The Stories We Tell: Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and Pericles’s Funeral Oration

Abstract

How to address the grief that attends the inevitable loss in war of those we love? How to turn victims of war into heroes? How to resolve the agonizing choices that war imposes on us? Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, the tale of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, and Pericles’s Funeral Oration as imagined by Thucydides were both written during the Peloponnesian War, and each points to the creation of stories told to assuage the grief that follows the loss of loved ones and to obscure the challenging moral choices that wars demand. Euripides’s characters are trapped by the moral ambiguities that plague our political decision-making and, through a startling conclusion to the play that recalls the language of Pericles’s Funeral Oration, they welcome the “vain myths” we introduce to make our wartime decisions seem painless and our moral dilemmas disappear. Only the mother Clytemnestra refuses to be lulled by the stories or disappear happily within the walls of her palace. The tragedian can give full voice to the complex role of those stories; the rhetoric of the political leader obscures the ambiguity and “vanity” of those myths. Given the wide familiarity with Pericles’s Funeral Oration, I devote most of my attention to Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and conclude with a discussion of Pericles’s famous speech.