Explore "Iphigenia in Tauris" by Euripides on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Composed between 414 BC and 412 BC, this play is often described as a romance, forming a tragi-comedy, unlike the more severe tragedies in the Euripidean corpus. The drama concerns the daughter of Agamemnon, Iphigenia, who, years before the time period covered in the play, narrowly avoided death by sacrifice at the hands of her father. At the last moment the goddess Artemis intervened and replaced Iphigenia on the altar with a deer, secretly taking the girl off to Tauris. There she was made a priestess at the temple of Artemis, a position in which she has the gruesome task of ritually sacrificing foreigners that land on King Thoas' shores. Despising her forced religious servitude, she is desperate to contact her family in Greece and let them know she is still alive and wants to return to her homeland.
The play also features Iphigenia's brother Orestes, who has, with assistance from his friend Pylades, killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon. Haunted by the Erinyes for committing matricide, he suffers periodic fits of madness and so has travelled to Tauris in order to steal a sacred statue of Artemis to help free him from his madness. Unknown to him, he will shortly meet his sister, whom he still believes perished years ago.