Iphigenia in Tauris
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Original / primary: Perseus Eng2
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Iphigenia
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Pelops, son of Tantalus, coming to Pisa with swift horses, married Oenomaus’ daughter, and she gave birth to Atreus, whose children are Menelaus and Agamemnon; from him I was born,
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his child Iphigenia, by the daughter of Tyndareus. Where Euripus rolls about its whirlpools in the frequent winds and twists the darkening waves, my father sacrificed me to Artemis for Helen’s sake, or so he thought, in the famous clefts of Aulis.
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For there lord Agamemnon mustered his expedition of a thousand ships of Hellas, wanting to take the crown of Troy in glorious victory and avenge the outrage to Helen’s marriage, doing this favor for Menelaus.
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But when he met with dreadful winds that would not let him sail, he went to burnt sacrifices, and Calchas had this to say: Lord and general of Hellas, Agamemnon, you will not set free your ships from land until Artemis has your daughter Iphigenia
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as a victim. For you once vowed to sacrifice to the torch-bearing goddess the most beautiful creature brought forth that year; then your wife, Clytemnestra, bore a child in your house—ascribing the prize of beauty to me—whom you must sacrifice. And by the craft of Odysseus,
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they took me from my mother, pretending a marriage with Achilles. I came to Aulis; held up high over the altar, I, the unhappy one, was about to die by the sword; but Artemis gave the Achaeans a deer in exchange for me and stole me from them; conducting me through the bright air,
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she settled me here in the land of the Taurians. A barbarian rules this land of barbarians: Thoas, who runs as quickly as the flight of birds, and so he received his name for his swiftness of foot. Artemis has made me the priestess in this temple.
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Here I begin the rites, which the goddess delights in, of a banquet noble in name only—I am silent as to the rest, for I fear the goddess— for I sacrifice, by a custom of the city established earlier, any Hellene who comes to this land.
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But others carry out the sacrifices, not to be spoken of, within the temple of the goddess.
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But the strange visions which the night brought with it, I will tell to the air, if that is any relief. I dreamed that I had left this land
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to live in Argos, and to sleep in the midst of the maidens’ rooms; but the earth’s back was shaken by a tossing swell. When I escaped and stood outside, I saw the cornice of the house fall, and the whole roof hurled in ruins on the ground, from the highest pillars.
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One support of my father’s house was left, I thought, and it had yellow locks of hair waving from its capital, and took on human voice. In observance of the art of slaughtering strangers that I practice here, I gave it holy water as if it were about to die, while I wept.
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This is my interpretation of this dream: Orestes, whom I consecrated by my rites, is dead. For male children are the supports of the house; and those whom I purify with holy water die. I cannot connect this dream to my friends,
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for Strophius, when I perished, had no son. Now I wish to give libations to my brother, though he is absent from me—for I would be able to do this—with the attendants given me by the king, Hellene women. But why
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are they not yet here? I will go inside this temple of the goddess where I live. Exit Iphigenia.
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Orestes
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(entering cautiously.) Look out, take care that no one is in the path.
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Pylades
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I am looking, and turning my eyes everywhere, in examination.
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Orestes
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Pylades, do you think this is the hall of the goddess,
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for which we set sail from Argos?
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Pylades
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Yes, Orestes; and you must think so too.
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Orestes
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And the altar, that drips with the slaughter of Hellenes?
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Pylades
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Its dedications of hair, at least, are red with blood.
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Orestes
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Do you see the spoils hanging from the very walls?
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Pylades
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Trophies of strangers that have been slain. But I must look all around and keep careful watch.This sentence is assigned to Orestes in the Coleridge translation but has been moved to align with the Greek.
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Orestes
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O Phoebus, where have you again brought me into the snare, by your oracles, since I avenged my father’s blood by the murder of my mother, and was driven by successive Furies,
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a fugitive, away from the land, and completed many winding courses; and coming to you I asked how I might arrive at an end to whirling madness and my labors, which I have carried out, wandering all over Hellas. . . .
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And you told me to go to the boundaries of the Tauric land, where Artemis, your sister, has an altar, and to take the statue of the goddess, which is said here to have fallen to this temple from heaven; and, taking it by craft of some stroke of luck,
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to complete the venture by giving it to the Athenian land—what was to come next was not spoken of—and if I did this, I would have rest from my labors.
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I have come here, obedient to your words, to an unknown, inhospitable land. I ask you,
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Pylades, for you are my accomplice in this task, what shall we do? You see that the surrounding walls are high; shall we ascend the steps leading up to the house? But how might we escape notice? Or loosening the bronze bars of the door with levers,
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of which we know nothing? If we are caught opening the gates and contriving an entrance, we shall die. No, but before we die, let us escape on the ship in which we sailed here.
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Pylades
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Flight is not to be endured, nor are we accustomed to it,
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and we must not bring reproach on the god’s oracle; let us leave the temple and hide in a cave which the black sea washes with its moisture—far from the ship, so that no one, seeing it, may tell the ruler, and then seize us by force.
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But when the eye of gloomy night comes on, then we must dare to take the polished statue from the shrine, by any means. See where between the triglyphs there is an empty space to let ourselves down. The brave endure their labors,
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the cowardly are worth nothing at all.
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Orestes
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Yes, we did not come on a long sea voyage only to undertake a return home before the end; but you have spoken wel, we must obey. We should go wherever we can hide and escape notice.
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For it will not be the god’s fault if his sacred oracle falls to the ground without effect. We must endure. Exeunt Orestes and Pylades.
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Chorus
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Keep a holy silence, you who inhabit the double clashing
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rocks of the Black Sea!
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O daughter of Leto, Dictynna of the mountains, to your hall, to the golden walls of your temple with beautiful pillars,
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I, the servant of the holy key-holder, bend my holy virgin steps. For I have left the towers and walls of Hellas, famous for horses, and
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Europe with its forests, my father’s home.
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I have come. What is the news? What is troubling you? Why have you brought me, brought me to the shrine, you who are the daughter of Atreus’ son, master of a thousand ships and ten thousand soldiers,
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who came to the towers of Troy with a famous fleet?
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Iphigenia
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Oh! My servants, how I am involved in mournful dirges,
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in laments unfit for the lyre, of a song that is not melodious, alas! alas! wailing for my family. Ruin has come to me; I am lamenting the life of my brother,
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such a vision I saw in my dreams, in the night whose darkness is now over.
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alas for the sufferings of Argos! O fate, I had one brother only and you carry him off and send him to Hades. For him,
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I am about to pour over the back of the earth these libations and the bowl of the dead: streams of milk from mountain cows, and offerings of wine from Bacchus,
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and the labor of the tawny bees; these sacrifices are soothing to the dead.
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(To a servant) Give me the golden vessel and the libation of Hades.
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O child of Agamemnon beneath the earth, I send these to you as one dead. Accept them; for I will not bring to your tomb my yellow hair or my tears.
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I live far indeed from your country and mine, where I am thought to lie, unhappily slaughtered.
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Chorus
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I will sing for you, my mistress, responsive songs and
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a barbarian cry of Asian hymns; this song, dear to the dead,
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Hades sings in laments, in chants—not songs of triumph.
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Alas for the house of the Atreidae; the light of their scepter, alas, of the ancestral house, is lost. Once they ruled
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as prosperous kings in Argos, but troubles dart out from troubles: Pelops, on his horses swiftly whirling, made his cast; the sun changed from its seat the holy beam of its rays.
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One pain comes after another, to the house of the golden lamb. . . . from that earlier time when the Tantalids were killed,
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punishment came to the house, and fate presses what you do not want upon you.
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Iphigenia
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From the beginning my fate was unhappy, from that first night of my mather’s marriage;
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from the beginning the Fates attendant on my birth directed a hard upbringing for me, wooed by Hellenes, the first-born child in the home,
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whom the unhappy daughter of Leda, by my father’s fault, bore as a victim and a sacrifice not joyful, she brought me up as an offering. In the horse-drawn chariot,
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they set me as a bride on the sands of Aulis, oh woe, a wretched bride for the son of the Nereid, alas! But now, as a stranger I live in an unfertile home on this sea that is hostile to strangers,
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without marriage, or children, or city, or friends, not raising hymns to Hera at Argos, nor embroidering with my shuttle, in the singing loom, the likeness of Athenian Pallas and the Titans; but
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. . . a bloody fate, not to be hymned by the lyre, of strangers who wail a piteous cry and weep piteous tears. And now I must forget these things,
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and lament my brother, killed in Argos, whom I left at the breast, still a baby, still an infant, still a young child in his mother’s arms and at her breast,
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the holder of the scepter in Argos, Orestes.
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Chorus Leader
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Look, here comes a herdsman, who has left the shores of the sea to bring you some new message.
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Herdsman
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Daughter of Agamemnon, and of Clytemnestra, hear a strange report from me.
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Iphigenia
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And what is amazing in your news?
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Herdsman
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Two young men have come to this land, fleeing the dark Symplegades in their ship, an offering and sacrifice pleasing to the goddess Artemis. Be quick to prepare
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the purifications and the first offerings.
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Iphigenia
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What country are the strangers from? How are they dressed?
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Herdsman
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They are Hellenes; I know this one thing, and nothing further.
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Iphigenia
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Can’t you tell me their names? Did you hear them?
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Herdsman
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One was called Pylades by the other.
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Iphigenia
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What is the name of his companion?
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Herdsman
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No one knows; we didn’t hear it.
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Iphigenia
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How did you see them? How did you come upon them and catch them?
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Herdsman
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At the edge of the breakers of the Black Sea—
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Iphigenia
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And what do herdsmen have to do with the sea?
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Herdsman
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We came to wash our cattle in the salt water.
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Iphigenia
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Go back to the earlier question, how did you take them, and in what way, for I want to know this. They have come after a long time; the altar of the goddess has not yet been reddened by streams of Hellene blood.
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Herdsman
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When we were driving the cattle, that feed in the forest, into the sea that flows through the Symplegades, there was a broken cleft, hollowed by the constant surge of waves, shelter for those who hunt the purple-fish. Here one of the herdsmen saw two youths,
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and made a retreat on tip-toe. He said: Don’t you see them? These are deities that sit there. One of us, who revered the gods, lifted up his hands and prayed, as he saw them:
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O son of the sea-goddess Leukothea, guardian of ships, lord Palaemon, be propitious to us! Or do you sit on our shores, twin sons of Zeus? Or the darlings of Nereus, father of the chorus of fifty Nereids?
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Another, who was foolish and bold in his lawlessness, laughed at the prayers and asserted that ship-wrecked sailors were sitting on the cliff, in fear of our custom, having heard that we sacrifice strangers here.
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Most of us thought that he spoke well,
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and that we ought to hunt down the customary offerings to the goddess. At this moment, one of the strangers left the rock, and stood, shaking his head up and down and groaning, with hands trembling, wandering in madness; and like a hunter, he cried aloud:
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Pylades, do you see her? Don’t you see hell’s dragon, how she wants to kill me, fringed with her dreadful vipers against me? and the one who breathes fire and slaughter from her robe and wings her way, my mother
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in her arms—the rocky mass, how she hurls it at me! Ah, she will kill me! Where can I escape?
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Astonished, we cowered together and sat in silence; but he drew his sword and rushed like a lion into the midst of our cattle, striking their flanks with his iron sword and thrusting it into their sides, thinking in this way to ward off the Furies,
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so that the waves of the sea blossomed red with blood. And all of us, as we saw our herds falling and ravaged, took arms, blew our conch shells, and collected the neighbors; for we thought cowherds would make a poor fight of it
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against well-grown and young foreigners. After a long time, our numbers were complete. But the stranger fell down, his pulsing beat of madness gone, his chin dripping with foam; when we saw him, so conveniently fallen, each of us went to work,
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hurling and striking at him. The other stranger wiped off the foam and tended his body, covering him with a finely-woven robe, looking out for the attacking blows, treating his friend kindly with his care.
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The stranger, now in his senses, started up from his fall and realized the surge of enemies close at hand and the present danger to them both, with a groan; we did not let up our attack with stones, pressing hard from all sides.
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Then we heard his dreadful exhortation: Pylades, we shall die, but let us die with glory; draw your sword, and follow me.
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But when we saw our enemies brandishing their two swords, we fled and filled up the rocky glens.
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But while some would flee, others pressed on and attacked them; if they drove those back, the ones who had just given way struck them with stones again. But it was hard to believe; with so many hands, no one succeeded in hitting these offerings to the goddess.