ABSTRACT
Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians is usually regarded as an exceptionally well-made play, more transparently coherent and unproblematic than, say, the kindred Helen or Jon. Euripides represents Iphigenia first identifying an ideal of purity in ritual practice. The aetiology, then, explains the ritual while making of it a commemoration of an ambivalent strain of the drama, a strain that appropriate compensation, through the ritual, would now resolve. And in each case an aetiological principle is at work indicating how, by means of ingenious and guileful substitution, narrative events in the past (the myth) become symbolic constructions in the present (the ritual). Athena’s aition for the Halae ceremony articulates the principle of apoina, compensation by means of substitution, a principle applicable both to sacrificial ritual as such and, pervasively, to Euripides’ play. Iphigenia acquires—in the perspective of dramatic myth; in the perspective of ritual she reacquires—her final association with the ambivalent sacredness of Artemis.
