The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Euripides · a tragedy for performance · the text as transmitted, 1,629 lines in the standard numbering, its closing messenger’s speech generally held not to be Euripides’ · Athens, City Dionysia, produced after the poet’s death in 406 BC · in Euripides’ Greek, read from knowledge with Kovacs’s Loeb for sense; Greek quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with the desk’s own close English beneath
Mode
Tragedy of indecision and political fear; the cycle’s most sacred moment told as the politics of a camp
Mythos
The father who must give his daughter to launch the war; the marriage turned to sacrifice; the willing victim
Phase
From a king awake at night writing and unwriting a letter to his daughter’s departure for the altar, and a messenger’s report of a hind put in her place
Presentation
Drama for the City Dionysia; two prologues, a parodos, four episodes and three stasima, a sung departure and a messenger’s exodos; 1,629 lines in the standard numbering, among the longest surviving tragedies, with the stasima short against the episodes
Register
From brothers squabbling over a letter in fast trochaics and a queen and a hero embarrassed at a door, to a mother’s indictment, a daughter’s supplication and a girl leading the paean to her own death
Scale
One house at one moment, with the army, its seer and its ambitions unseen around it, at the threshold of the Trojan war
Governing Proposition
A king who sought the command of the Greek army at Aulis has been told by its seer that the goddess demands his daughter’s death before the war can be launched. He sends for her under the pretext of a wedding to Achilles, writes to stop her, is caught, relents, and finds that relenting no longer matters, because the army knows. The girl begs for her life, and then chooses to die for Greece. The wager of the play is that a war is a collective will that no one in it commands, that its leaders are its captives, and that the last thing it takes from its victim is her consent.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens at night. Agamemnon is awake under a star, and the Old Man of his household asks what troubles him. The king envies the man who lives without glory. He has a letter, and he writes it and unwrites it, seals it and unseals it. He has sent for his daughter, under the pretext of a marriage to Achilles, because the goddess demands her death before the war can be launched; and now, by night, he means to call her back. The opening is still and beautiful, and the whole play is in its gesture: a decision made and taken back.
The text that carries this opening is itself unsettled. It is in two forms, anapaests and iambics, and the order in which they stood is in doubt; the two prologues overlap. The play was left unfinished or unstaged at Euripides’ death in 406 BC and produced at the City Dionysia by a younger Euripides, the poet’s son or nephew, with Bacchae and the lost Alcmaeon in Corinth, and it took the first prize. Whatever another hand completed for that production belongs to the one work, and is credited or charged to the play.
Then the chorus enters: women from Chalcis who have crossed the strait to look at the fleet. They are spectators of war, and they sing what they see, ship by ship and hero by hero, in a catalogue far longer than their spectacle needs. The glamour is real and it is the point. The play will cost it out. And the army itself, which will decide everything, never appears; neither does Calchas, its seer, nor Odysseus, who will lead it. It is felt at every exit.
Movement II
Menelaus has seized the letter. The brothers quarrel over it in fast trochaic tetrameters, and the scene is a tug of war between two men over a piece of writing: near farce, at the most sacred moment of the cycle. Agamemnon sought the command; Menelaus wants his wife back. Heroes are reduced to the scale of men in a camp, and the tone slides toward what later comedy would make of such men.
Then the news comes that the women have arrived. The summons cannot be recalled. Agamemnon weeps, and Menelaus, seeing his brother weep, relents: he wakes to what he has been asking. The relenting no longer matters. The army knows, or will know; Calchas will tell it, and Odysseus will lead it. Each reversal so far has been a decision taken back, and this one is taken back by the crowd that no one in the play commands.
This is the spine of the play, and it is economical: remove any link, the night letter, the seizure, the arrival, the relenting, and the trap does not close. The chorus answers with a short song on moderate love. The stasima in this play are short against the episodes, about a tenth of the lines in the three of them together, and lightly attached. The weight is in the scenes, where the decisions are made and unmade.
Movement III
Clytemnestra and Iphigenia arrive for a wedding. Agamemnon meets them speaking double: everything he says to his daughter means one thing to her and another to him. The chorus sings of the fleet at Troy and foresees the city’s fall. The audience knows what the women do not, and every element of the wedding the mother has come to arrange is already being turned into something else.
Then the comedy that reveals the plot. Achilles comes to the door and meets the queen, who offers him her hand as to a son-in-law. He recoils: he knows of no marriage. The crossed purposes are resolved by the Old Man, who tells them at the door what the wedding is for. Achilles pledges to save the girl. It is one more decision in a play of decisions that do not decide.
The chorus sings the third stasimon, on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis: the gods feasting, the Centaurs, Chiron’s prophecy of the son, Achilles, who will be born of it. Then it turns to the girl, garlanded like a heifer for the altar. The true divine wedding of Achilles’ parents is set beside this sham one, and the mother’s escort, the lustral water, the veil and the procession of a marriage are seen for the rite of slaughter they have become.
Movement IV
Clytemnestra indicts her husband. She tells how he took her as a prize, killing her first husband and her infant, and asks what she is to be at home, and what she is to pray for, while he is away at war. The speech rises to terror. The marriage is shown to have been founded on murder, and the infant son, Orestes, a mute part in the play, is the avenger to come. Agamemnon is silent before it.
Then Iphigenia begs for her life. She is a girl who wants to see her father and the light, and her supplication is the summit of the play’s pathos: “kakōs zēn kreisson ē thanein kalōs”
“better to live badly than to die well”. In six words it answers the whole heroic code. The indictment and the supplication stand as an agon of two great speeches against a silent king, and he cannot answer either. Her lament on Paris and Ida, sung by an actor alone, carries her from speech into song.
Achilles comes back from the army. He tried to stand against it, and it turned on him with stones, his own Myrmidons with it. The best man in the camp has failed against the crowd. That is the one fact the play has been building: the army cannot be refused, and its leaders are its captives. It is the only preparation the girl’s change receives, and the actor must carry the rest.
Movement V
Iphigenia chooses to die for Greece. “barbarōn d’ Hellēnas archein eikos”
“it is fitting that Greeks rule barbarians”. The girl who begged for the light now takes up the reason that kills her, and the play gives her the dignity of the choice while letting the audience hear whose sentence she is speaking. Read straight, it shows a girl dignified by the cause that kills her; read as irony, it shows the cause using her. On either reading the condition is the same: a collective will that recruits its victims into consent.
Aristotle named this change as his example of inconsistency of character, the suppliant unlike the later girl, and the question has been argued since. The play does not settle it. She refuses to let her mother cut her hair in mourning. She calls for the garlands and the dance around Artemis’s altar, and leads, in lyric exchange with the chorus, the paean to her own death: terror and radiance at once. Her passage from spoken supplication to sung monody to sung procession has been her passage from the house to the altar.
The transmitted text does not end there. A messenger, in the last hundred lines or so, reports that a hind was put in the girl’s place and that she was carried off to the gods; Agamemnon brings the report, and Clytemnestra doubts it. This ending is generally held not to be Euripides’, and the authentic one is lost. Read as the text’s ending, it is flat beside the rest, and its miracle pulls against the human law the play has kept: it lets the myth off at its edge, and blurs the cost of what the girl has chosen.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is necessary and economical: a chain of reversals in which every decision is taken back. Agamemnon recalls the summons by night; Menelaus seizes the letter; the women arrive; Menelaus relents, and the relenting no longer matters, because the army knows. Remove a link and the trap does not close. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the transmitted text carries around that spine: two prologues that overlap, a catalogue of ships in the parodos far longer than the women’s spectacle needs, a messenger’s narration of a substitution the play has not prepared, and scenes that repeat what they have done. Something near a sixth could go without loss to the argument, more than in the strongest tragedies.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the play discloses can be stated and holds: a war is a collective will that no one in it commands, and the men who lead it are its captives, held by ambition and by fear of the crowd they courted. Agamemnon sought the command and cannot refuse its price; Menelaus wants his wife back and wakes to what he is asking; Achilles is brave until the army turns on him, his own Myrmidons with it. The deepest disclosure is the last: the victim takes up the reason that kills her. The play gives her the dignity of the choice while letting us hear whose sentence she speaks. Held off the top because the ideology is shown more than anatomised, and the close blurs the cost with a miracle.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height comes late, and often once it comes. The opening is still and beautiful: a king awake at night under a star, envying the obscure man, writing and unwriting. Clytemnestra’s indictment rises to terror when she tells how he took her as a prize, killing her first husband and her infant. Iphigenia’s supplication is the summit of pathos: “kakōs zēn kreisson ē thanein kalōs”
“better to live badly than to die well”, an answer to the whole heroic code. Her decision and her departure song, calling for the garlands and the dance around Artemis’s altar, are terror and radiance at once. Below the top because the first half moves on quarrel and intrigue, its pitch near comedy by design.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The sacrifice of the daughter to launch the war is the founding act of the Trojan cycle and of the curse on the house of Atreus, the thing the Agamemnon looks back to; this play stands on the threshold and makes the threshold the whole drama. The archetype is the marriage turned to sacrifice: the pretext is a wedding to Achilles, and the mother’s escort, the lustral water, the veil and the procession are converted into the rite of slaughter, while the third stasimon sets the true divine wedding of Achilles’ parents beside it. Iphigenia stays particular, a girl who wants to see her father and the light. Held a step below the top: Artemis’s demand is reported, never present, and the hind lets the myth off at its edge.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance: the chorus of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon had told the sacrifice as a gagged girl lifted like a goat, and Euripides’ own volunteer victims, Macaria, Polyxena and Menoeceus, had already shown the young going freely to death. The swerve is to tell the most sacred and terrible moment of the cycle as near-domestic politics: brothers squabbling over a letter, a general afraid of his staff, a mother and a hero embarrassed by a wedding that does not exist. The risk was charged at once: Aristotle names the play as his example of inconsistency of character (Poetics 15). Held a tenth below the gate because this is the late manner at its sharpest, not a new manner; Orestes and Helen had taken similar liberties.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Much of the knowledge lives in the form. The army is never seen and is felt at every exit: a play built on an offstage mass is the way to show leaders governed by a crowd. The chorus are women from Chalcis come across the strait to gape at the ships, spectators of war’s glamour, and their catalogue of heroes is the glamour the play then costs out. The rhythm of reversals, letter and counter-letter, Menelaus’s change, Achilles’ pledge and failure, Iphigenia’s turn, makes the form an argument about decisions that do not decide. Her passage from spoken supplication to sung monody to sung procession enacts her passage from the house to the altar. Held down because the stasima are lightly attached.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The evidence of return is long. The central question has been argued since Aristotle: is Iphigenia’s turn an inconsistency, a girl’s growth, an ironic exposure of patriotic cant, or a free act in a place where no freedom remains? Each reading has had strong advocates, and none has closed the others. Agamemnon is read as weak, as trapped, or as ambitious beyond pity; Menelaus’s reversal as sincere or tactical; Achilles as a hero or a vain young man. The state of the text keeps the play open in a further way: what Euripides wrote, and how he ended it. Each generation that has staged it has found a play about war’s recruitment of the young. Below the top: its questions are fewer, and centre on one figure’s choice.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Attic tragedy of the late fifth century, and the European theatre that took up Greek tragedy from the Renaissance. The force: the most thorough of the late plays in turning heroic myth into a drama of indecision and political fear, character set against role, the tradition later drama and New Comedy took from Euripides as a whole. It does not reorganise the possibilities of tragedy as the Oresteia or Oedipus do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: first prize at its production; Erasmus’s Latin with Hecuba (1506); Lady Jane Lumley’s English version, among the first of a Greek drama; Racine’s Iphigénie (1674); Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1774); Schiller’s translation; Cacoyannis’s film (1977).
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the charge falls on the form. The original ending is lost and a substitute stands in its place; the order of the prologue is in doubt; interpolation is heavier than in almost any other tragedy. The text comes down in two manuscripts only, L and P, outside the Byzantine school selection, and was little read for a millennium before Erasmus. It is not fragmentary: what carries its meaning, the brothers, the arrival, the indictment, the supplication and the decision, is whole and legible. Presence since the Renaissance is wide, in translation, the French stage, opera, schools and modern staging. The damage to the ending touches the meaning and not only the fabric, and that sets the figure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Euripides’ Greek as far as it can be weighed; the lyric music is lost and is not charged. The construction of intrigue is skilful: the letter as a stage object passing between hands; the third episode’s comedy of crossed purposes, a queen greeting a hero as her son-in-law, resolved by the Old Man’s revelation at the door; the indictment and the supplication set as an agon of two great speeches against a silent king. Trochaic tetrameters give the quarrels speed; the monody and the departure exchange use the late Euripidean lyric resources. Charged on the text as it stands: the doubled prologue, the bloated catalogue, the messenger’s report, flat beside the rest, and the many lines that repeat or pad.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The two most distant elements are the brothers’ near-farcical tug of war over the letter and the girl leading the paean to her own death. One law governs both: wills bend to the unseen many, and each person’s reasons are the army’s reasons wearing his own face. Menelaus’s selfishness and Iphigenia’s sacrifice obey the same physics of public pressure. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to sacred terror, and it is mostly held. Charged: the abruptness of Iphigenia’s change, prepared only through Achilles’ report of the army and left for the actor to carry, so that Aristotle’s objection has force even when answered; and the transmitted close, whose miracle and whose mother’s doubt pull against the human law of the rest.
Score: 8.0 / 10
A single play, weighed at its own scale and not marked down for it, holds a good deal in one structure: the family, a marriage founded on murder, a father, a mother, a daughter and the infant son who will be the avenger; the state and the army, with command, ambition, the assembly and the crowd; war and its ideology, Greek against barbarian and the honour of Hellas; the sacred, in the seer, the goddess’s demand and the altar; and a young consciousness making itself at the edge of death. Love and marriage as institutions run through all of it. These are integrated, not listed: each order acts on the girl. What it does not hold is the natural order and labour, or history beyond the one moment at Aulis.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8. A text whose action and great speeches survive whole across twenty-four centuries, though its ending does not; a disclosure of war as a collective will that recruits its victims into consent; and the marriage turned to sacrifice, built into every element of the wedding the mother came to arrange.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8, held by what the transmitted text carries around a necessary spine: the overlapping prologues, the long catalogue of ships, the messenger’s report and scenes that repeat themselves. The Encompassed at 7.9, held by the form: a single play holds neither the natural order nor labour, nor history beyond the moment at Aulis. Among the gated axes, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: the late Euripidean manner at its sharpest rather than a new manner, and a reach wide and continuous but a step below the most influential tragedies.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 7.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. The aggregate, at 8.4, stands below the summit’s 9.0 in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Euripides’ Iphigeneia hē en Aulidi in the Greek, scored as the text as transmitted for performance: lines 1 to 1,629 in the standard numbering of Diggle’s Oxford text and Kovacs’s Loeb (2002). The play comes down with the so-called alphabetic plays in two manuscripts, L (Laurentianus 32.2) and P, which derives from it or from its source. The messenger’s exodos, the hind put in the girl’s place and her carrying off to the gods, is generally held not to be Euripides’, and much of it is thought late. Other passages are suspected too: the order of the two prologues, much of the catalogue of ships, and many lines in the later scenes (Page, Actors’ Interpolations in Greek Tragedy, 1934, is the classic study). The exodos is read as the text’s ending and weighed where it acts, modestly, under The Inevitable, The Made and The Inner Law; the loss of the authentic ending and the contamination of the text are charged once, under The Imperishable. Completion by Euripides the Younger for the first production, if it happened, is part of the one work, credited or charged to the play. No axis moves on the question of authorship as such. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and the proportions of the parts are approximate. Every axis is judged on Euripides’ Greek. Translations · David Kovacs’s Loeb for sense; Charles R. Walker’s version in the Chicago series and Merwin and Dimock’s (1978) for the play in English. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the play: Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with the desk’s own close English beneath, and citations are by part of the play rather than by line. The music of the lyrics and their metrical detail are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the year of the first production, whether a fragment preserves an earlier ending with the goddess appearing, and the date of Lady Jane Lumley’s version, are not given.