Iphigenia

Iphigenia occupies a revealing position in the depth-psychology corpus: she appears not as a protagonist in her own right but as the concentrated emblem of a sacrificial logic that exposes the deepest tensions between religious obligation, political power, and the psychology of moral capitulation. Nussbaum’s sustained engagement with the Aeschylean and Euripidean treatments furnishes the corpus’s most searching analysis, reading Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter as paradigmatic of how an agent can catastrophically restructure his inner life to cooperate with necessity — transforming horror into willingness. Burkert’s anthropological frame, already present in Nussbaum’s citations, situates the Iphigenia sacrifice at the boundary where animal ritual keeps human killing at bay yet simultaneously reveals it. Snell reads the Iphigenia in Aulis as Euripides’ most nihilistic stripping away of heroic pretense, leaving only egotism and fear where divine mandate once stood. Miller invokes her story typologically, linking the sacrifice to atonement theology. Edinger catalogues her in an alchemical index of innocence and mortificatio. Harrison identifies formal ritual residues in the Iphigenia Aulidensis. Across these positions a shared tension persists: Iphigenia crystallises the moment when the sacred and the bestial converge, and when an individual consciousness either resists or becomes complicit in that convergence.

In the library 10 passages

Voicing no blame of the prophet or his terrible message, Agamemnon now begins to cooperate inwardly with necessity, arranging his feelings to accord with his fortune.

Nussbaum argues that Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia is the archetypal case of moral self-corruption, in which an agent ceases to resist necessity and instead restructures his interior life to become a willing collaborator in his own catastrophe.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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the sacrifice of Iphigenia fits precisely into this pattern. Agamemnon’s stay at Aulis began with the pitiless killing of one animal by another… He now uses (or abuses) the ritual of animal sacrifice to act out the very possibility that this ritual keeps at bay.

Drawing on Burkert, Nussbaum reads the sacrifice of Iphigenia as tragedy’s enacted disclosure that ritual animal killing conceals and simultaneously harbours the threat of human sacrifice, which Agamemnon literalises.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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If we think of it as pointing to the murder of Iphigenia (for it is she who is ‘stopped from her course’ before the birth of children, she who is the particular victim of the ‘king of ships’), we are introduced already to the central theme in the Chorus’s blame of Agamemnon

Nussbaum demonstrates that the omen of the two eagles devouring a pregnant hare pre-figures Iphigenia’s murder, making her the interpretive key to the Oresteia’s indictment of Agamemnon’s failure of feeling.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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In the Iphigenia in Aulis the brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus easily unmask the idealistic motives which each alleges to the other; the principles which really control their actions are egotism, lust for power, and—cowardly fear of the other.

Snell reads the Iphigenia in Aulis as Euripides’ most corrosive demonstration that Homeric heroism, deprived of divine sanction, collapses into naked self-interest, rendering the sacrifice meaningless rather than sacred.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953thesis

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Kalchas reveals that Agamemnon must offer up his own daughter, Iphigeneia, to enable the expedition to depart… versions of the sacrificial scene became famous in the fifth-century dramas of Aeschylus (Agamemnon) and Euripides (Iphigeneia at Aulis).

Lattimore provides the mythographic frame establishing Iphigenia’s sacrifice as the inaugural act of the Trojan cycle, noting its deliberate suppression in the Iliad and its prominence in fifth-century tragedy.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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The clue is in the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, Agamemnon, and in the custom of looting linked to the divine order of the Gods.

Miller reads Iphigenia’s sacrifice typologically as the mythic substratum underlying Christian satisfaction and penal theories of atonement, linking her story to the logic of divinely sanctioned violence.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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Iphigenia Aulidensis: the end is lost, but the present traces suggest a pretty typical sequence: Agon, Ach—

Harrison situates the Iphigenia Aulidensis within her ritual-structural analysis of Aeschylean and Euripidean drama, identifying in its fragmentary close the formal elements of agon and theophany characteristic of the Year-Daimon cycle.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

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Aeschylus was supposed to have revealed ‘certain lore of the mysteries’ in the Tomotides, Hiereiar, Sisyphus Petrocylistes, Iphigenia and Oedipus.

Harrison records the ancient tradition associating Aeschylus’s Iphigenia with mystery-cult lore, reinforcing the connection between the sacrificial figure and initiatory religious knowledge.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

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