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My opinion of Agamemnon is notoriously low, so I am always tempted to assume that he is in the wrong, but do draw your own conclusions.
The old man sets off to deliver the letter, but he bumps into Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother and Iphigenia’s uncle. Menelaus must have been suspecting that his brother would try something like this, because he immediately grabs the letter, breaks its seal, and reads its contents.
Menelaus responds that the old man shouldn’t have been carrying something which was bad for the whole of Greece.12
The sons of Atreus rarely downplay their importance in any situation, so this conflation of what Menelaus personally doesn’t want with what is terrible for all Greeks is entirely in character.
But now he’s decided he doesn’t want to kill his daughter and he’s sending secret letters. This often happens to powerful men, Menelaus observes. They work hard to get their position, and then ruin it all by being weak and incapable.
But throughout his long speech, Menelaus spends almost no time at all talking about the offence to Artemis.
He is much more worried about the loss of status his brother will experience in the eyes of the men he is supposed to command.
Agamemnon isn’t at all worried about losing face in front of his men or anyone else. He claims not to be able to understand why his brother is so annoyed when he’s finally had the good luck to lose a wife he couldn’t trust anyway.
He correctly identifies that Menelaus just wants his good-looking wife back.
Like Menelaus, his discourse is conducted at an entirely human level.
But the questions go unasked and unanswered, because a messenger arrives onstage to say that they have brought Iphigenia and Clytemnestra to the camp, as well as Agamemnon’s infant son Orestes. Agamemnon is horrified: having summoned his daughter to a phony marriage, he had somehow not realized that her mother might accompany her so swiftly and bring the baby along for the ride. It is immediately clear to Agamemnon that he will now have no choice but to kill his daughter.
Just because you said there was a marriage and there isn’t doesn’t mean your only alternative course of action is murder.
And – and this is the kicker – he’ll tell them I promised to make the sacrifice to Artemis, and that I lied.
It isn’t that he promised his brother he would kill Iphigenia, it is that he promised Artemis.
Peitho is the goddess you appeal to when you want to be rhetorically convincing, either in front of a large group – a jury, an army – or in private.
We see this argument made by other child killers in Euripides, most notably Medea. Whatever I do, someone is going to kill my child, so it’s better if I do it. It’s a stretch to see this argument as altruistic when Medea makes it, but it’s impossible to do so when Agamemnon does – not least because he is more concerned with his own life.
There is no action Agamemnon believes he can take to save his daughter. The only element of choice is whether he dies too.
Iphigenia goes willingly to her death, accepting that Artemis demands her life.
Instead, she asks the women of the chorus to raise a hymn of praise to Artemis.
Although even if Artemis had backed the Greeks, it doesn’t appear that she is an especially useful ally in a war: according to Homer, she loses her bow and arrows after an attack by Hera.
The men have gathered around to watch her die, though the messenger tells us that when the moment came, they all looked down at the ground rather than witness her killing.
In her stead lay a dead deer, its blood spattered all over the altar. Calchas proclaimed that the goddess had chosen the deer to replace Iphigenia so that her altar wasn’t stained with her noble blood.
But perhaps Artemis – much like the men in the play – sees the sacrifice as one made by Agamemnon rather than by Iphigenia.
We can be considered blessed with regard to our daughter, he tells Clytemnestra right at the end of the play. She’s now keeping company with the gods.
Contrary to what Agamemnon chooses to believe, Iphigenia does not wake up to find herself swanning about on Mount Olympus, pouring nectar and serving ambrosia to her divine roommates. Instead she finds herself a priestess of Artemis in the land of the Taurians – we know it better as Crimea, in modern Ukraine. She is deeply resentful at being cut off from her Greek roots: she doesn’t only miss her family, but also the life she led as an Argive woman;
She remembers quite clearly that Agamemnon had promised to sacrifice the most beautiful child born in a particular year and that Calchas had proclaimed that child to be her.
Apollo has charged Orestes with retrieving the statue of Artemis from the temple where Iphigenia serves (though Orestes doesn’t know the priestess is his long-lost sister). Orestes must do this if he wants to be rid of the Furies, who still pursue him for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra.
The Furies pursue Orestes for the unforgivable crime of killing his own mother.
What about Elektra ?
The clash of cultures could hardly be more explicit: his Artemis would want her statue returned to her temple; the Greek Artemis would want her statue taken to Athens.
But the connection between the Brauronian Artemis and the Taurian one – through Iphigenia as priestess at both places – is made explicit by Pausanias. He observes that a shrine to Artemis on the Acropolis is named after Brauron, because they still have an ancient wooden statue of her.
Plenty of scholars have observed that the moon is seen as Artemis’s domain for no better reason than that the sun (which also has its own god, Helios) is connected to Apollo. As his sister, therefore, Artemis must be linked to the moon. There is, of course, another reason why young girls might be interested in a moon goddess, but it seems to have been a step too far for male academics of previous centuries to note that menstruation is often linked to lunar cycles
Love is all very well, but reciprocated love is what we all really want.
And the unapologetic ambition of Artemis – even as a child, the woods and mountains aren’t enough for her; she wants the moon itself – is part of her nature too.
According to Callimachus, in his Hymn to Artemis from the third century BCE, Artemis is given the task of coming to the aid of women suffering labour pains by the Fates themselves. They order it, she explains, because her own mother (Leto) suffered no pain when giving birth to Artemis.
The Roman people, as the satirist Juvenal once complained, sold their votes for panem et circenses – bread and the circuses.31 The bread Juvenal is referring to is a grain dole, handed out to voters, who were adult male citizens of Rome. Women couldn’t vote, so they had nothing to sell for grain; they needed a man in the family to qualify.
Throughout the Games, Katniss never forgets the inhumanity of all the adults who are collaborating to kill innocent children. In this, we might note that she resembles not Artemis but Euripides’s Iphigenia, who becomes her priestess.
We might well wonder where the adults were who could have shared some of their own meagre rations with two small children. Even the good people of District 12 would apparently have watched Katniss and Prim starve to death. So the parallels continue: no matter where you are in futuristic Panem, or in Iphigenia’s Bronze Age home, you are not protected by those who surely should protect you.
She is ruthless, in other words, but she doesn’t ever want a creature to suffer, even if she takes its life.
we can read of countless finds wrecked by their discovery or damaged in harmful attempts to conserve them. But the François Vase has had an unusually difficult life. It was broken into many pieces in antiquity. In 1844, some of its many sherds were discovered by Alessandro François at Chiusi, not far from Perugia in northern Italy. The legend goes that François had to excavate an area the size of the Colosseum to find as many pieces as he did.
in 1900, when the pot found itself in the way of an angry museum guard. He threw a wooden stool at it, and even though it was covered by protective glass, the vase was smashed into 638 pieces.
It was rebuilt again in 1973 to incorporate a missing piece that had been returned.
The Artemis myth on the rim of the vase is that of the Calydonian boar, a cautionary tale for why you should never do as a man named Oeneus did and fail to mention Artemis – and Artemis alone – in your prayers.
Artemis Arrow-shooter (even this epithet reminds us that she could easily have killed Oeneus where he stood) is furious. She sets a wild boar loose in his orchard.
It is the trees, their fruit, their blossoms that the boar destroys, an agricultural plague rather than the kind which picks off men and animals (Artemis’s brother Apollo sends just such a plague to devastate the Greeks in Book One of the Iliad).
Actaeon was born into the royal house of Thebes, which should sound a warning sign if you’re expecting him to live a happy life and die of old age. His grandfather Cadmus, founder of the legendary city, is cited by Ovid as an example of the dictum (borrowed from the Greeks) that you can call no man happy until he’s dead.
Euripides offers up a variation on the hubris theme: he says Actaeon boasted about being a better hunter than Artemis.
Nearby is a valley with a spring where Diana (Artemis’s Roman name) likes to come and bathe after she has been hunting.
We know that a character who is completely at home in one environment is about to crash straight into a neighbouring environment where they won’t belong at all, at which point all bets will be off.
Now, if you want to tell people you saw me naked, you can give it a try, she says.
Because where the water has splashed on his head, he grows antlers. His ears grow pointy, his hands become hooves, his arms turn into forelegs.
