ABSTRACT
Achilles is a figure of panhellenic legend that he surely entered the Iphigeneia story after it became part of the Trojan cycle. Here the story-line founders: it was clearer that Iphigeneia had to be sacrificed than why. In Stasinos Agamemnon is hunting and shoots a deer. The goddess Artemis is angry at the death of the deer. In our surviving tradition she sends storm winds which keep the Greek fleet at Aulis unable to sail for Troy. Iphigeneia has no known direct connection with either cult or myth at Mounichia, a hill with a temple of Artemis overlooking Peiraieus, the port of Athens. But its myth is remarkably similar to that of Aulis. Every Athenian girl was required to perform the Bear ritual before marriage - or so our late version of the myth would have us believe. But the scholiast on Aristophanes speaks of selected girls and Aristophanes' Lysistrata boasts proudly of having been 'a Bear at the Brauronia'.
