragic plot, Euripides makes two important changes. As we learn in the opening of the play, Iphigenia was not killed at Aulis. Though all who were there thought Iphigenia was slain, Artemis (the sister of Apollo) spirited away Iphigenia, leaving a deer to die in her place. The goddess carries Iphigenia to barbaric Aulis (located in the Black Sea, at the edge of the Greek world, near where Jason found the Golden Fleece); there she is made priestess at the altar of Artemis, and serves King Thoas. Part of her duties as priestess is to sacrifice to the goddess all strangers who land on the shores of Aulis. When the play opens, Iphigenia has just had a dream that makes her believe that her brother, Orestes, is dead. But he is not. According to Euripides, even after being declared innocent as his trial, Orestes is pursued by several Furies who rejected the verdict. In desperation, Orestes seeks help from Apollo, who tells him that the only way he can be freed from the Furies is to seek out the Temple of Artemis in Aulis. There he must steal a small wooden idol of Artemis believed by the Taurians to have fallen from the sky. Only by carrying the idol back to Greece can he be freed. Immediately after Iphigenia shares with her chorus of captive Greek women her belief that Orestes is dead, Orestes appears on stage, accompanied by his friend, Pylades, who is married to his sister, Electra. The two decide to hide in a cave by the sea and then return at night to steal the idol from the temple. But they are spotted on the beach when Orestes, driven mad by the Furies, attacks and kills a herd of cattle. After a struggle, the two men are captured and dragged before Iphigenia. She is told that one of the men is named Pylades, but she does not know the name of the second. She questions Orestes vigorously, but the truth remains hidden to both of them. When she learns that they are Greeks from Mycenae and that Orestes still lives, she asks them to carry a letter from her to Orestes. In the process the siblings discover who they are, and Orestes is saved from being sacrificed by his own sister. In the second half of the play, Orestes, Pylades, and Iphigenia plot together to steal the idol of Artemis and escape back to Greece. Iphigenia fools Thoas into allowing her to take Orestes, Pylades, and the idol down to the beach to purify them in the sea. The three manage to get aboard Orestes’ ship, but Thoas is warned and is about to send troops to stop them. At that moment, Athena appears and commands Thoas to allow them to return to Greece and, in time, to send ransom back to Tauris to buy back the freedom of the chorus of captive women.
1 To the shock and surprise of modern audiences, Iphigenia at Tauris turns out to be a tragedy with a happy ending. And yet, Iphigenia is but one of a number of ancient Greek tragedies that end happily. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, what makes a tragedy a tragedy is that its plot is built around a reversal during which the action shifts suddenly from good fortune to bad fortune (or vice versa) and the characters move from a state of knowledge to ignorance (or vice versa). Aristotle makes it clear that the best tragedies end unhappily; such was the influence of the great philosopher that Aristotle’s aesthetic taste became synonymous with that of Europe. Aristotle also demanded that the best plots should resolve themselves, rather than rely on a climactic appearance of a god to sort out the plot (a method known as a deus ex machina, since the divine figure would be lowered on to the stage by a crane). In direct contrast to Aristotle’s taste, Euripides’ play not only reverses toward good fortune, but ends with a deus ex machina. Alfred Hitchcock was a director who preferred suspense to shock In Vertigo, a villain hires the hero (Scotty) to keep an eye on his suicidal wife (Judy). Scotty falls in love with Judy, but when she runs up a bell tower and leaps to her death, his vertigo prevents him from saving her. Several months later, Scotty sees a woman who looks like Judy and slowly, obsessively tries to remake her into Judy. In the novel on which Hitchcock based his film, the reader does not realize until the end that the woman is Judy: that it was not her, but the real wife who was thrown out of the tower to her death by the villain. Hitchcock sacrifices this shocking revelation by letting the viewer know right away that the woman is Judy. In return, he gains almost an hour of nail-biting suspense as we wonder how and when Scotty will realize who this woman is—and what he will do when he finds out! Euripides manufactures the same form of suspense by letting the audience know immediately who Orestes and Iphigenia are. As a result, we sit on the edge of our seats waiting for the tiniest clue that will reveal their identities—before it is too late! # Although my adaptation retains all the characters and scenes, the play itself has been cut in half. I did so by trimming back the long speeches, condensing the choral songs, and whittling away at long sequences of dialogue. Still, I have carefully maintained Euripides’ balance between meditative soliloquies, lyrical poems of longing and regret, and rapid-fire exchanges. As is common in English, I have translated the play (but not the choral songs) into blank verse, a form that consists of an unrhymed series of iambic pentameter lines: 10-syllable, 5-stress lines, with the stresses falling on the even syllables (But THAT the DREAD of SOME-thing A- fter DEATH). Shakespeare used this form for his soliloquies as did Milton for Paradise Lost. Blank verse moves forward in a stately, grandiose fashion that is both meditative and sweeping; as such, it is perfectly suited for translating Greek epic and tragedy. Though Shakespeare has been my model, I have also followed Wordsworth, whose blank verse tends to read like good prose. Wordsworth accomplishes this by using normal syntax whenever possible: “and I have felt a presence in the woods” rather than “a presence I have felt within the woods.” In attempting to make this adaptation as accessible as possible I have learned a lesson from Shakespeare and the King James Bible—don’t be afraid to use monosyllables. Consider the first and last lines Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want / And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever”), or the last two lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 (“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings”).
Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in English & Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist Univ,, holds the Robert H Ray Chair in Humanities; his books include From Achilles to Christ, The Eye of the Beholder, and Pressing Forward: Tennyson and the Victorian Age.
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