Triptych and Iphigenia by Edna O’Brien

herbs, potions, and fortune-telling, moreover he was a cuckold, a bigamist, and a misogynist who lived in rancorous isolation in a cave. It says much for his inwardspirit and dedication to his calling that he wrote over a hundred plays—nineteen of which are in existense—and that when he died in Macedonia, Sophocles, out of a mark of delayed homage for his great rival, made his chorus wear mourning for the evening performance.
    Euripides is the dramatist, along with Shakespeare, who delved most deeply into the doings and passions of men and women. His dramas, while being political, religious, and philosophic, are also lasting myths in which the beauty and lamentation of his choruses are in direct contrast with the barbarity of his subjects. As with Shakespeare he found the existing stories and legends too good, too primal, to be abandoned and so he appropriated tales from Homeric times, rewrote them, transformed them, and made them a foil for his prodigious imagination so that they serve as staple and forerunner for all drama that came after him. Sophocles’ characters can seem stiff, their language elaborate, but Euripides’—vacillating, egotistical, unbridled, and warring—are as timely now as when they were conceived in the fifth century before Christ.
    Iphigenia in Aulis
is the least performed of his plays, having been described by ongoing scholars as being picturesque, burlesque, and in the vein of “New Comedy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The story is glaringly stark—Agamemnon, head of an oligarchic army, who has lived for power and conquest, is asked to sacrifice that which he loves most, his daughter Iphigenia. He demurs but we know that the lust for glory will prevail and yet in Euripides’ drama, each voice, each need, each nuance is beautifully and thoroughly rendered. Iphigenia is for the chop but at the moment when her little universe is shattered, when she realizes that she is being betrayed by both God and man, she pitches herself into an exalted mental realm, the realm of the martyr-mystic who is prepared to die but not to kill for her country. It is of course, as probably in the myth surrounding Joan of Arc, a heightened, histrionic moment which pitches its heroinein the ranks of the immortals. If one of the prerogatives of art is to catapult an audience from the base to the sublime, from the rotten to the unrotten, from the hating to the non-hating, then Iphigenia does that, but her sacrifice prefigures a more hideous fate. The catharsis is brief, as the grand mechanism of war and slaughter has been set in place. Clytemnestra, the mother, helpless to avert her daughter’s death, becomes an avenging fiend and ten years hence, when Agamemnon, victorious from Troy, will return with his Trojan concubine, the crazed prophetess Cassandra, he will meet a gory end at the hands of Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus.
    After his death in 408 BC three plays by Euripides were found—
Iphigenia in Aulis, Alcmaeon,
and
The Bacchanals
and were put on the stage by his son, Euripides III.
Iphigenia
was incomplete and finished by another hand. The other hand is what gives the play as we know it a false and substanseless ending. At the very last moment the sacrifice is aborted, Iphigenia whisked away and a deer put lying on the ground, the altar sprinkled with the necessary blood. It seems unthinkable that an artist of Euripides’ unflinching integrity, with a depth and mercilessness of sensibility, would soften his powerful story for public palliation.
    History has righted his standing. The Latin poets Virgil, Horace, and Ovid all acknowledged their debt to him, Plutarch would boast that he knew the plays by heart, and Goëthe devoted himself to reconstructing several of his plays from fragments. He now is recognized as the greatest of that triad of Athenian giants and even his fellow countryman Aristotle, after much carping, crowned him “that