Role Inversion and Its Function in the Iphigeneia at Aulis

In the Iphigeneia at Aulis role and role inversion are paramount concerns. Indeed it could be contended that in this play we find Euripides' clearest and best defined account of human (and divine) variability. Agamemnon, Menelaos, Achilleus, Iphigeneia, and even, in the final analysis, Artemis, all take positions and attitudes diametrically opposed to those initially adopted. Moreover, the basic thrust behind these movements in position and attitude is the same for each of these characters. All are concerned, in one way or another, with the saving or destruction of Iphigeneia, a situation which most emphatically includes Iphigeneia herself. For on the one hand she wildly supplicates to be saved, while on the other she gladly offers her body to the blade. In addition, Iphigeneia plays a crucial role in greater destructions. If she is destroyed by Agamemnon's and the army's actions, then Greece is destroyed in turn by her (Agamemnon's and the Greeks' final triumph is a ‘Pyrrhic’ victory at best), a situation made all the more ironic by her affected stance of saviour to the fatherland. In Iphigeneia's case, however, the discrepancy between intention and the consequences of action is innocent enough. The play gives no hint that she is at all aware of the irony implicit in her actions. But such lack of awareness is not postulated with regard to Agamemnon, Menelaos and Achilleus. The duplicities and hypocrisies of these three have been the subject of much analysis, and it is at least a critical commonplace to observe that they are characterised in a way more reminiscent of the sour end of everyday life than of the due proprieties associated with heroic, or Homeric, behaviour

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