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Artemis and Iphigeneia

Few problems in the Oresteia have been more debated in recent times than that of why Artemis sends the calm which detains the Achaean fleet at Aulis. ‘The main problem, a much vexed one’, wrote Eduard Fraenkel, ‘… arises from the fact that we are not told anywhere in the ode why the wrath of Artemis is directed against the Atreidae’. By ‘the ode’ Fraenkel means, of course, the parodos of the Agamemnon; he might have written ‘in the play’ or ‘in the trilogy’. He believed that Aeschylus had in mind the story, told in the Cypria and in the Electra of Sophocles, that Agamemnon had angered Artemis by boasting that he surpassed her as an archer, but that he made no allusion to it because it seemed to supply a motive too petty to accord with his great theme. Others have protested that in a trilogy concerned with guilt and retribution it is strange that so important an action should be left unmotivated. Sir Denys Page revived the view of Conington and others that Artemis is angry with the Atreidai because they are symbolised by the eagles which appear at Aulis, and these eagles kill a pregnant hare, an animal under her protection. That is to confuse the world of the portent with the world of reality which it symbolises, besides assigning to the goddess a motive of a still more objectionable pettiness. In pointing this out, twenty years ago, I contended that since the eagles stand for the Atreidai the hare must stand for Troy, and deduced from this that Artemis must be angry at the prospective massacre of the Trojans. In Homer and in the later tradition, Artemis takes the Trojan side against the Greeks, and I argued that since the hare stood for Troy the partiality of Artemis for wild animals and their young must stand for her partiality for the Trojans.