treated in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, which was probably left
unfinished at his death. But our play chooses a later moment of
the story.

In reality Artemis at the last moment saved Iphigenia, rapt her
away from mortal eyes and set her down in the land of the Tauri to
be her priestess. (In Tauris is only the Latin for "among the
Tauri.") These Tauri possessed an image of Artemis which had
fallen from heaven, and kept up a savage rite of sacrificing to it
all strangers who were cast on their shores. Iphigenia, obedient
to her goddess, and held by "the spell of the altar," had to
consecrate the victims as they went in to be slain. So far only
barbarian strangers had come: she waited half in horror, half in a
rage of revenge, for the day when she should have to sacrifice a
Greek. The first Greek that came was her own brother, Orestes, who
had been sent by Apollo to take the image of Artemis and bear it
to Attica, where it should no more be stained with human
sacrifice.

If we try to turn from these myths to the historical facts that
underlay them, we may conjecture that there were three goddesses
of the common Aegean type, worshipped in different places. At
Brauron and elsewhere there was Iphigenia ('Birth-mighty'); at
Halae there was the Tauropolos ('the Bull-rider,' like Europa, who
rode on the horned Moon); among the savage and scarcely known
Tauri there was some goddess to whom shipwrecked strangers were
sacrificed. Lastly there came in the Olympian Artemis. Now all
these goddesses (except possibly the Taurian, of whom we know
little) were associated with the Moon and with child-birth, and
with rites for sacrificing or redeeming the first-born. Naturally