Iphigenia - Tumblr Posts
I currently have two emotions and those are:
- fuck you victor frankenstein
- fuck you petruchio
- FUCK YOU AGAMEMNON
And of course:
- damn I suck at math
edit: I forgot to mention the characters I love so don’t forget that
Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon (2018)
Iphigenia was a daughter of King Agamemnon and thus a princess of Mycenae. Agamemnon offends the goddess Arthemis, who retaliates by commanding him to kill Iphigenia as a sacrifice so his ships can sail to Troy. In some versions, Iphigenia is sacrificed at Aulis, but in others, Artemis rescues her.
Constellation Iphigenia (2019)
Iphigenia in Tauris (2022)
in middle school during my Intense Greek Mythology Phase, Artemis was, as you can likely guess, my best girl. Iphigenia was my OTHER best girl. Yes at the same time.
The story of Iphigenia always gets to me when it's not presented as a story of Artemis being capricious and having arbitrary rules about where you can and can't hunt, but instead, making a point about war.
Artemis was, among other things--patron of hunting, wild places, the moon, singlehood--the protector of young girls. That's a really important aspect she was worshipped as: she protected girls and young women. But she was the one who demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter in order for his fleet to be able to sail on for Troy.
There's no contradiction, though, when it's framed as, Artemis making Agamemnon face what he’s doing to the women and children of Troy. His children are not in danger. His son will not be thrown off the ramparts, his daughters will not be taken captive as sex slaves and dragged off to foreign lands, his wife will not have to watch her husband and brothers and children killed. Yet this is what he’s sailing off to Troy to inevitably do. That’s what happens in war. He’s going to go kill other people’s daughters; can he stand to do that to his own? As long as the answer is no—he can kill other people’s children, but not his own—he can’t sail off to war.
Which casts Artemis is a fascinating light, compared to the other gods of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is really a squabble of pride and insults within the Olympian family; Eris decided to cause problems on purpose, leaving Aphrodite smug and Hera and Athena snubbed, and all of this was kinda Zeus’s fault in the first place for not being able to keep it in his pants. And out of this fight mortal men were their game pieces and mortal cities their prizes in restoring their pride. And if hundreds of people die and hundred more lives are ruined, well, that’s what happens when gods fight. Mortals pay the price for gods’ whims and the gods move on in time and the mortals don’t and that’s how it is.
And women especially—Zeus wanted Leda, so he took her. Paris wanted Helen, so he took her. There’s a reason “the Trojan women” even since ancient times were the emblems of victims of a war they never wanted, never asked for, and never had a say in choosing, but was brought down on their heads anyway.
Artemis, in the way of gods, is still acting through human proxies. But it seems notable to me to cast her as the one god to look at the destruction the war is about to wreak on people, and challenge Agamemnon: are you ready to kill innocents? Kill children? Destroy families, leave grieving wives and mothers? Are you? Prove it.
It reminds me of that idea about nuclear codes, the concept of implanting the key in the heart of one of the Oval Office staffers who holds the briefcase, so the president would have to stab a man with a knife to get the key to launch the nukes. “That’s horrible!,” it’s said the response was. “If he had to do that, he might never press the button!” And it’s interesting to see Artemis offering Agamemnon the same choice. You want to burn Troy? Kill your own daughter first. Show me you understand what it means that you’re about to do.
i love saying "[character] save me" to characters that can't even save themselves
Agamemnon serving zero cunt because he gave it all to his depressed kids
I'm not like an Agamemnon stan or anything but I do kinda wish people stopped portraying his sacrifice of Iphigenia as being like, him being totally heartless and stuff. Because it's not -- that's the point, right? By forcing him to kill his own daughter, it's giving him a deeply personal stake in the war. It's 'you want to go across the sea to kill people who know nothing and have done nothing? fine. prove it.' It's about him having to commit to war in its entirety, the pain that most of the Achaean forces never will.
Obviously it's a bad thing. And yeah, Clytemnestra deserves to kill him for sacrificing their daughter. But if he didn't care about her, if it didn't tear him up inside to put his own daughter on the altar, why wouldn't he be asked to sacrifice anything else?
The Iphigenia Paradox
You know that her death is one of the most tragic/heartbreaking moments from the Iliad and you wish she wouldn't have been sacrificed. Then you find out that there's a version of this part in which she didn't die and a deer was sacrificed in her place. But then you remember that her death is relevant for the plot and that her importance resides in her absence during the rest of the book.
Euripides makes it possible
Iphigenia in Tauris (2022)
Iphigenia...
guess what. i posted poetry on ao3. my first contribution to ancient greek religion and lore fandom is here, baby. @scarlet-sam-chaos nt as good as i wanted, but given the circumstances, *shrugs*, i'd call it not bad.
guess what. i posted another poem. i posted my clytemnestra poem. go forth and find joy in my barely concealed simping.
me with hannibal. Abigail as iphigenia is just too strong
Me messaging Kyle: loustat & claudia is like Oresteia in like lestat is both Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Louis is Clytemnestra and also Orestes and Claudia is Electra but she's also Iphigenia and
harpy hare but it is about clytemnestra and her relationship with her children (both alive and dead) after iphigenia‘s sacrifice. i am actively crying.
