Ebook: Iphigenia in Tauris

Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris stands the Iphigenia-Orestes story as treated by Euripides, Aeschylus and Racine on its head. The serene rhythms and harmony of his blank verse make it the ideal vehicle for this finely wrought spiritual drama. Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War, in exile as a priestess in the barbaric land of the Tauri (Crimea), breaks the Tantalid family curse by saving the life of her brother Orestes who has murdered his mother because she has murdered his father; at the same time she enables him to expiate his crime. 
The female identity of the central character is all-important. It is uniquely her voice, against all the other voices which are male, that brings resolution – not by preaching values but by the visceral force of belief in the rightness of the language of the heart.