story, however bright his prospects may seem, you feel that he is
bound to die; he cannot escape. A good many tragedies, however,
are built not on Tomb Rituals but on other sacred Aitia: on the
foundation of a city, like the Aetnae, the ritual of the torch-
race, like the Prometheus; on some great legendary succouring of
the oppressed, like the Suppliant Women of Aeschylus and
Euripides. And the rite on which the Iphigenia is based is
essentially one in which a man is brought to the verge of death
but just does not die.

The rite is explained in 11. 1450 ff. of the play. On a certain
festival at Halae in Attica a human victim was led to the altar of
Artemis Tauropolos, touched on the throat with a sword and then
set free: very much what happened to Orestes among the Tauri, and
exactly what happened to Iphigenia at Aulis. Both legends have
doubtless grown out of the same ritual.

Like all the great Greek legends, the Iphigenia myths take many
varying forms. They are all of them, in their essence, conjectural
restorations, by poets or other 'wise men,' of supposed early
history. According to the present play, Agamemnon, when just about
to sail with all the powers of Greece against Troy, was bound by
weather at Aulis. The medicine-man Calchas explained that Artemis
demanded the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, who was then at
home with her mother, Clytemnestra. Odysseus and Agamemnon sent
for the maiden on the pretext that she was to be married to the
famous young hero, Achilles; she was brought to Aulis and
treacherously slaughtered--or, at least, so people thought.

There is a subject for tragedy there; and it was brilliantly