EURIPIDES
tive date also goes well with the fact that at the end of his
career Euripides was much interested in exploring the rami-
fications of the saga of the House of Atreus (Electra, 413;
Helen, 412; Orestes, about 408; Iphigenia at Aulis, post-
humous), though the plays do not connect with each other
and often conflict in choice of legendary variants.
Iphigenia was probably not produced with Electra in 413,
since Orestes appears in both plays but with rather different
characteristics, and since the predictions at the end of Electra
ignore the expedition to the Taurians; nor, probably, was it
produced with Helen in 412, since the dramas are too much
alike to have been given together. We must then choose be-
tween 414 and 411 (the style is not "late" enough for any
posterior date); my own uncertain choice is 414.
The Play
Iphigenia in Tauris was of course presented as a tragedy,
but it is not "tragical" like Medea or Hippolytus. The for-
mulae by which we are accustomed to interpret tragedy—the
tragic fault or tragic choice (hamartia), the punishment of
hybris (whatever that means), the irreconcilable conflict of
characters, or justified revenge breeding new hatred and wrong
—do not apply here and can be blissfully ignored. Euripides
is more interested in How than in Why, and even as romantic
comedy Iphigenia is less seriously problematical, cuts less
deep, than Alcestis or Ion. Note how briskly the murder of
Clytemnestra is disposed of, lines 924-27.
But the cheerfulness is serious, and in it I find two domi-
nant ideals. One is the love of Greece. Euripides has been
sobered by the horrors of internecine war, and has dropped
the narrow, often bellicose pro-Athenian theme, which ap-
pears in Heracleidae and Andromache and The Suppliants,
in favor of a wider Hellenism. His homesick Greeks find no
comfort in even the friendliness of outlanders and long for
Greece, all Greece or any of Greece, not merely Athens. The
other ideal is friendship, the devoted, disinterested friendship
of Admetus, Heracles, and Apollo in Alcestis, of Heracles and
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