Death As Duty

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS

This act is at its noblest in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the tragedy of a heroine who discovers she owes the state her death. What Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac was for Israel, Agamemnon’s ritual killing of his daughter Iphigenia was for the Greeks, a paradigm of pitiless duty transcending love or mercy. So pitiless must it have seemed that in Euripides’ other treatment of the same act, Iphigenia in Tauris, he gave it a happy ending, as did Racine, Corneille, and Gluck centuries later.

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Because lphigenia is so willing to owe the state her death, a happy ending is out of the question. Then, too, the curse of the house of Atreus is doomed to continue. But the family’s finest hour is surely Iphigenia’s conscious choice of death (and we accept for the play’s sake that death’s political and religious necessity).