#iphigenia among the taurians

[illustratus]

The Erinyes (The Furies) — Iphigenia Among the Taurians by André Masson

[ilions-end]

i keep thinking about how euripides makes it clear iphigenia still loathes odysseus for his trickery and part in her sacrifice, and then later she saves herself and her brother through trickery -- she prevails only at her most odysseus-esque.

also something about how both taurians and helen present elaborate trickery for self-preservation as a thing the women do when the men's violence (or threats of violence) keep failing. feminine-coded odysseus. i'm sure somebody must have written academically about this somewhere.

[funeralmourners]

IPHIGENIA: —But dreams have ensavaged me.

Euripides, Iphigenia Among the Taurians (tr. Anne Carson)

[cam-stopped-eating-candles]

Rick was both an idiot and a coward for not making Iphigenia a canon hunter of Artemis. She could have been a lieutenant before Zoë… or Zoës old friend…

[finelythreadedsky]

nooo not the secret ancient greek women’s fabric code again! guys there was no secret code embedded in the manufacture of woven textiles and thus only legible to women as the weavers of such textiles. yes even in myths. it is a metaphor.

[sugaredoleander]

i just took my final ancient greek exam of the semester yesterday and have been avoiding studying for my microbiology exam all day. so let's talk about these three devastating lines from anne carson's translation of herakles

and by talk about i mostly mean here's a bunch of different translations

Ἡρακλῆς μαινόμενος - Herakles by Euripides, lines 1398-1400

c. 416 BC.

original text in Ancient Greek via the Perseus Digital Library

Euripides. The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. in two volumes. 1. Heracles, translated by E. P. Coleridge. New York. Random House. 1938.

Herakles translated by Anne Carson in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (pg 81-82) 2006

Internet Archive

H of H playbook by Anne Carson (not a direct translation but a reimagining of Herakles, 2021)

Euripides: Herakles, translated by Tom Sleigh, Oxford University Press, 2001

Ian C. Johnston, 2020

Heracles, translated by William Arrowsmith, from Euripides III: Heracles, the Trojan Women, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Ion (The Complete Greek Tragedies - Euripides III, University of Chicago Press, 2013 (Arrowsmith's translation itself is from 1956)

my own translation with notes under the cut

* everywhere that I have used [] I have inserted a word that does not technically appear in the original text.

Theseus Stop! Give [your] hand [to me], [your] servant [and] friend. 

*more literally: Stop! Give [your] hand to a servant/helper [and] friend.

* Ancient Greek uses different punctuation, though the : symbol is used roughly the same way as it is in English and exclamation points are not used, verb conjugation in English does not differentiate the imperative mood, which παῦσαι (sg.2.aor.imperat.med-pass) is in, and often the way we show imperative mood in written English is with an exclamation point. 

-The word δίδου (sg.2.praes.imperat.act.) is also imperative. 

-παῦσαι is said in reference to Herakles’ earlier lines, lamenting his - well, the plot of Herakles.

* The particle δὲ has been omitted from the translation. It’s usually translated as but, and, or then. 

* The possessive pronoun your - σός - does not appear but is implied.

* χεῖρ᾽ is the short version of χειρός - hand

* ὑπηρέτῃ φίλῳ are both nouns in dative, here answering the question to whom? The word and - καί - does not appear between the two, likely because poetic language. The word ὑπηρέτῃ can also mean rower, an underling, servant, attendant, assistant, and is often translated here as helper. The word φίλῳ is a form of φίλος - friend, loved, beloved, dear

Herakles No, lest I wipe off blood on your garments.

* Word order changed slightly. The first word is ἀλλ᾽ - poetically shortened version of ἀλλά - usually translated as but, however, here: lest.

* ἐξομόρξωμαι (sg.1.aor.med-pass.) means wipe off or wipe away, but stain is, in my opinion, not an inaccurate translation in regards to the meaning conveyed.

* πέπλοις means any woven cloth, here usually translated as garments, robes or clothes. 

* αἷμα means blood and is grammatically either nominative or accusative, probably accusative, μὴ means not and σοῖς is a second person possessive pronoun in plural dative.

Theseus Wipe it off, spare naught: I [do] not refuse [you].

* ἔκμασσε (sg.2.praes.imperat.act.) - wipe it off - is imperative again, so is φείδου (sg.2.praes.imperat.med-pass.) - spare.

* μηδέν I translated as naught as in nothing, οὐκ means not

* ἀναίνομαι is in sg.1.praes.ind. - so present tense would be the most literal translation, ie. I do not refuse you, but the meaning might best be conveyed in English with the use of future tense, ie. I will not refuse you. The word can also mean reject, deny, renounce and disown, or be ashamed. Possible other translations: I don’t deny you; I won’t reject you; I am not ashamed; I won’t renounce you.)

That's all on Herakles, the rest is me rambling about Ancient Greek grammar for interested parties (mostly myself). If I could put a second cut here, I would.

Some further notes on the grammatical cases and verb conjugation. You'll have noticed that I've followed verbs with parentheses with some abbreviations. I'll break those down a little for those not in the know: unlike English, Ancient Greek has different endings to denote the person in verb conjugation - 1.sg being first person singular as in I, and so on with 2.sg - you, 3.sg he/she/singular they, 1.pl - we, 2.pl - plural you, 3.pl - plural they. There's also technically an extant dual form in some texts (when speaking of a pair of two) but it's rare. Ancient Greek conjugation also varies a lot by the temporal tense, the ancient greek times are present (praesens - praes.), future (futurum and futurum III), imperfect (imperfectum), strong and weak aorist (aor. - this one doesn't exist in any modern languages and is a bit of a jeremy bearimy but is usually translated as either present or past, depending on the context), perfect (perfectum), and pluperfect (pluscuamperfectum) - all of these except imperfect and pluperfect (which only have indicative forms) then have various forms - indicative (ind.), infinitive (inf.), imperative (imperat.), optative (opt.) and conjunctive (coni.). Verbs also have an active (act.) and middle and passive or active and mediopassive (med-pass.) form, except some verbs only have mediopassive versions and are thus translated as either active or mediopassive depending on the context. This is as complicated (and fun!) as it sounds. (editors note: the fun! was not sarcastic - i am a medstudent who hasn't had to take two semesters worth of classes on this, nor do i have to keep taking ancient greek next semester but i'm going to)

Nouns in Ancient Greek also have grammatical cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative, as do adjectives. They also have genders, and adjectives of course have positive, comparative and superlative (good, better, best) forms.

Ancient Greek also uses a lot of participles, which is like a noun-ified verb. Participles are also a concept in English, just - a lot simpler in English, and also I think in English a participle is a verb that has some characteristics of an adjective or noun, whereas in Ancient Greek participles and verbal adjectives are separate concepts. Participles are derived from verbs and have the same grammatical cases as nouns, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative, and singular and plural versions, and have three genders, masc., fem. and neut. - they also have active and mediopassive forms, and differ based on the temporal conjugation of the verb, retaining its augment, reduplication, characteristic added letters (for example σ in the future tense, and θη + σ in the passive future) or lack thereof, also they can have different endings or roots based on the tense. So, yeah, "conjugate and translate this verb in part.fut.pass.sg.masc.gen. and II aor.part.act.sg.acc.fem." is what a test question might look like at my level of studying ancient greek.

Sentence constructions also differ from English, some of the most common ones are AcI, NcI, genitivus absolutus. accusativus duplex and nominativus duplex. They also will often skip words (particularly the verb to be they often deemed unnecessary) and poetic language is its own can of worms with its own theoretical dialects and prosody.

All of this is like, barely scratching the surface, there's also a bunch of different dialects, stuff varies by era, all of the noun cases have like, a Bunch of different uses, and it's all terribly interesting.

[dionysism]

hey! if you don't mind answering, what's your favorite greek mythology themed book? the iliad, the odyssey or something third? also, i'm really curious what are your favorite translations of the books i just mentioned? it's always a pleasure to visit your blog btw <3

the odyssey is my fav of all time and i love the iliad dearly too but i'm also a big fan of the oresteia & related plays (sophocles electra & the euripides plays on house of atreus) but also eurpidies bacchae and also his herakles.. but medea too... (i love euripides if you can't tell 😭) also i know i mainly talk tragedy on here but aristophanes' comedies are great, you ever read lysistrata? if not you should. really funny. play is about women refusing to sleep with their husbands until they sue for peace and stop the war.

for iliad and odyssey translations i've gone into a few of my favorite translations here

the rest i couldn't offer as wide a variety of translations as with the iliad & odyssey cause some of them i've only read one translation of & i have more on my tbr but i haven't gotten to them yet so i couldn't say my thoughts. for the oresteia i have read one full trans (currently reading another) and one other agamemnon. i've read fagles (love fagles trans) & i'm reading sarah ruden's rn (great so far!) and the agamemnon comes from anne carsons (her trans is an orestia that includes aeschylus' agamemnon, sophocles' elektra & euripides' orestes and i haven't read other translations of those two yet so all i can recommend is anne's) same with euripides' iphigenia at aulis (trans by w.s. merwin & george dimock) & iphigenua among the taurians (trans by anne carson) are the only two i've read but i did enjoy them both! i also haven't read this one in full yet so take with a grain of salt but i've seen a few excerpts from robert icke's translation of the oresteia and i liked what i read so i hope to read that one soon

medea i've read three translations: oliver taplin, gilbert murray & philip vellacott. i loved all three of them but if i had to pick a favorite i'd say taplin's probably. (but, woman, can you steel yourself to kill your body's fruit? ... you would become the wretchedest of women / then let it be)

the bacche i've read anne carsons & john davie's, again both of which i enjoyed but i'm partial to carson. (dionysus' "okay ladies, up we get! no more crouching, no more sobbing!" is cute. i wouldn't describe the entire play as cute tho LMFAO. well. unless you find bacchanals and ripping people to shreds cute, which, maybe i do)

herakles i've read anne carson's, robert potter's & philip vellacott. now as ive said i do really love anne carson but potter's might take it for me as the favorite this time. one of my favorite theseus appearances in mythos too

and for lysistrata i've read douglass parker's. this is probably in my top 3 aristophanes plays. comedic genius he was

[chthonic-cassandra]

I hear you're looking for fic requests...[hold music plays as I scroll through your ao3]...maybe do you have any thoughts on Iphigenia? I adore your one work about her very much.

also, semi-unrelated, wondering if you have anything to say about Measure for Measure? don't know if you've read it but you've read Titus and they feel equally niche. Anyway I think the vampire potential is strong with that play, and as vampire mutual, I thought that might appeal. [I wrote some 'what if Isabella got vamp'd at the end' stuff ages ago, I should dredge it up.]

Oh, do I ever have things to say about Measure for Measure! Twisting, vinegar-sour play with its language all turning in on itself like streets with no exits. It's a play I love very much, despite-because of its considerable structural flaws, and I do especially love beloved Isabella, with her extremity and abnegation-which-is-pride and her sharp rhetoric that winds itself into such psychosexual twists. I have never thought about vampire potential there, but I will ponder.

I have read some good Measure fic in my time (like this and this, and I want to know everything there is to know about your vampire Isabella). I have strong opinions about it myself, that maybe I will write in fic, but it would be ugly and uncomfortable because one of the things I believe most strongly about Measure is that Angelo and Isabella are in fact the only ones in the play who actually get each other, who actually are speaking the same language, and the fact that the only way that language can be enacted is through violence is the horror and the horrific comedy of it.

I also have things to say about Iphigenia. Some of them are (apparently, according to be my subconscious) horror movie Iphigenia Among the Taurians. And some of them are purely choreographic. But I am very touched that you like my little fic about her! Thank you so much for letting me know.

(also: touched and delighted to be the vampire mutual)

[measureformeasure]

Hey June! I was wondering, what medias/books would you recommend for a person wanting to get into the ancient greek classics? The Iliad/Odyssey/Aeneid stories fascinate me, but as there are so many versions and translations and retellings, I don't really know where to start. How did you get into them?

hey anon! I feel mildly underqualified to answer this as I actually haven’t read the Iliad or Odyssey or all of the Aeneid but I will do my best (i’m working on it! promise! iliad is up next and i’m gonna read it and i’m gonna go crazyinsane)

firstly you should totally read the original texts. remember that they aren’t The One True Story, they’re just written-down versions of wobbly cultural stories that change from person to person. and you don’t have to read them before reading retellings or adaptation but it’s good to read them fairly close together. just read what you wanna read. the bit of the Aeneid I read was translated by Robert Fagles, and I’ve heard Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is good. my friend Theo @fifthlydoyoudream recommends E. V. Rieu’s Argonautica translation, if you wanna read that. poetry in translation has decent translations of most plays i’ve tried to find, and that’s nice because it’s online and super accessible.

the way I first got into the greek classics was reading Anne Carson’s An Oresteia, which is Agamemnon, Elektra, and Orestes. it’s a really great intro because Anne Carson’s translations are just fantastic & it’s one play from each of the three big greek tragedy-writers & it’s a pretty well-contained story so you don’t need much context - you could read Iphigenia at Aulis first but that’s not really necessary. (confusingly there is also The Oresteia, which is different). if you can find an Anne Carson translation of a play you should totally read that one. that’s my rule of thumb. I always recommend Antigone too - it’s also fairly self-contained and it makes me crazyinsane. Anne Carson has two translations, they’re both good - Antigonick is better if you have a little context beforehand in my opinion. also Oedipus the King/Oedipus Rex is good.

tbh what i recommend is just following characters or stories that you like and seeing where that gets you. like i’m having a pretty intense house of atreus moment atm but i still barely know who penelope is because i haven’t read the odyssey. who is penthesilea? still do not know. but don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff out there!! it can be a little scary but wikipedia is your friend and also you do not have to know everything.

and some adaptations/retellings:

Lavinia by Ursula K. le Guin is an adaptation/retelling of the Aeneid from Lavinia’s point of view and it is very very good.

Luis Alfaro’s Greek Trilogy are play adaptations of Oedipus Rex, Elektra, and Medea set in modern-day LA with a Latino cast and it is so fucking good it makes me want to bite glass and explode. you can find oedipus el rey by googling but the other ones might be a bit more annoying to find

Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) by Ho Ka Kei is a good deconstruction of the colonialist nature of Iphigenia among the Taurians, and it is also absurdly hilarious, so I recommend. I read it before I read the play it adapts and I was fine but it is good to have context.

i’m having an iphigenia moment anyway i also recommend Iphigenia at Zero by Lisa Schlesinger if you get into iphigenia’s story.

I’m like 15 pages in to Cassandra by Christa Wolf and I am thoroughly enjoying it so far

Antigone directed by Sophie Deraspe is a great French Canadian adaptation of Antigone in the modern day I really like it

and who would i be if i didn’t recommend max @goose-books‘s godsong, aka the aeneid (among other things) with lesbians

also. note on adaptation - a lot of adaptations i have read flatten the morality of these plays into good and bad. i think that’s dumb. let them be shitty, adaptations!

ok thats all good luck brave soldier o7

[artemis-potnia-theron]

Artemis + Human Sacrifice, Blood, and Bulls

"The cult of Artemis Brauronia had two sanctuaries: one at the ancient site of Brauron (from which the goddess derives her name), and the other in the heart of Athens on the Acropolis...a procession was held every four years — from the Temple of Artemis Brauronia on the Athenian Acropolis to Brauron — in honour of the goddess and her priestess Iphigenia.

Initially, it is easy to identify one aspect of Artemis’ duality here when considering that this procession encompasses two different urban spaces, the city and the village. In addition to this, the rituals that took place at Brauron provide us with a much more complex identity for Artemis.

Artemis of Brauron, also known as the Taurian Artemis, is mystical, and her worship was orgiastic and connected, at least in early times, with human sacrifice. According to Greek legend, there was in Tauris a goddess, whom the Greeks identified with their own Artemis, to whom all strangers that were thrown off the coast of Tauris were sacrificed (Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 36).

The Brauronian Artemis was also worshipped in Sparta as Artemis Orthia, goddess of the steep, or “she who stands erect.” The latter, sometimes understood as a phallic symbol, may correlate with the fact that only boys participated in this ritual. Her image is said to have been brought over, or stolen, from Brauron and consequently drove men mad.

Tradition states that some quarrel or competition among the earliest tribes of Sparta led to violence and death around the altar of Artemis. After the slaughter there was a plague, and the Oracle prescribed that the altar be soaked in blood. The citizens selected an individual by lot who would be the human sacrifice (Herodotus, Histories 1.65).

This original tradition was eventually considered barbaric, and the ritual was adapted by the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus so that boys were scourged at her altar in such a manner that it became sprinkled with their blood.

This cruel ceremony was believed to have been introduced in the place of human sacrifices,and according to Redfield, it was not boys who were scourged but warriors, and instead of one of them dying they could all bleed together.

This is a very Spartan ritual in that it involves physical sacrifice in the sacred place of the divine. More interestingly, the ritual of the community is inscribed on the body of its citizens and denies differences, both natural and cultural, so that all men are treated equally.

Since this is clearly an initiation rite, we can see that Artemis is present in the transformation from child to adult of not just women but men too. This is further evidenced when we look at the tradition of the Taurian Artemis.

Orestes is said to have continued on from Brauron and established the cult of Artemis Tauropolos. A kindred divinity, if not the same as the Taurian Artemis, her worship was connected with bloody sacrifices, and she is said to have produced madness in the minds of men if they looked upon her statue (Sophocles, Ajax 172). Artemis was able to cure this madness in her role as “Healer,” but she did this sparingly and only for those she deemed worthy of her gift.

According to Sophocles, Artemis Tauropolos was originally a designation of an ancient Taurian goddess who oversaw male rites of passage. The name Tauropolos has been explained in different ways, some supposing that it means the goddess worshipped in Tauris, who protects the country of Tauris, and to whom bulls are sacrificed (Sophocles, Ajax 172), while others explain it to mean the goddess riding on bulls, drawn by bulls, or killing bulls (Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 1457).

The bull is mostly referred to by classics scholars as an ancient and proliferous symbol of masculinity. It is thus intriguing that Artemis is associated with this symbol, though not altogether surprising when we consider her duality as a goddess of bloodshed and retribution, often viewed as Greek male characteristics, as well as mercy and healing, often viewed as Greek female responsibilities.

This shows the complexity of cultic practice, which places Artemis in the position of presiding divinity in the early lives of Greek boys and girls."

She Who Hunts: Artemis: The Goddess Who Changed the World by Carla Ionescu

(Photo credits: Archaeological Site of Brauron from the sanctuary of Artemis)

[ilions-end]

iphigenia among the taurians is my first encounter with the variant where agamemnon had to sacrifice iphigenia because years before, he made a vow to sacrifice to artemis "the fairest thing that the year brought forth" (and ofc it turned out to be the year iphigenia was born)

conceding that he might have made the vow even before marrying clytemnestra (and could apparently comfortably ignore his promise for at least another decade), what DID he imagine he'd have to sacrifice? like, was he really into arts and crafts that year? was his livestock birthing very nice-looking calves and lambs? was he hoping his fields would produce a particularly attractive broad bean? i keep thinking about it

[meduseld]

Something about how Dr. Goodsir is made to butcher bodies in the mutineer camp and about how Iphigenia, among the Taurians, is made to prepare foreign men’s bodies for slaughter, something about how they are cut off from their suffering people and forced into service to killers they despise, something about how the only way to escape means breaking that taboo even further.........

[iampresent]

Alright y'all I finally got Edith Wharton's "Mythology"

This isn't all of them, I know. If you picked any of the above options, feel free to give it a tagline below!

[figbian]

hm. i’m in a euripides class rn and thinking a lot about iphigenia in tauris/iphigenia among the taurians bc we’re reading it. it is So….. the human sacrifice. iphigenia talking about how she’s dead, standing before her brother, alive. the empty tomb. the hair motif (bloody hair in her dream, water sprinkled around a corpse’s hair for the body’s purification, the only thing in iphigenia’s tomb being a lock of hair). Hm. thinking about it.

[dreamofmourning]

“surviving your own death” is a contradictory phrase, because it’s obviously not possible, but i can’t find another way to describe how there are elements of personhood that can endure through the process of dying until the final moment, but other aspects that have to give out for a person to handle the the experience of knowing their death is unavoidably about to happen to them. it’s about what to do once you realize the process of your dying has begun in a way that can’t be stopped now (and this realization is the key thing, you have to see it coming, this is why i think living dead characters always seem to involve foreseeing your own death - their unique response to that IS what makes them living dead). it’s not so much that you can’t survive your dying (obvious), but that you can’t survive as the subject of your own death. which leaves the options of: 

1. becoming something other than yourself 2. becoming something other than a subject 

i like the first one, obv, the idea of a kind of transformation that produces something that only exists to die. it’s also sad in a strange way for me (suicide lover) because i think your death should belong to you, and in this way it doesn’t, it belongs to a transient fragment of yourself that dies with its death and can never be incorporated. at the same time, the lead up to it is a suicide in itself: there is an implicit consent to death when you realize it is going to happen and instead of trying to avoid it, your response is to prepare for it, in either of those two ways. prior is a really good example of this:

he leaves himself to be able to bear his dying, and because that version of him is not the protagonist, we don’t get access as the reader to his death anymore, because it’s happening to a different person, our prior is already gone 

but #2 is so much more painful to meee/of interest to all the things i care about. i think we absolutely see this in prior too... him ripping out the pages from the back of his journal to give to other soldiers is the moment i knew for certain that he was going to die at the end. but also the missing pages in laura’s diary and leland showing them to her during the scene of her death (see here), the 20 year gap from iphigenia in aulis to iphigenia among the taurians, my favorite yet extremely contentious and somewhat embarrassing clinging to the idea that some perspectives in a novel cannot be reconstituted (the jury is still out...). i think all of this is more interesting to me because it’s completely wrapped up with the manner of representing these stories, since the major way we can experience another’s subjectivity (or measure whether it is still there or not) is as a character - specifically protagonists/narrators. a narrator in a diary-form novel who’s ripping out the back pages of the very diary that we’re “reading”... how can you read that as anything but death, him trying to end the story faster to get his death over with

general point is that what we see as the living dead is the gap of time after a character has begun to give up their subjectivity but before they actually die, and that what’s special in these living dead characters is that they survive for so long in this in between period, when most people could not bear for this surrendering to happen except when death is extremely imminent

[chthonic-cassandra]

Thinking about this 16 hours later and I think my sleeping self had a good idea here.

So. I think my sleeping mind concocted a Xena version of Iphigenia Among the Taurians involving cannibalism?