Page:Euripides (Mahaffy).djvu/61

IV.] main interest, though the characters are carefully and pathetically drawn. Yet they are general characters—an exiled sister longing for tidings of her family and her home; the devoted friendship of two noble youths, one of whom is afflicted with remorseful madness for a bygone crime.

41. The Tauric Iphigenia.—Iphigenia, priestess of Artemis among the Tauri, opens the play with a prologue, announcing her miraculous escape from the sacrifice at Aulis, and her grim duty of consecrating for sacrifice the Greek strangers who land on the coast. She then goes out to seek the attendants she had summoned to join the funeral libations for her brother Orestes. For she feels convinced of his death by a vivid dream of her shattered home, and a single pillar standing, endowed with human voice. The stage is thus left vacant for the entry of Orestes and Pylades, who have come to attempt the carrying off of the image of Artemis, in accordance with an oracle.

When they withdraw to wait for the night, Iphigenia and her attendant chorus reappear, and sing the dirge which accompanies their funeral offering. Then comes a cowherd to tell of the discovery of the youths, the sudden paroxysm of Orestes, and his mad sally against the king's cattle, together with the attack of the herdsmen, and the valiant resistance and mutual devotion of the prisoners, whom she now orders to be brought before her. The soliloquy which follows (vv. 342–392), in which she contemplates her former pity for hapless strangers, and now her cruel resolve when she thinks Orestes dead, is very touching, though it ends with that sceptical questioning of the morality of her office which imparts a cold and critical tone to a pathetic passage.

After an irrelevant chorus we have the splendid scene in which Iphigenia interrogates the prisoners with returning compassion, and learns all the family woes which have happened since her departure from Argos. She proposes to dismiss one of the