Iphigenia in Aulis

Greece itself emerges as a major symbol in the play. The idea of Greece (or “Hellas”) as a cultural unity was relatively new when Euripides wrote his play and became cemented for the first time during the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BCE. Homer, whose epics of the Trojan War were set down around the eighth century BCE, did not have a comparable sense of a united Greece, and for him—as for most early Greek sources—the Trojan War was motivated simply by Menelaus’ desire to retrieve his wife Helen from her Trojan lover. But Euripides introduces a different way of looking at the war. In the play, many characters interpret the war as a patriotic or even ideological conflict to assert Greek rights in the face of foreign aggression. In contemporary Greek terms, it may have even been possible for Euripides’ audience to see the Trojan War as a kind of analogy to their own wars with the Persians, in which Panhellenic alliances of various Greek city-states united against the “barbarians” of Persia.

Even though not all characters in the play accept the patriotic explanation for the war—to Clytemnestra especially, the war is motivated by nothing other than one man’s desire to reclaim his adulterous wife—the fact that all the Greeks have united against a common enemy means that it is a Panhellenic effort, and thus that the Trojan War is, at least in some sense, a war for “all the Greeks” (1526). When Iphigenia accepts her fate, she even conceives of herself as a bringer of “salvation and triumph” (1474) to the Greeks, and thus as a symbol for a war that is itself increasingly becoming a symbol for all Greece.