You may have noticed that there are no Greeks at all in Homer—the word ‘Greek’ is derived from Latin—and that there are no Hellenes either. First and foremost, and properly speaking, the Hellenic was a linguistically defined group, not a culturally or geographically defined one. Hence not only the Argives and the Myrmidons, but the Trojans as well are ‘Greeks’. So in no sense was there ever a war between Greeks and Trojans. To be sure, there is something vaguely oriental about Priam’s polygamous arrangements, just as there is something Hellenic about his children’s monogamy. Something is in transition there, but it is impossible to get one’s bearings, so as to say from what to what. It is, in fact, a rather complete and embarrassing mystery how the language of Homer’s poems came to be called after the descendants of Hellên, and why the people associated with this language also took on his eponym for themselves and for their speech—while, for some reason, they identified themselves with the Achaeans of the Iliad rather than the other Greeks whom they were attacking.
Contrary to what you may have heard, there is no settled fact about the location of the city called Ilium, or of the horse-breeding, river-filled region called Troy, or of the ocean called the Hellespont, the ‘sea of Hell’. If the scene and battlefield of Troy was on the modern Hellespont in Turkey, Homer was not only blind, but a fabulist. The best that we can say about his audience, if Ilium was actually that now profitable mound in lowly Hissarlik, is that they had obviously never been to modern Anatolia.
There is no such thing as ‘Greek mythology’. If you have been unfortunate enough to take a course or read a book on this subject, try to forget as much as you can of them when you read Greek poets. The sources for such compendia are either Hellenistic or Roman, or else ‘lifts’ from earlier authors and composers that have been disguised as general stories, rather than the particular plots of particular story-tellers. Homer is the original, not the product, and the notion of ‘Greek mythology’ is pernicious in many ways to the nature of this poetic origin.
One of these ways is that it suggests that there was a script or scripture to which the Greek poets were referring, or in relation to which they were improvising. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was no Bible in ancient Greece. In point of fact, it was primarily and preeminently the poets through whom the rest of society best got to know their common stories, which were usually understood to be stories about the past, not adventures into fantasyland. This is true despite the fact that there must also have been oral traditions of the fairy-tale variety, like about Santa Claus and the Grampus, passed on from grandparents to toddlers and the like.
An audience in the theatre would surely not have been a blank slate. They would have known something about Oedipus and Hecuba before the plays began. But this does not mean that they knew what they were going to see. There may, for example, have been alternate traditions, sometimes substantially different ways of telling a story. But they may also, let us hope, have been merely and simply surprised.
And let us not forget that witnessing a plot was only one part of the experience of Aeschylean or Sophoclean drama. The choruses danced poetry that had never before been seen or heard; and the power of this poetry has long endured past the death of its original witnesses and their language.
There is no doubt that the lyric and tragic poets were looked to as types of authority, not just on the mythic past but on the sophistic present. This authority of the poets needs to be emphasised to a modern audience. Even the archaic poet-singer, the ἀοιδός whom Homer describes, was a public worker or demiurge, not a member of the entertainment sector. There was not only authority but autonomy: there was no review board or doctrinal council approving scripts before the fact. (To be sure, there was critique afterwards, including prosecution in court, for ‘profanation of the Mysteries’—that is, enacting things on the stage that were too close to the dramatic or other rituals that constituted the secret religious Mysteries and initiations. The Christian mysteries, celebrated in mass—the open inspiration for varieties of modern drama—are comparatively public.) We may imagine that it was the sheer potency of the poetry itself, not some anachronistic fidelity to doctrine, which would make a poet’s depiction of gods and men persuasive, and hence prize-worthy.
Consider Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigeneia. You have probably heard of her as the daughter who had to be sacrificed to Artemis, so that the Achaean fleet would be freed from the headwinds that moored them in Aulis, preventing their passage to Troy. You have heard of her, ultimately, because of Aeschylus. Well: Homer seems not to have heard of her at all.
There is a definite tension between the prophet Calchas and Agamemnon in the opening scene of the Iliad, which could be explained by way of allusion to an earlier incident, where Calchas’ interpretation of an omen demanded the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter. In the present case it demands that the King return his war-prize, the girl Chryseis, to her father, an Apolline priest of the Troad. But there is no direct allusion whatsoever to an earlier sacrifice, in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, not even as a motive for Clytaemnestra’s revenge. (The story of Agamemnon’s death, in a version where not Clytaemnestra but her stay-at-home back-door lover Aegisthus was the evil perpetrator, is a looming motif in the Odyssey.)
The two Homeric poems are famous for avoiding mention of incidents that occur in the other poem—the Odyssey never retells an event from the Iliad, but sometimes refers to different but oddly parallel events that occurred during the war. There may well be an aesthetic motive or convention for this strange avoidance in what is, after all, a sequel in our sense of things. Perhaps then there was a prehistoric poem about Aulis and Iphigeneia which was lost, even to ancient posterity?
The inconsistency seems too great, however. When Agamemnon lists his children in Iliad IX, he mentions his son Orestes and three daughters: Chrysothemis, Laodice, and Iphianassa. The warlord-king Agamemnon mentions them as possible brides for Achilles, as part of the bribe for their quarrel’s appeasement. Given the role of Achilles in some of the other stories that contain her, as a prospective husband for Iphigeneia, it is highly unlikely that Homer’s Agamemnon, in his embassy of reconciliation with Achilles, is making a second play at reining in Achilles through marriage to a daughter, and omitting Iphigeneia because she is dead (and a depressing memory). He hopes to wield power and win trust by becoming Achilles’ father-in-law; in this way he is only one of several in Homer’s telling who competes to be a sort of father figure to Achilles. Aside from Peleus himself, the mortal father who does not appear, there is also Phoenix, Zeus (father of all), and most remarkably of all, the Trojan King Priam in Book XXIV. Hence Agamemnon’s offer here to Achilles from the bounty of his daughters has a certain internal resonance within the narrative strategy of Homer’s story.
For Aeschylus, by contrast, the sacrifice of this Iphigeneia becomes the centrepiece of a kind of cosmic vision, which plays out in his Oresteia through a sequence of counter-murders into an ultimate destination in the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares at Athens. Here the first civic court was set up to break the cycle of revenge and settle the price of blood-guilt through that great civilising innovation, a jury trial. Iphigeneia’s actual death at her father’s hands is the key to the whole progress of this vision.
There is also in the second play of the Oresteia a famous recognition and discovery scene between Orestes and his sister Electra—one that inspired an imitation by Sophocles, and a parody by Euripides, who both wrote an Electra. This is another daughter of Agamemnon, whom Homer apparently had not heard of, or mourned the loss of, long before she inspired Eugene O’Neill.
But when Euripides tells the story, in Iphigeneia in Aulis, she does not die. (Perhaps I should repeat, she does not die.) Euripides introduces the notion of Achilles as the prospective bridegroom, whom Agamemnon ropes into luring his daughter, along with Clytaemnestra, to Aulis for the wedding. (There are a number of further complications that Euripides no doubt invented. I imagine a playwright finds it irresistible to find ways of getting Clytaemnestra on stage; she haunts the imagination.) Aeschylus had nothing to do with this element of the allegedly ‘mythological’ story. And at the last minute, Artemis relents, and substitutes a deer for the girl, who is taken up by the gods. She then shows up in Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris, incognito, where she is reunited with her brother Orestes. The discovery scene between them is held up by Aristotle as exemplary, comparable in effect only to that in the Oedipus Rex (Poetics 1455a). Hence this moment is, for Euripides, a centre of dramaturgical interest: the reunion of Orestes with the sister whom he had thought lost forever, and she with him. Iphigeneia’s salvific quasi-resurrection is the dramatic key to the cathartic power of the reunion.
So what do you find in a book called ‘Greek Mythology’ when you look up ‘Iphigeneia’? Considering what these three poets have given you, how would you tell the story? Did she exist? Was she sacrificed or did she survive? The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as a ‘story of Iphigeneia’. The reality we are looking at is a product of poets: in this case three poets and their radically divergent purposes. It is not as though their take on Iphigeneia is in some sense tangential to their poetic motive. It is impossible even to ask such things as ‘did she exist?’, or ‘was her ending happy or sad?’, outside of the context of these poetic aims, and the moments and momentum they mean to create.
Mythology is born of comparison—comparing stories—and comparison requires a certain distance from the comparates. Stories, in significant contrast, require a level of immersion to be effective. There is not a story that does not demand at some point a suspension of belief or disbelief in the accepting of a plot point. We all know the conversation after the movie that begins, ‘the only thing that didn’t make sense was …’ ‘Great movie though.’
Comparison inevitably results in a process of distillation, where the common elements in stories precipitate and can seem, through that process, to be more important, archetypal even, in relation to the peculiar elements invested through the craft and motive of the teller in the moment. Immersion in these telling details seems more to be the point of engaging a poet’s work and experiencing its mimesis, than the intellectual satisfactions of comparative work. The archetypes discernible to the comparing intellect can assert their universality in a way that distorts this peculiar experience. The only way to Aeschylus’ Iphigeneia, the meaning of her life and sacrifice in his visionary natural history of the Athenian jury, is through Aeschylus.
If you read a book of ‘Greek Mythology’—and they are legion, they constitute a genre, some of them famously authored books from the ancient and the modern worlds, alongside those anonymous textbooks for high school indoctrinations and college lecture courses—you will discover that the Trojan War resulted from a thing called ‘The Judgement of Paris’. That’s fine, so be it. Homer once refers to this event, briefly in a sometimes doubted passage, in the final, twenty-fourth book of the Iliad—and nowhere else. There is a truth in this quasi-historical claim. But where does war come from? What are the Achaeans and Trojans really fighting for and about? These are yet the questions to ask of Homer the poet and his verses, and Helen the woman, and the young man Achilles, which remain unaddressed by either history or fairy tales.
There are even students and readers who will ‘correct’ what they read, in Homer, or Aeschylus, or Euripides, based on their mythology courses. Read the poems! Even in translation, they sing their own tune. Read ancient poetry! Perhaps you think it is important or to its purpose that art capture your experience. Yes poetry is a living thing. Hip hop and Taylor Swift are very much about you, with excursions covering another entity—yourself. This Ancient Greek poetry is for and about something else entirely, something far less boring. It is also a living thing. Have a look.