GOETHE'S DRAMA IPHIGENIE AUF TAURIS (published in final verse form in his Schriften, 1787) is not widely known to readers today outside the somewhat closed confines of German Classicism. Even the traditional legend of Iphigenia from ancient Greece—above all in the drama by Euripides that served as the model for Goethe's play, presumably in the French translation by Pierre Brumoy, Iphigénie en Tauride, contained in his Théatre des Grecs (1730)—is unfamiliar in its details to general readers. The single, most salient fact of this legend—familiar above all from the opening Chorus of Aeschylus's Agamemnon—is the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis by command of her father in response to the anger of the goddess Artemis, who has raised contrary winds that prevent the Greek armies from sailing against Troy. That fact, of course, is radically revised by Euripides: Iphigenia appears at the outset of his drama to reveal that she was rescued at the last moment by Artemis and carried off to the remote barbaric kingdom of Tauris at the far end of the Black Sea to serve as priestess in the sacred grove of the goddess.

The irony in this revisionary reading of the myth resides in the fact that the intended sacrificial victim from Aulis must now officiate at the sacrificial deaths of all strangers who happen to reach the alien shores of Tauris.