Iphigenia in Tauris in the Early Empire

As Edith Hall has discussed (2013: 92-134), Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (IT) is one of the most influential Athenian tragedies on the literature of the early empire. The friendship between Pylades and Orestes became a model for amicitia (Cic. de Amic. 7.24, de Fin. 5.22.63; Plut. Tox. 6) and Ovid uses the letter sent to the presumptively absent Orestes as an implicit model for his own sad letters from the Black Sea (Trist. 3.2.48-102, 4.4.59-88). IT was also a model for the Charition mime (P.Oxy. 413), suggesting familiarity with the story through a burlesque street performance. Numerous visual representations of the events of the play survive in wall paintings and mosaics from Pompeii and elsewhere, and others are attested in literary sources (Pliny NH 35.136, Anth. Gr. 16.128, etc.), but there is no positive indication it was performed in the empire, despite a robust but underappreciated ongoing tradition of Greek dramatic festivals (Skotheim 2016).

This paper builds on Hall’s discussion, working to identify specific mediating factors, positive reasons to attribute knowledge of the play and its contents to indirect sources. In the case of IT, several can be isolated: (a) Latin adaptations (Pacuvius, who also adapted Sophocles’ Chryses, a plot mythologically dependent on Euripides’ play); (b) collections of hypotheses (such as Satyrus’ Tales from Euripides [P.Oxy. 1176]); (c) mythographic sources, such as Hyginus and Apollodorus; (d) anthologized passages and excerpts, including maxims (which may of course overlap with extant papyrus finds, as they do with Cresphontes). It is only when mediating sources have been discounted that a given allusion might be claimed to come directly from a complete text or from performance (two vectors discussed by Wright 2020). For example, all of the details isolated by Hall (2013: 114) suggesting the influence of IT on the Greek novel tradition are shared by the hypotheses tradition, and there is nothing in the novels not to be found there. As a result, it must be seen as a mediating factor for the representation of the play in the early empire. Because IT is among the so-called “alphabetic” plays of Euripides, a robust book tradition is not to be expected (as existed for Bacchae, Hecuba, Orestes, Alcestis, Phoenissae, etc.) for this play.

Mediating factors are identified through the visual tabulation of a limited cluster of specific details. This graphic method allows the contrast between IT and Euripides’ Andromeda, a play which does not survive but for which there exist several performance anecdotes from the empire, to become apparent. Tabulation also allows the integration and evaluation of additional sources for which the influence of IT has been claimed, including Acts 19.21-20.1 (Bilby and Lefteratou forthcoming) and a stone figurative carving from the 1st or 2nd century CE found in West Sussex (Black et al. 2012). The paper will demonstrate this methodology with these two examples (not available to Hall), Plutarch’s Toxilus, and Charition, each of which demonstrates a distinct relationship to the Euripides’ text.