THE PHILOSOPHICAL MEANING OF THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER AS A CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATION OF TRAGEDY IPHIGENIA AT AULIS

With the movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer , Jorgos Lanthimos takes the value sacred from superhuman powers and makes it mundane. It is claimed that queen Clytemnestra, one of the heroes of Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, does not believe in superhuman powers. This is because Clytemnestra considers the event of killing of her own daughter Iphigenia a murder rather than a sacrifice. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos interprets the killing of Iphigenia as a “sacrifice” by her own father, King Agamemnon, to question the relations between the people of the contemporary world. Are the killings of Iphigenia and Martin’s father, Jonathan Lang, sacrifices or murders? Whatever the answer is, the idea that both the film and the tragedy suggest is that what should be considered sacred is life. King Agamemnon, who killed his own daughter, and surgeon Steven, who caused the death of his own patient, are expected to pay the price for the loss of life they caused. But how? What could be the cost of a human life? As a result, the contribution of the movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer to the people of the contemporary world is that it re-examines the values of “sacred” and “sacrifice.”

Spectres of Euripides: Time, Translation and Modernism in H.D.’s Euripides

The modernist period was one of intense engagement with antiquity. It was also a period concerned with radical ideas about time put forward by Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein that questioned traditional understandings of the relationship between past and present. This article considers these two aspects of the modernist period through H.D.’s translations of Euripides: it argues that H.D.’s equivocal position in literary modernism and the imagist movement (as demonstrated by her translations from Hippolytus), her prosodic experimentation with Greek verse forms in her translations from Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis and finally her emphasis on temporal themes in her Freud-inspired translation of Ion can be all read in such a way to cast new light on the complex temporalities of the translation of classical texts and the modernist reception of the classics.

CONCEALED KYPRIS IN THE IPHIGENIA AT AULIS

In their first stasimon, the chorus of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (= IA) praises ‘concealed Kypris’ as a marker of virtue for women (568–72):μέγα τι θηρεύειν ἀρετάν,γυναιξὶ μὲν κατὰ Κύ-πριν κρυπτάν, ἐν ἀνδράσι δ᾿ αὖκόσμος ἐνὼν ὁ μυριοπλη-θὴς μείζω πόλιν αὔξει.It is something great to hunt for excellence. For women, it is according to concealed Kypris, and among men in turn manifold order being within makes the city grow greater.

Early modern receptions of Iphigenia at Aulis

The sacrifice of Iphigenia, appearing influentially in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, assumes various forms in early modern translation, reading, and adaptation. Early modern receptions variously constrict, domesticate, Romanize, and Christianize the story. Publication in Latin, especially in Erasmus’ translation (1506) transposes Greek linguistic and cultural referents to later hermeneutics, rendering mysterious ancient elements into familiar Roman analogues — Stoic ideals, fortuna, prudentia, and the like. Caspar Stiblin’s Latin translation (1562) and Gabriel Harvey’s copious marginalia in his copy of Erasmus’ translation show that constriction and domestication often take the form of fragmentation of the text into sententiae, or wise sayings. The search for rhetorical figures, political maxims, or moral lessons generates many Christian applications and culminates in Buchanan’s biblical reworking of Iphigenia’s story in Jephthes, wherein Artemis gives way to the Judaeo-Christian god and Iphigenia, here Iphis, becomes a type of Christ. The Vernacular Adaptations of Jane Lumley, Jean Racine, and Abel Boyer continue to dismantle the heroic ethos of Euripides play and re-imagine the story: Achilles dwindles into a romantic lead, Agamemnon, into a vicious ruler and father, and Iphigenia becomes a pious and submissive daughter.

The Chorus in ‘Old’ Tragedy

The practice of revival and reperformance of drama in the fourth century, a practice illuminated by recent scholarship, allows for a recalibration of the view of fourth-century dramatic choral practice. Acknowledging the fifth-century plays (and their choruses) that were definitely and possibly revived in the fourth century instantly enriches the picture of fourth-century dramatic choral culture. As well as reviewing the significance of revivals for fourth-century dramatic culture more generally, this chapter considers the sections of tragic text (so-called ‘interpolations’) that seem to have been added to fifth-century plays for, it contends, fourth-century revivals. The reconfigured choruses of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, indicate what might have been possible and desirable for producers to change for revivals of these plays. The qualities of the additions here analysed add further evidence for varied and valued dramatic choruses in the later classical period.

Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender

Australian dramatist Tom Holloway’s adaptations of ancient tragedy reflect both the way that dramatists can structure scripts with an ‘open dramaturgy’ that provides directors with the opportunity to realize text through postdramatic strategies, and the way that the classics can be used to investigate the Australian psyche. The 2010 première production of Love Me Tender, Holloway’s Iphigenia at Aulis reinvention, situated the tragedy in an Australian bushfire season, and reinvented it in the form of unattributed lines on a page. The absence of characters is a postdramatic strategy, and in performance numerous other postdramatic techniques were added to the script to create an affective, image-driven investigation into the theme of sacrifice. Chapter 3 argues that Love Me Tender embodies a politics of form, and that the play compounds an investigation into the idea of sacrifice with a focus upon societal tensions surrounding pre-teen sexuality and raunch culture. It suggests that Love Me Tender provides a key example not only of the way that this new dramaturgical style can be realized through postdramatic performance, but also of the political use of the classics in postdramatic theatre.

Household Songs

This chapter illuminates the affective significance of music and song within household drama, a genre that early modern scholarship has found difficult to detach from the page and that continues to be undervalued in performance terms. Drawing on the notion of the closet, understood both as an architectural and acoustic space within the early modern household and as a generic marker for women’s dramatic productions, it explores the range of musical practices encompassed under the broad category of “household plays.” Focusing on Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, it then considers how recent staging experiments help to illuminate textual markers of music and song that have too often been silenced.

Euripides’ Bacchae

Produced posthumously along with Iphigenia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth and awarded first prize at the City Dionysia in 405 bce, Euripides’ Bacchae is one of his most well-known and influential tragedies. One of the most significant aspects of the play, attracting religious, gendered, psychological, philosophical, and metatheatrical readings, is the appearance as a major character of the god Dionysus seeking to establish his cult in the city of Thebes. Dionysus is simultaneously an outsider, setting off from Lydia with his band of Asiatic maenads, and a son of the city, conceived by Semele, a member of the Theban royal family, and born out of his father Zeus’ thigh after the death of his mother. Worshipping Dionysus brings ecstasy and joy, experienced through revels, music, and dancing, yet there is also a vengeful and destructive side to the god. He seeks to punish his maternal aunts for their lack of belief in his divine parentage and drives them from the palace onto the mountains along with the other Theban women. At the same time, the Theban elder Cadmus, Dionysus’ maternal grandfather, and the prophet Tiresias attire themselves in Bacchic garb and head for the mountains in a show of respect for the god. But Cadmus’s grandson Pentheus, the ruler of the city, is hostile to the establishment of Dionysus’ cult and refuses to accept the outsider. In the course of the play, Pentheus confronts Dionysus and attempts to constrain him by force to reassert his control over the city. Yet it is impossible for a mortal to defeat a god. Intrigued by news of the women’s Bacchic revels on the mountains, Pentheus is persuaded by Dionysus to disguise himself as a maenad and visit the mountains to observe the women. A messenger reports the terrible news of Pentheus’s death, torn apart as if he were an animal in a Bacchic ritual, by his mother and her two sisters. The play culminates with a powerful scene in which Agave returns to the palace carrying the head of her own son, believing it to be the head of a mountain lion they have killed. During the scene her father Cadmus gradually helps her to see that she has in fact dismembered her own son. The play concludes with the exile of the remaining members of the royal family.