Appendix E
Character Descriptions

Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis

Character Descriptions

Agamemnon, King of Mycenae.

The play begins with Agamemnon at a moment of crisis, caught between two contradictory courses of action: he has planned the sacrifice of his daughter, yet seeks to avert it at all costs. Agamemnon is a fully dimensional, complex character, with an irreconcilable dilemma. He has duties toward his family but also toward the Greeks, toward his wife and daughter, and toward his self-serving brother. He is willing to tell lies and to deceive, but he also appears humane and emotionally attached to his daughter. Agamemnon is a character whose downfall is brought about by his inability to assume a firm moral and ethical stance.

Menelaus, King of Sparta, brother to Agamemnon.

Self-centered, vengeful, and unlikable, Menelaus is presented by Euripides as an opponent of Agamemnon. His dramatic function is to attempt to cancel his brother’s plan to save Iphigenia, and to shed light on Agamemnon’s character through a confrontation that introduces many of the play’s themes, most notably the characters’ frequent vacillations between opposing points of view. It is only after he has had a change of heart and advocates for the abandonment of the Trojan mission in order to spare Iphigenia’s life that Menelaus becomes sympathetic. The important theme introduced by Menelaus when he changes his mind is that of kinship and of the tension between family values and public interests.

Clytemnestra, wife to Agamemnon, mother to Iphigenia.

Not yet the transgressing matricide of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Euripides’ Clytemnestra is far more of a victim than the revenging victimizer she is destined to become after the Trojan War. In this play, Clytemnestra appears as a devoted wife and loving mother whose hatred and disdain toward her husband emerge in the course of the play as a direct result of Agamemnon’s actions. She displays throughout the action a very clear sense of her rights and responsibilities within her marriage and in society at large.

Iphigenia, daughter to Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.

At first a pure, virtuous child, on the verge of womanhood, Iphigenia undergoes perhaps the greatest transformation in the play. She is introduced as a young and impulsive girl, having a childlike affection for her father and showing an innocent disregard for social conventions. When she learns that she and her mother have been deceived by her own father and that she has been brought to Aulis not to wed Achilles, but to be sacrificed to the war effort, she pleads hopelessly and impotently for her life. Yet, by the end of the action, she has grown in maturity and stature into the character who takes the onstage action into her own hands, dictating to everyone else how they should deport themselves as she goes off willingly to her own death.

Achilles, famed (and glamorous) hero of Homer’s Iliad, at this point in time is only “destined” to become one of the most prominent warriors of the Trojan War.

An upper-class young man of late fifth-century Athens, proud of his ancestry and sophistic training, impatient and easily offended, with a strong sense of honor and what is right. But Achilles, for all his self-aggrandizement and pride, is also exposed as inexperienced, immature, self-centered, and even bombastic. He is certainly pragmatic, and he adjusts to the demands of his situation; yet he is a man of principle, too, who is willing to rescue Iphigenia even when his own life is in jeopardy. The character that emblematically stands as a symbol of heroism in the Iliad, the single most authoritative poem of the Greek world, is reduced by Euripides to a figure unable to defend Iphigenia and his own heroic identity. His admiration of Iphigenia is an admiration of a heroism he is unable to claim for himself. With its portrayal of Achilles, this play challenges a whole set of values and beliefs that are traditionally associated with his Homeric heroism.

The Old Servant, gifted to Clytemnestra as part of her wedding dowry, and currently in service to Agamemnon at Aulis.

This important “minor” character helps to move the plot forward and also to guide the emotions and reactions of the spectators in a way similar to and as complex as that of the chorus. The old servant triggers Agamemnon’s expository speech in the prologue, raises expectations about Achilles’ temper, and draws the spectators’ attention to Agamemnon’s inability to predict, let alone to try to avert, the consequences of his fictitious ruse of a marriage between Achilles and Iphigenia. More importantly, it is the servant who reveals to Clytemnestra and Achilles the prophecy of the sacrifice and the fictitiousness of the wedding, thus setting in motion the second half of the play. Despite its centrality to the tragic plot, the role of the old servant is not without its comic side, and a number of his actions point toward a character whose social status, age, and manners set him distinctly apart from the other characters.

The Chorus of young married women from Chalcis [pronounced “kal-kis”], the town across the strait from the camp of the Greek army at Aulis.

This group of what are essentially “sightseers” has traveled across a body of water to “watch” the famous Greek fleet, about which they apparently have heard a great deal. Euripides’ seemingly arbitrary introduction of this group of young women into the play after the expository scene allows the thereafter ever-present Chorus to comment on the action and to intervene in the dialogue segments of the play as detached onlookers. In their “odes,” they introduce and reflect on a number of themes that permeate the plot: love and desire, war and peace, as well as marriage and sacrifice. They also offer emotional, moral and mythological filters through which to view what happens on stage. The women of Chalcis, though, are far from impartial and disinterested spectators. Their point of view is subjective and, like the old servant, they collectively create an emotional and psychological lens through which the audience is invited to judge the action.