Iphigenia in the Iliad and the Architecture of Homeric Allusion

Summary

In this paper, I argue that the traditional narrative of Iphigenia’s sacrifice lies allusively behind the opening scenes of the Iliad (1.8–487). Scholars have long suspected that this episode is evoked in Agamemnon’s scathing rebuke of Calchas (1.105–8), but I contend that this is only one moment in a far more sustained allusive dialogue: both the debate over Chryseis and her eventual return to her father replay and rework the sacrifice story. The Iliad begins by recalling the start of the whole Trojan war.

it has long been recognized that Homeric epic manipulates mythic time in complex and sophisticated ways, allusively reenacting events beyond the strict confines of its narrative.¹ The start and end of the Iliad, in particular, abound with allusions to earlier and later moments of the Trojan war story. The first half of the poem closely replays the opening stages of the war: the catalogue of ships, the teichoscopia, the duel of Paris and Menelaus, the encounter of Paris and Helen, the marshaling of troops and Pandarus’s truce-breaking—these all reperform acts that logically “fit” the first, rather than tenth, year of the conflict.² In the second half of the poem, meanwhile, the poet foreshadows what is to come: Patroclus’s death presages Achilles’ own, Hector’s death serves as a metonym for the fall of Troy and the funeral games of book 23 prefigure many later episodes of the tradition.³ Within its own narrow chronology, Homer’s epic embodies the whole Trojan war story.

Iliad 1, however, is rarely—if ever—considered as part of this allusive scheme.⁴ Most scholars focus on how this book looks forward, not backward, setting the stage for the events that follow: it introduces Achilles’ anger and Zeus’s promise to Thetis, two elements which together propel the internal Iliadic narrative. There seems to be an implicit scholarly assumption that it is only once the poem has been set on its own trajectory that echoes of earlier moments in the story begin.⁵ In this paper, however, I will argue that such allusive analepsis is active from the Iliad’s very start. Already in book 1 we can identify the allusive reworking of a specific episode from the larger Trojan war story: the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Scholars have long suspected that this event lies behind Agamemnon’s scathing rebuke of Calchas (1.105–8), but this is usually considered an isolated and passing reference, without any larger significance for the book or poem as a whole.⁶ Here, by contrast, I intend to demonstrate a far more extensive and sustained allusion to the episode than has previously been recognized. In particular, I will argue that both the debate over Chryseis and her eventual return to her father replay the tale of Iphigenia’s sacrifice through a range of thematic and structural allusions.⁷ This argument—if accepted—is of considerable significance for how we view the Iliad’s relationship to the wider epic tradition, as well as the allusive architecture of the poem as a whole.

Homeric allusion is, of course, a theoretical quagmire. Various methodological approaches compete in modern scholarship, especially surrounding the question of how meaning can be drawn from repetitions in an oral-derived, formulaic tradition. While neoanalysts have traditionally reconstructed specific lost poems as sources for the Iliad, oralists instead privilege the embedded resonance of specific words or phrases based on their various uses elsewhere in archaic poetry (“traditional referentiality”).⁸ Attempts have been made to combine these approaches,⁹ and in recent decades scholarly attention has shifted away from old questions of “textuality” to focus on the precise mechanics of reference.¹⁰ But even so, considerable disagreements remain.

My aim in this paper is to pursue a middle road between neoanalysis and traditional referentiality, exploring how the Iliad alludes to what I propose was an established oral tradition of Iphigenia’s sacrifice at Aulis. From an early date, the sacrifice story contained a number of core and stable elements that would have been integral to any telling. It is this mythical fabula—a distinctive and recognizable sequence of narrative events—to which a poet like Homer could allude.¹¹ I intend to demonstrate how the Iliad interacts with this fabula by means of “motif transference,” adapting, reworking and distorting the original Iphigenia sequence.¹² I will use the language of “allusion” to refer to this process. By this, I do not mean to suggest that the Iliad is interacting with a “fixed” poem, a “written text” or even a specific “oral text”;¹³ my focus remains on the reworking of a sequence of mythological motifs. But I use “allusion” to acknowledge a sense of design in this process, even if it is only constructed at the level of audience reception: the opening scenes of the Iliad evoke the Iphigenia story as a parallel and foil, a carefully curated sequence for audiences to recognize.¹⁴

In what follows, I begin by outlining the core elements of the Iphigenia fabula, drawing on the evidence of the Cypria and other sources to highlight the crucial motifs of the tale (I). Using this framework as a key, I then turn to Iliad 1 and explore how the poem’s opening allusively replays and reworks the fabula of Iphigenia’s sacrifice (II). This detailed analysis will provide the groundwork for the final section, in which I ask what this sustained motif transference adds to our interpretation of the Iliad (III). As we shall see, this argument not only enriches our appreciation of the poem’s opening, but it also expands our understanding of Homeric characterization, structure and allusion.

I. the fabula of iphigenia

The sacrifice of Iphigenia was an old and well-established element of the Trojan war tradition. Although it is not mentioned directly in either Homeric poem, the story featured already in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (where she is called “Iphimede”: fr. 23a.17–26 M-W) and the cyclic Cypria (arg. 8 GEF).¹⁵ Among archaic lyricists, it was treated by Stesichorus in his Oresteia (fr. 178 Davies-Finglass) and perhaps also by Simonides.¹⁶ By exploring the details of these early accounts, as well as the evidence of later tradition, we can tentatively outline the fabula of the myth as it would have most likely been known to Homer and his archaic audiences.¹⁷ Crucially, this is not an attempt to reconstruct a single poem that allegedly preexisted the Iliad or to distill a pure, “original” version of the myth (an impossibility in the context of flexible and multiform oral traditions). Rather, my aim is simply to identify the core recurring elements of the Iphigenia story. It is the repeated conjunction of these motifs in the same sequence that would have produced a distinctive and recognizable Iphigenia narrative.¹⁸

Of course, such an enterprise is complicated by our lack of direct access to pre-Homeric tradition. We can only make use of post-Homeric evidence and thus face the risk that our sources betray the influence of the Homeric texts themselves, or otherwise reflect post-Homeric developments in the myth.¹⁹ This is a crucial problem that affects any attempt to situate Homeric poetry against its wider tradition. But even so, we should be wary of unduly exaggerating the primacy of Homer at an early date: the evidence of both art and literature suggests that it was only in the later sixth century that the Homeric poems began to dominate tradition.²⁰ Moreover, as Jonathan Burgess has noted, limited possibilities for the diffusion of epics at an early date (either through performance or literary circulation) mean that “relatively late poems are not necessarily influenced by relatively early poems” and that chronologically “‘late’ poems may well represent mythological traditions that precede ‘early’ poems.”²¹ With appropriate caution, we can thus employ post-Homeric evidence as our best available guide for potential pre-Homeric traditions.²² The remnants and testimonia of the Epic Cycle are particularly valuable in this regard; I follow those scholars who regard the Cyclic epics as manifestations of traditional material known to Homer and his audiences, even if they were textualized at a later date.²³ But in handling both this and other later material, we must still proceed with the utmost care and remain attuned to potential inventions or post-Homeric receptions. Ultimately, certainty remains impossible, but with sufficient circumspection—and with varying degrees of confidence—we can employ the evidence of the Cycle and other sources as a general guide for the pre-Homeric Iphigenia tradition.

Following this approach, I have identified six separate elements of the Iphigenia fabula (indicated below by the letters A–F), all of which—as we shall see—reverberate in the narrative of Iliad 1.

(A) Agamemnon offends a deity and is punished

Agamemnon’s transgression

According to Proclus’s summary of the Cypria, when the Greeks had gathered at Aulis after the aborted Teuthranian expedition, Agamemnon went hunting and killed a deer (καὶ τὸ δεύτερον ἠθροισμένου τοῦ στόλου ἐν Αὐλίδι Ἀγαμέμνων ἐπὶ θήρας βαλὼν ἔλαφον, arg. 8 GEF). This alone may be no crime (cf. Odysseus’s deer hunting on Aeaea, Od. 10.156–71), but Agamemnon went on to boast that he surpassed even Artemis (ὑπερβάλλειν ἔφησε καὶ τὴν Ἄρτεμιν, arg. 8 GEF), a hubristic remark which stirred up the goddess’s anger (μηνίσασα δὲ ἡ θεός, arg. 8 GEF). Many later accounts reflect this same combination of successful deer shooting and insolent arrogance (Soph. El. 568–69; Callim. Hymn 3.262–63; Hyg. Fab. 98), and some even report the contents of Agamemnon’s boast: “not even Artemis could have shot like that.”²⁴ From Proclus’s summary, Agamemnon’s main transgression appears to have been his boastful claim to surpass Artemis’s skill as an archer.

However, a further aspect of Agamemnon’s crime can be found in Sophocles’ Electra, which renders the deer shooting itself an act of sacrilege. Electra reports that her father came across the deer while sporting in Artemis’s sacred grove (θεᾶς | παίζων κατ᾿ ἄλσος, Soph. El. 566–67). The beast was thus sacred to the goddess and by killing it Agamemnon committed an im-piety.²⁵ This detail is recalled in a number of later versions.26 It may simply be a post-Homeric accretion to the myth, but it could also date back far earlier: Electra’s account certainly seems to signal a debt to an older source with the “footnoting” ὡς ἐγὼ κλύω (“so I hear,” El. 566).²⁷ If so, it would have secured an underlying logic for the myth from an early date, offering a “close nexus of crime and punishment: ‘pro cerva-virgo’ which is maintained in the Cypria’s account of Iphigenia’s rescue: ‘pro virgine-cerva’” (see § I (E) below).²⁸

In any case, the essence of Agamemnon’s transgression is consistent across all sources: he offended Artemis through some combination of boastful arrogance and a sacrilegious disregard of the divine.²⁹

Agamemnon’s punishment

As a result of Agamemnon’s impiety, Artemis was angry and—so the Proclan summary continues—stopped the Greeks from sailing by sending a storm (μηνίσασα δὲ ἡ θεὸς ἐπέσχεν αὐτοὺς τοῦ πλοῦ χειμῶνας ἐπιπέμπουσα, arg. 8 GEF), which not only delayed the expedition, but also risked its abandonment, a total mission failure.³⁰ This detail of the storm is attested elsewhere as early as Hesiod’s Works and Days, where the Greeks are said to have gathered a large army together at Aulis, waiting for a χειμών to pass (Αὐλίδος, ᾗ ποτ᾽ Ἀχαιοὶ | μείναντες χειμῶνα πολὺν σὺν λαὸν ἄγειραν, Op. 651–52),³¹ and it might also have featured in the Hesiodic Catalogue, where a dramatic storm description follows the catalogue of Helen’s suitors and Zeus’s plan to annihilate the demigods (fr. 204.124–29 M-W).³² In addition, it recurs in many other sources, including Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (188, 198–99, 1417–18) and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (88, 352, 1323–24). In the former, Aeschylus may even play with his audience’s preexisting knowledge of the episode: Calchas initially hopes that Artemis will not cause any adverse winds (147–49), a fruitless hope that resonates ironically against the backdrop of tradition.³³

Few extant texts dwell on the effects of the Greek army’s detainment, but the fuller description in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon gives a sense of the storm’s serious impact (Ag. 188–98):

εὖτ᾿ ἀπλοίᾳ κεναγγεῖ βαρύ-  νοντ᾿ Ἀχαιικὸς λεώς,Χαλκίδος πέραν ἔχων παλιρρόχ-  θοις ἐν Αὐλίδος τόποις·πνοαὶ δ᾿ ἀπὸ Στρυμόνος μολοῦσαικακόσχολοι, νήστιδες, δύσορμοι, βροτῶν ἄλαι,  ναῶν <τε> καὶ πεισμάτων ἀφειδεῖς,παλιμμήκη χρόνον τιθεῖσαιτρίβῳ κατέξαινον ἄνθος Ἀργεί-  ων·

... when the Achaean army was oppressed by bad sailing weather which emptied their stomachs, as they occupied the land opposite Chalcis, in the region of Aulis with its roaring ebb and flow; and winds came from the Strymon, bringing unwelcome leisure, starvation and bad anchorage, making men wander, and not sparing their ships or cables, but making time seem twice as long—those winds wore down and shredded the flower of the Argives.³⁴

The chorus of Argive elders paint a vivid image of the Greeks’ mental and physical anguish: the winds cause famine (κεναγγεῖ, 188; νήστιδες, 193), physical decay to the boats (195) and psychological hardship as the days drag slowly by (παλιμμήκη χρόνον, 196).³⁵ The final image of the “flower of the Argives” being shredded and worn down (τρίβῳ κατέξαινον, 197) is particularly evocative of the distress inflicted by Artemis, which in at least one later version explicitly includes a plague (Dictys 1.19).

We cannot be sure that such a description of the stranded Greeks’ suffering featured in the Cypria or other early traditions of the myth, but it would certainly not have been out of place in archaic epic. In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men suffer similarly when they are trapped by adverse winds on the Island of the Sun (12.325–34),³⁶ as do Menelaus and his comrades on Pharos (4.351–69); in both cases, “hunger wore at their stomachs” (ἔτειρε δὲ γαστέρα λιμός, 4.369 = 12.332). Of course, the Odyssey is particularly preoccupied with food, hunger and feasting, but the provision of the Greek army is a recurring concern throughout the Trojan war tradition, even in the Iliad.³⁷ And the storm description of the Catalogue—whether or not it refers directly to Aulis—similarly stresses the physical deterioration that the storm brings: it “wore down mortal strength and the fruit was diminished” (τ̣ρ̣ύ̣χ̣ε̣σ̣κεν δὲ μένος βρότεον, μινύθεσκε δὲ καρπός, fr. 204.128 M-W). In addition, famine appears to have been a major theme in a later episode of the Cypria, when the starving Greeks look to the help of Anius’s daughters (fr. 26 GEF). This later famine in Troy and the earlier one at Aulis would have formed a natural narrative doublet, a common feature of Cyclic and Homeric mythmaking.³⁸ It is thus likely that Artemis’s punishment not only frustrated the progress of the Greeks’ mission, but also inflicted physical hardship upon them.

(B) Calchas discloses divine displeasure and proposes a solution: Agamemnon must give up a prized woman from his possession

When the Greeks could not resolve their predicament, they turned to the prophet Calchas for help. According to Proclus’s Cypria summary, he “told them about the wrath of the goddess and instructed them to sacrifice Iphigenia to Artemis” (Κάλχαντος δὲ εἰπόντος τὴν τῆς θεοῦ μῆνιν καὶ Ἰφιγένειαν κελεύσαντος θύειν τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι, arg. 8 GEF). This detail remained a permanent fixture of the Iphigenia story: it appears in many other literary sources,³⁹ and is also reflected in the prominent position which the seer plays in the iconographic tradition.⁴⁰

Early sources are far less forthcoming about how Agamemnon reacted to Calchas’s prophecy. This is unsurprising: it is well known that Proclus’s summaries of the Epic Cycle downplay the significance of character speech, making it very difficult to determine what role it played in any specific episode.⁴¹ Even so, based on Agamemnon’s characterization in the larger epic tradition and the inevitable emotions of such a fraught situation, it is plausible that he would have reacted with an impulsive outburst of anger.⁴² Later accounts provide some support for this hypothesis. Hyginus explicitly says that Agamemnon “began to refuse” as soon as he had heard the proposed solution (re audita Agamemnon recusare coepit, Fab. 98; cf. Dictys 1.19). Many other sources focus on his mental strain in the situation: the sons of Atreus could not hold back their tears (δάκρυ μὴ κατασχεῖν, Aesch. Ag. 204), while Agamemnon only acted “against his will, after much resistance” (βιασθεὶς πολλά τ᾿ ἀντιβὰς μόλις, Soph. El. 575) and “through much necessity” (διὰ τὴν πολλὴν ἀνάγκην, Σ A Il. 1.108–9b). Only Aeschylus’s Agamemnon offers an alternative picture: the chorus claim that Agamemnon “blamed no prophet” (μάντιν οὔτινα ψέγων, Ag. 186). But this unique variant is most likely a pointed departure from earlier tradition, designed to downplay Agamemnon’s individual imprudence and accentuate his role as a victim within the larger Oresteia narrative.43 In any case, the emphatic assertion that Agamemnon “blamed no prophet” seems to presuppose preexisting traditions in which he did precisely that.⁴⁴ Just as Aeschylus’s Calchas hopes against tradition for no adverse winds (Ag. 147–49), so too here I believe it is better to take the chorus’s statement as an attempt to rewrite the mainstream tradition. Even in this sole exception, we find a nod to Agamemnon’s traditionally angry response.

(C) Achilles loses a potential bride

Once Agamemnon agrees to the proposed sacrifice, the Greeks send for Iphigenia and justify the summons under the pretext that she is going to marry Achilles. This detail features already in the Cypria (arg. 8 GEF) and likely also appeared in Stesichorus’s Oresteia (fr. 181a.25–27 Davies-Finglass).⁴⁵ Thereafter, it recurs frequently in art,⁴⁶ Attic tragedy⁴⁷ and later sources.⁴⁸ Its fullest exposition comes in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (98–105, 358–65, etc.), where we also witness Achilles’ response to Agamemnon’s ploy: he criticizes the king’s conduct (μέμφομαι, 899) and complains that he has committed hubris against him (ὕβριν ἐς ἡμᾶς ὕβρισ’ Ἀγαμέμνων ἄναξ, 961).⁴⁹ Initially, he also refuses to accept the king’s decision and plans to prevent the sacrifice, even threatening to kill Agamemnon and Menelaus with his sword (970–72; cf. 932–69, 1360–61, 1365, 1426–27). Agamemnon’s actions not only deprive Achilles of a potential bride, but also frustrate and anger him. In Lycophron’s Alexandra, Achilles reacts to the loss of his wife (δάμαρτα, 190) by lamenting alone on the seashore, a display of extreme grief (192–95). Given Achilles’ propensity for anger and excessive emotion elsewhere in archaic epic, it is plausible that such reactions would have already featured in the traditional fabula of the story from an early date.

(D) Odysseus collects and brings this woman to her father

Proclus’s terse summary of the Cypria does not specify who collected Iphigenia and brought her to Aulis: the Greeks simply send for her (μεταπεμψάμενοι, arg. 8 GEF). But in later tradition, this role is almost always assigned to Odysseus. In the prologue of Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, Iphigenia herself reports that she was taken from her mother “through the wiles of Odysseus” (μ’ Ὀδυσσέως τέχναις | μητρὸς παρείλοντ’, IT 24–25), and we know that this version was dramatized in Sophocles’ Iphigenia, which included a conversation between Odysseus and Clytemnestra (fr. 305 TrGF). The same version is also found in the iconographic tradition and later literary sources, with Odysseus collecting Iphigenia alone or in partnership with another.⁵⁰

Despite the near uniformity of tradition, however, two Euripidean plays offer slight variations, but as with Aeschylus’s “blamed no prophet,” these seem to be pointed divergences for rhetorical effect. In the Electra, Clytemnestra claims that her husband “went off, leading Iphigenia from home to the harbor at Aulis” (ᾤχετ᾿ ἐκ δόμων ἄγων | πρυμνοῦχον Αὖλιν, 1021–22). In defending her murder of Agamemnon (1011–50), it is rhetorically advantageous for her to focus solely on Agamemnon’s culpability, without a diluting reference to the involvement of others.⁵¹ In Iphigenia at Aulis, meanwhile, Clytemnestra herself escorts Iphigenia to the Greek camp (414–19, 454–59, etc.), but this is essential for the drama’s larger plot: the emotional confrontation of husband and wife on stage would not be possible were Odysseus to play the middleman.⁵² These two outliers are thus fully accounted for by their context; in each case, Euripides has good reason to downplay Odysseus’s usual role. Moreover, Euripides seems to signpost his innovation in Iphigenia at Aulis: Clytemnestra claims that it is “no wonder” (οὐ θαῦμα) that Achilles does not recognize her because they have not met “before” (πάρος, 823–24), a claim that metapoetically acknowledges the novelty of Clytemnestra’s presence in Aulis.⁵³ The drama also allusively nods to Odysseus’s expected participation: the hero is one of the few Greeks who has knowledge of Agamemnon’s deception (107, 524), and Achilles still suspects that Odysseus will lead the group to bring Iphigenia to the altar (1362). Even this Euripidean exception thus seems to presuppose and allude to Odysseus’s involvement.

The major difficulty here, however, is the fact that Odysseus’s role is first explicitly attested only in fifth-century Attic tragedy, a genre which frequently depicted the hero as a villainous trickster and demagogue.⁵⁴ One might thus wonder whether his involvement in the sacrifice was a tragic invention, designed to further blacken his character. We do not have the evidence to disprove this possibility outright, but even so, Odysseus’s central role in collecting Iphigenia fits very plausibly into wider patterns of the epic Trojan war tradition. From the evidence of the Iliad and Epic Cycle, it is clear that delegation is Agamemnon’s usual modus operandi: within the Iliad, he sends the heralds Talthybius and Eurybates to take Briseis from Achilles (Il. 1.318–48), delegates the initial prewar recruitment of Achilles to Nestor and Odysseus (Il. 9.252–59, 11.765–90; cf. Cypr. fr. 19 GEF) and has others speak on his behalf in the embassy to Achilles (Il. 9, cf. esp. 9.372–73).⁵⁵ The same process is also visible in the Cyclic tradition of the army’s initial mustering: according to Proclus (Cypr. arg. 4–5 GEF), Menelaus, Nestor and Palamedes went to recruit Odysseus in the Cypria,⁵⁶ while Apollodorus later reports that Agamemnon sent a herald to recruit each king (Epit. 3.6).⁵⁷ Only in the Underworld scene of Odyssey 24 do we hear of Agamemnon’s personal presence on such a mission (when recruiting Odysseus: 24.115–19), but this seems to be a pointed exception, designed to silence and efface Palamedes’ traditional involvement in the episode.⁵⁸ Given the well-established pattern of Agamemnon’s delegation, it is thus unlikely that the king was thought to collect his daughter himself in the archaic tradition.

Odysseus, by contrast, is frequently involved in such missions. In the embassy of Iliad 9, he emerges as the clear leader of the group: although Nestor had asked Phoenix to take the lead (ἡγησάσθω, 9.168), it is Odysseus who “leads the way” to and from Achilles’ hut (ἡγεῖτο, 9.192; ἦρχε, 9.657), who speaks first on arrival (intercepting Ajax’s nod to Phoenix: 9.223–24) and who is called upon to report the outcome of the embassy by Agamemnon (9.673). In addition, he is involved in many other missions that require cunning or deception, such as the Doloneia (Il. 10), his infiltration of Troy in disguise (Od. 4.240–58; Il. Parv. arg. 4b–d GEF) and the theft of the Palladium (Il. Parv. arg. 4e GEF). Odysseus was thus the natural agent to fulfill Agamemnon’s will, especially given the trickery involved in the Iphigenia story.⁵⁹

(E) Sacrifice is performed at the altar

Once she has been collected, Iphigenia is delivered to her father in Aulis and placed on the altar, the consistent site of her sacrifice throughout tradition in both literature and art.⁶⁰

Proclus again does not specify who performs the sacrifice: the Greeks in general simply “try” to sacrifice her (ἐπιχειροῦσιν, arg. 8 GEF). Such imprecision is matched by our other earliest sources (Hes. fr. 23a.17 M-W; Pind. Pyth. 11.22–23), but in later tradition, it is almost always Agamemnon himself who performs the sacrifice, with Calchas assisting in the preliminary rituals.⁶¹

In many tellings of the story, however, Iphigenia is not actually sacrificed: she is replaced (usually by a deer) and instead whisked away to become immortalized or appointed as a priestess in Tauris. This version is already found in the Cypria (deer substitution and conveyance to Tauris: arg. 8 GEF), the Hesiodic Catalogue (replacement by an eidōlon and immortalization as “Artemis Einodia”: fr. 23a.17–26 M-W) and Stesichorus’s Oresteia (transformation into Hecate: fr. 178 Davies-Finglass).⁶² The antiquity of the motif is further suggested by underlying parallels with cultic rituals at Brauron and Mounychia, as well as the binding of Isaac in Semitic tradition; such ritual substitution was not alien to ancient thought.⁶³ I thus consider it likely that Iphigenia’s substitution was an integral part of the myth from the start. By contrast, in tragedy and other later sources, the lack of substitution seems to be a pointed departure to accentuate the horror of Agamemnon’s actions, especially in the context of justifying his later murder by Clytemnestra.⁶⁴ Ultimately, however, whether she is killed or whisked away, the attempted sacrifice always has a grim outcome for Agamemnon and his family: the loss of Iphigenia.

(F) After the sacrifice, the Greeks receive a favorable wind from the offended deity and sail to Troy

After the sacrifice is complete, Proclus’s summary of the Cypria continues by claiming that the Greeks “then sail to Tenedos,” embarking on their journey to Troy (ἔπειτα καταπλέουσιν εἰς Τένεδον, arg. 9 GEF). The sacrifice succeeded in appeasing Artemis, who quelled her angry storm winds.

But Artemis did not just calm the storm; she also seems to have assisted the Greeks’ onward journey to Troy. In some later sources, we explicitly hear that she provided a fair breeze. In Iphigenia at Aulis, for example, Calchas specifies that Artemis has gladly received the sacrifice and “grants us a fair voyage to attack Troy” (καὶ πλοῦν οὔριον | δίδωσιν ἡμῖν Ἰλίου τ᾿ ἐπιδρομάς, 1596–97), fulfilling Achilles’ earlier prayer for safe sailing (1575–76).⁶⁵ This detail is not explicitly attested in any extant archaic source, but it fits well with Artemis’s larger association with seafaring and seems to be reflected in one of the opening hymns of the Theognidea (11–14).⁶⁶ In these verses, the speaker calls on Artemis for protection from death (presumably on a sailing voyage: κακὰς δ᾿ ἀπὸ κῆρας ἄλαλκε, 13)⁶⁷ and recalls how Agamemnon dedicated a temple to her “when he was about to sail on his swift ships to Troy” (ὅτ᾿ ἐς Τροίην ἔπλεε νηυσὶ θοῇς, 12). Given the explicit Trojan war context, Aulis is the most likely setting for this dedication,⁶⁸ and the implication is that Artemis should protect the speaker’s voyage just as she did Agamemnon’s.

After all the hardship and suffering that she has caused, the appeased god thus assists the Greeks in their voyage to the Trojan shore. Artemis transitions from obstructing the Greek cause to actively supporting it.⁶⁹

Ii. replaying iphigenia: the return of chryseis

Now that we have outlined the key elements of the Iphigenia fabula (summarized in Table 1), it is time to turn to the Iliad and examine the reflections of this fabula in book 1. As we shall see, all six elements are reflected in the same order in the opening phases of the poem.

Table 1.

core elements of the iphigenia fabula

Before tracing this parallel sequence, however, it is worth facing head-on a possible challenge to this thesis: the possibility that the Iphigenia story was not known to the Homeric tradition.⁷⁰ This is an issue that has been discussed before, but it is worth revisiting briefly given how crucial it is for my larger argument. It is true that the Iliad lacks any direct mention of Iphigenia, and to at least some scholars her sacrifice seems incompatible with Agamemnon’s list of three marriageable daughters in book 9: Chrysothemis, Laodice and Iphianassa (Il. 9.145, 287). The final name, Iphianassa, has been considered an alternative or substitute for Iphigenia, a possibility that receives support from the apparent flexibility of the sacrificed daughter’s name elsewhere: she is called Iphimede in the Hesiodic Catalogue (Hes. fr. 23a.17 M-W), Iphigone in Euripides’ Electra (El. 1023), and Iphianassa in Lucretius (1.85).⁷¹ On this interpretation, if “Iphianassa” is still alive and available in the tenth year of the war, the sacrifice (or attempted sacrifice) cannot have taken place.

However, this logic is complicated by the evidence of the Cypria, which preserves a tradition in which Agamemnon had four daughters, the three of the Iliad plus Iphigenia (fr. 20 GEF = Σ Soph. El. 157). Some scholars suppose that this is simply a post-Homeric attempt to reconcile the Iliad with the sacrifice tradition,⁷² but this is far from certain. Undoubtedly, the Cypria’s additional daughter “looks like an attempt to synthesize variants,”⁷³ but there is no reason that such synthesis could not have occurred in tradition prior to the Iliad.⁷⁴ After all, similar-sounding names of royal siblings are paralleled elsewhere in early Greek epic by three of Metaneira’s daughters in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Callidice, Clisidice and Callithoe, 109–10); such duplications were evidently not offensive to an ancient ear.⁷⁵ Moreover, the independent existence of both Iphigenia and Iphianassa is in no way inconsistent with—and could even be presupposed by—Agamemnon’s claim in book 9. Now that Iphigenia is dead (or whisked away to Tauris), it makes sense that Agamemnon only names his three surviving (or available) daughters as potential wives for Achilles (Il. 9.144–48).⁷⁶ Indeed, if anything, the shadow of Iphigenia’s sacrifice only enriches our appreciation of this tense moment: if we recall that Agamemnon had previously “offered” Achilles another of his daughters at Aulis, the unfulfilled and unhappy nature of that “marriage” fore-shadows how poorly this offer will go down in the present (cf. Il. 9.388–400).

Most significantly, however, the sacrifice seems to be presupposed earlier in the Iliad by Agamemnon’s scathing rebuke of the seer Calchas (Il. 1.105–8):

Κάλχαντα πρώτιστα κάκ᾿ ὀσσόμενος προσέειπε·“μάντι κακῶν, οὐ πώ ποτέ μοι τὸ κρήγυον εἶπας·αἰεί τοι τὰ κάκ᾿ ἐστὶ φίλα φρεσὶ μαντεύεσθαι,ἐσθλὸν δ᾿ οὔτε τί πω εἶπας ἔπος οὔτ᾿ ἐτέλεσσας.”

First of all he spoke to Calchas with a menacing glare: “Prophet of evil, never yet have you told me anything good. It is always dear to your heart to prophesy evil, and never yet have you said a good word or brought it to fulfillment.”

This outburst fits with Agamemnon’s broader characterization in Iliad 1; indeed, he later criticizes Achilles in similar terms (1.177). But his emphasis on Calchas’s repeated behavior presupposes a broader history of bad blood between the pair (note especially the string of temporal adverbs: οὐ πώ ποτε, “never yet,” 106; αἰεί, “always,” 107; οὔτε τί πω, “never yet,” 108). Some ancient scholars understood a reference here to Calchas’s prophecy that Troy would only be sacked after ten years, which is certainly a possibility.⁷⁷ But this alone does not seem to account for the emotional hyperbole of Agamemnon’s rebuke. Moreover, the generality of Agamemnon’s temporal adverbs suggests that he has more than one moment in mind here. It is thus very likely that this reproach also points to Iphigenia’s sacrifice, the other major past occasion on which Calchas gave Agamemnon some terrible news.⁷⁸

We have already noted that the Iphigenia story is found in many other archaic texts, including the Cypria, the Hesiodic Catalogue and Stesichorus’s Oresteia, which strongly implies that it was already firmly embedded in archaic mythological lore. But we can further add that the tale is also integral to the larger plot and narrative of the Trojan war, which makes it even more unlikely to be a late post-Homeric accretion. Not only does it play a key structural role— initiating the war with a sacrificed daughter, mirroring the sacrifice of Polyxena at its close⁷⁹—but it also serves as a major motivation for Clytemnestra’s later murder of her husband (cf. Pyth. 11.22–23). The Odyssey is already familiar with Clytemnestra’s adultery, suggesting that the whole family drama was well established at an early date.⁸⁰ And indeed, Agamemnon immediately follows his rebuke of Calchas in Iliad 1 with an unflattering assessment of his wife (1.112–15), hinting at the marital discord that arose from his daughter’s sacrifice. The same unease may also be reflected in Chryses’ pointed failure to appeal to Agamemnon’s familial piety in his opening supplication (a common ploy in other supplication scenes: Il. 15.659–66, 22.338–43, 24.485–87, 503–4; Od. 11.66–68). With Iphigenia’s sacrifice in the background, Agamemnon’s paternal love is not an effective thing to appeal to.⁸¹ Finally, Homer’s direct avoidance of the myth fits with the Iliad’s more general suppression of immortalization and killing within the family. In keeping with the poem’s larger aesthetic priorities, the Iphigenia narrative is transplanted to the domain of indirect and allusive reference.⁸²

Like many scholars, therefore, I believe that the Iphigenia story belonged to the wider mass of traditions and tales against which the Iliad situated itself. But rather than seeing the Iliad’s allusion to this story restricted primarily to Agamemnon’s brief rebuke of Calchas, I contend that the fabula of the sacrifice underlies the whole opening of the poem. Agamemnon’s words are not an isolated allusion, but rather a signpost to the wider motif transference at work in book 1. I shall now trace this Iliadic reframing of the Iphigenia fabula, following the same lettered sequence as above. As we shall see, the Iliad mirrors the overarching Iphigenia sequence, but also reworks and distorts it at specific points—divergences that we shall consider further in section III.

(A) Agamemnon offends a deity and is punished

The Iliad begins with Agamemnon angering Apollo by dishonoring his priest Chryses, refusing to return his captive daughter Chryseis in exchange for an abundant ransom (1.8–42). As punishment, the god inflicts a plague on the Achaeans, disrupting the war effort and causing much suffering (1.43–52).

This whole episode closely parallels Agamemnon’s offense against Artemis. Like at Aulis, the king hubristically offends a god of archery by both boasting and disrespecting what is sacred to him or her (Artemis’s deer / Apollo’s priest: cf. ἠτίμασεν ἀρητῆρα, 1.11).⁸³ He brusquely dismisses Chryses (κακῶς ἀφίει, 1.25), threatening him with violence (1.28, 32) and blasphemously disregarding the emblems of his office (the scepter and fillet, 1.28).⁸⁴ In addition, he gloatingly describes how Chryseis will share his bed in Argos (1.29–31), a malicious boast that Aristarchus even athetized as “unseemly” in the mouth of a king (ἀπρεπές, Σ A Il. 1.29–31). Agamemnon impiously dismisses Apollo’s divine authority, just as he had Artemis’s at Aulis. The king, it seems, has not learned from his previous transgression. Indeed, Achilles’ claim that Agamemnon does not know how to look to the past or the future (Il. 1.343) could be taken as an implicit gesture to his failure to learn from past mistakes.⁸⁵

The consequences of Agamemnon’s conduct are also parallel. Apollo grows angry, just like his sister (χολωθείς 1.9; χωόμενος 1.44; χωομένοιο 1.46; ἐχώσατο 1.64; μῆνιν 1.75; cf. μηνίσασα, Cypr. arg. 8 GEF). And he enacts an analogous punishment: the plague (νοῦσον ... κακήν, 1.10; λοιμός, 1.61; λοιγόν, 1.67, 97, 456) is a similarly violent upheaval of the natural world to Artemis’s storm winds, causing anguish (ἄλγεα, 1.96, 110) and delay to the Greeks’ project.⁸⁶ Indeed, as Achilles goes on to say, the Greeks are “driven back” by this plague (παλιμπλαγχθέντας) and risk having to abort the whole expedition and “return home” (ἀπονοστήσειν), the same threat of mission failure that faced them at Aulis (Il. 1.59–61).⁸⁷ Moreover, there is an underlying symmetry between this punishment and Agamemnon’s previous crime: Apollo’s punitive archery (1.48–52) echoes and inverts Agamemnon’s foolhardy deer hunting.

Of course, it could be argued that these two episodes are simply two manifestations of a common story pattern found in Homer onwards: that of an arrogant mortal offending a deity and suffering as a result.⁸⁸ Indeed, Apollo and Artemis appear to have been particularly suitable for this kind of revenge pattern.⁸⁹ But in this instance, the similarities extend beyond the typological norm, especially since the same mortal is at fault in each case. Moreover, the two offended deities form a natural brother-ister pair, reinforcing the correspondence between the two incidents—in both cases, Agamemnon offends a child of Leto. Homer’s initial emphasis on Apollo’s descent from Leto (1.9, 1.36) even foregrounds this familial connection at the outset.⁹⁰ In addition to the underlying symmetry between Agamemnon’s hunting and Apollo’s archery, these parallels thus establish the Iphigenia fabula as an underlying paradigm and foil for the Iliad’s opening, inaugurating—as we shall now see—a whole series of narrative interconnections.

(B) Calchas discloses divine displeasure and proposes a solution: Agamemnon must give up a prized woman from his possession

After nine days of Greek suffering, the Iliad continues with an assembly initiated by Achilles, who proposes that they ask a prophet about the cause of Apollo’s anger (1.53–67). In response, the seer Calchas—after seeking reassurance and protection from Achilles—reveals that Apollo is angry with Agamemnon for his mistreatment of Chryses and will not relent until Chryseis is returned with a full hecatomb (1.68–100). Agamemnon reacts furiously, rebuking Calchas, but ultimately agrees to follow his instructions (1.101–17).

Here too, events map closely onto those at Aulis. In both cases, the divinely induced impasse is explained by the seer Calchas, and the solution which he proposes involves Agamemnon giving up a prized woman from his possession—his war-slave Chryseis and his daughter Iphigenia. This parallel is particularly striking; on no other occasion in myth is Agamemnon required to give anything up to appease a god, let alone a prized woman. Moreover, Chryseis and Iphigenia are similar figures, each primarily defined and identified through her relationship to her father.⁹¹ In the Iliad, however, Homer has split Calchas’s solution at Aulis into two: the sacrifice of Iphigenia here becomes Agamemnon’s loss of Chryseis and a separate sacrificial hecatomb— though Achilles’ later instruction that Agamemnon “give this girl up to the god” (and not “her father”: σὺ μὲν νῦν τήνδε θεῷ προές, 1.127) could equally hint that Chryseis will be dedicated and entrusted to Apollo, just as Iphigenia was to Artemis.

Calchas’s prominence in this episode is also significant. This is his only direct appearance in the Iliadic narrative, and he is only otherwise mentioned twice elsewhere: in Iliad 2 when Odysseus recalls his interpretation of the snake omen at Aulis (2.299–332) and again in Iliad 13 when Poseidon adopts his form as a mortal disguise (13.43–45).⁹² From these mentions and Proclus’s summaries, it is clear that Calchas is primarily associated in tradition with events at Aulis.⁹³ His very presence here at the outset of the poem would encourage an audience to recall his major previous contribution.

In addition, the Iliad assembly scene may even nod to Agamemnon’s original offense at Aulis when Achilles suggests possible reasons for Apollo’s anger: he wonders whether Apollo “find faults with a εὐχωλή or a hecatomb” (εἴτ’ ἄρ’ ὅ γ’ εὐχωλῆς ἐπιμέμφεται εἴθ’ ἑκατόμβης, 1.65). This line is most naturally understood to refer to a prayer or sacrifice which the Greeks have either omitted or wrongly performed.⁹⁴ But εὐχωλή, like its associated verb εὔχομαι, is a polyvalent noun which can refer to a “boast” as much as a “prayer.” In fact, the vast majority of the noun’s Iliadic instantiations have this precise sense of a “boast” or “vaunt.”⁹⁵ Its presence here alongside ἑκατόμβη inevitably foregrounds the meaning of “prayer,” but Achilles’ words may still hint at the possibility that Agamemnon’s crime results, as before, from an arrogant boast. Ultimately, Calchas goes on to dismiss Achilles’ suggestion (1.93), but the raised possibility invites a further connection with the earlier episode.⁹⁶

Finally, we may also suspect that Agamemnon’s outburst of fury against Calchas’s revelation resembles his response at Aulis. We have already seen how the king’s opening words invite an audience to recall Calchas’s previous prophecy, looking back to an earlier occasion on which the seer had offered unwelcome advice (1.106–8), but the virulent character of these words also likely replays the king’s earlier reaction.⁹⁷ Indeed, Calchas’s expectation that he will anger a mighty king and cause lasting resentment (1.78–83) is likely based on his previous experience at Aulis.

(C) Achilles loses a potential bride

After Agamemnon has agreed to return Chryseis, he asks for a replacement γέρας (“war-prize”) and threatens to confiscate that of another leader if he does not have his way (1.118–47). When Achilles objects, Agamemnon narrows his threat: he will take Achilles’ own γέρας, Briseis (1.148–87). The escalating quarrel is eventually quelled—or at least deferred—through the interventions of Athena and Nestor, and Achilles reluctantly agrees to give up Briseis (1.188–307). After the assembly disperses, preparations begin to appease Apollo (1.308–17); Agamemnon sends his heralds to collect Briseis from Achilles (1.318–48); and Achilles summons his mother, complains about what has happened and asks her to supplicate Zeus on his behalf (1.349–430).

This section of Iliad 1 exhibits the least direct mapping onto the Aulis episode, as it begins to turn our attention to the larger consequences of Agamemnon’s conduct, especially Achilles’ withdrawal, an event which determines the trajectory of the whole poem. Yet even so, here too the Iphigenia episode resonates meaningfully in the background, now centered on the figure of Briseis: Achilles loses a potential bride through Agamemnon’s actions, just like at Aulis.⁹⁸ In Iliad 9, the hero tells Odysseus that he loves Briseis from the depths of his heart (ἐγὼ τὴν | ἐκ θυμοῦ φίλεον, 9.342–43) and earlier in his speech he even equates her to Helen as his own ἄλοχον θυμαρέα (“darling wife,” 9.336). This is a rare formulaic phrase, found only twice elsewhere in archaic Greek epic of Penelope (Od. 23.232) and Mestra (Hes. fr. 43a.20 M-W), two women who were sought after by many suitors.⁹⁹ Achilles presents Briseis as a desirable wife on a par with these prominent personalities of the mythical tradition. Indeed, this resonant phrase is well chosen for Achilles’ immediate addressee, Odysseus: Achilles implies that Briseis is his equivalent of Penelope.¹⁰⁰

Achilles’ comments have often been dismissed as rhetorical exaggeration, simply designed to elevate Briseis to the level of Menelaus’s Helen—especially since he later wishes that Artemis had killed Briseis on the very day that he chose her as his prize (19.59–60), hardly the sentiments of a doting lover.¹⁰¹ But even this wish resonates pointedly with the Aulis episode (envisioning Briseis as a victim of Artemis just like Iphigenia), and in context it too has its own rhetorical purpose: heightening the pain and emotion that Achilles feels at the loss of Patroclus. Other moments in the poem, by contrast, do in fact hint at the sincerity of Achilles’ feelings for Briseis: after losing her in book 1, the hero withdraws from his companions in tears and sits on the shore of the sea (1.348–50), a pose that the scholia recognize as that of a distraught lover.¹⁰² Later in the poem Briseis herself recalls how Patroclus had promised to make her Achilles’ “wedded wife” (κουριδίην ἄλοχον) back in Phthia (19.297–99); the poem encourages us to see her as a potential future bride for Achilles, just as Iphigenia was at Aulis.¹⁰³ Achilles’ loss of Briseis is thus analogous to his unfulfilled “marriage” to Iphigenia. In both cases, Agamemnon and the army take away what they had previously offered (cf. μ’ ἀφέλεσθέ γε δόντες, 1.299).

Achilles’ reaction to Agamemnon’s conduct also parallels that at Aulis. He responds angrily (ὑπόδρα ἰδών, 1.148),¹⁰⁴ complaining of Agamemnon’s hubristic behavior (ὕβριν, 1.203; ὑπεροπλίῃσι, 1.205; λωβήσαιο, 1.232; cf. ὕβριν ... ὕβρισ’, IA 961). He also verges once more on violence: without Athena’s intervention, he would have drawn his sword against the king (1.188–94, 205) and he still ends the conversation by threatening to spill Agamemnon’s blood around his spear (1.302–3; cf. IA 970–72). Like at Aulis, Agamemnon has “completely deceived and wronged” him (ἐκ γὰρ δή μ’ ἀπάτησε καὶ ἤλιτεν, 9.375; cf. 9.371, 375–76), and he responds with similar venom. Indeed, Agamemnon may even subtly acknowledge this prior clash: he claims that “strife is always dear” to Achilles, alongside wars and battles (αἰεὶ γάρ τοι ἔρις τε φίλη πόλεμοί τε μάχαι τε, 1.177), a remark that—like his similarly phrased complaint about Calchas (1.107)—could nod to this specific past conflict. If Achilles had indeed been caught up in the crossfire of Agamemnon’s scheming at Aulis, that prior history of fraught relations adds extra depth to their latest quarrel.

(D) Odysseus collects and brings this woman to her father by the altar

While Achilles complains to his mother, Chryseis is on her way back to her father. After the assembly, we have already heard that the ship had set off with Odysseus as commander (1.308–12), and now it reaches Chryse; after mooring the ship, the Greeks bring out the hecatomb for Apollo, and Odysseus leads Chryseis to the altar and places her in the arms of her father, who joyfully receives her (1.430–47).

These events closely correspond to the Aulis episode. There too, as we have seen, Odysseus appears to have been traditionally responsible for bringing Iphigenia to her father, just as he brings Chryseis to Chryses here.¹⁰⁵ The repeated emphasis on Odysseus’s central role at this moment (1.311, 430, 440) invites an audience to recall the last time he played a similar role. The repetition of the hero’s epithet πολύμητις (1.311, 440) may also foreground his capacity for cunning, inviting us to recall the Aulian marriage trick.¹⁰⁶ Particularly suggestive of events at Aulis, however, are the two verses describing the transfer of Chryseis to her father (1.440–41):

τὴν μὲν ἔπειτ᾽ ἐπὶ βωμὸν ἄγων πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεὺςπατρὶ φίλῳ ἐν χερσὶ τίθει, καί μιν προσέειπεν·

Then Odysseus of many wiles led her to the altar, placed her in her dear father’s arms, and spoke to him.

Taken out of context, these verses could just as well refer to events at Aulis as those at Chryse. The altar is precisely where Iphigenia is delivered to Agamemnon (e.g., βωμῶ[ι], Hes. fr. 23a.18 M-W), and the vagueness of πατρί and τήν could evoke Agamemnon and Iphigenia as much as Chryses and Chryseis. We might even wonder whether such language was used elsewhere in the context of the Iphigenia fabula, redeployed here in a new but comparable context.¹⁰⁷ Such a suggestion can only be speculation on available evidence, but it nevertheless highlights how similar these two mythical scenarios are.

If the Agamemnon and Iphigenia episode does lie behind this scene as I suggest, however, this moment really points up the difference between these events and those at Aulis. The father here “joyfully” receives his “dear” daughter in a moment of happy reunion (ὁ δὲ δέξατο χαίρων | παῖδα φίλην, 1.446–47, cf. φίλῳ, 1.441),¹⁰⁸ a stark contrast to events at Aulis, where Agamemnon’s family is ultimately torn apart rather than reunited. Indeed, later descriptions of events at Aulis emphasize the misery of this moment: in Iphigenia at Aulis, for example, Agamemnon cries at his daughter’s arrival (650, 683–84) and later groans aloud when he sees her led to the altar (ἀνεστέναξε, 1549), a foil to Chryses’ joy here.¹⁰⁹ We shall consider the larger significance of these differences in the next section, but here we can note how the tragic frisson of the Iphigenia episode is evoked but negated.

(E) Sacrifice is performed at the altar

As soon as Chryses has received his daughter, sacrifice is performed: the hecatomb is set up and Chryses prays to Apollo (1.447–57); the slaughter and preparation of the sacrificial meat is described in intimate detail (1.458–66); and the ritual concludes with feasting and singing (1.467–74).

Here too, these events follow the general pattern of the Aulis fabula. The immediate transition from Chryseis’s return to the sacrifice mirrors the same sequence at Aulis, where Iphigenia’s arrival immediately precipitates her sacrifice. Indeed, the enjambement in line 447 positions the “dear daughter” (παῖδα φίλην) and the “hecatomb” (ἱερὴν ἑκατόμβην) in close proximity to one another, reinforcing the speed (ὦκα) with which the sacrifice is begun.

Chryses’ prominent role in the sacrifice matches that of the paternal Agamemnon and priestly Calchas at Aulis, while his prayer to Apollo explicitly asks the god to “ward off loathsome destruction from the Danaans” (Δαναοῖσιν ἀεικέα λοιγὸν ἄμυνον, 1.456), a very similar request to that which would have been made to Artemis at Aulis. Here too, the sacrifice performs the same function; indeed, the whole ritual is designed to “appease” the god (cf. ἱλάσκοντο, 1.472).

Of course, the ensuing sacrifice diverges significantly from that at Aulis: Chryseis is not sacrificed to the god (or supernaturally saved). Yet there may still be some underlying resonances. It is notable that this is the longest description of sacrifice in the whole of the Iliad, with a detailed description of the ritual procedure (1.458–61):¹¹⁰

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ᾿ εὔξαντο καὶ οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο,αὐέρυσαν μὲν πρῶτα καὶ ἔσφαξαν καὶ ἔδειραν,μηρούς τ᾿ ἐξέταμον κατά τε κνίσῃ ἐκάλυψανδίπτυχα ποιήσαντες, ἐπ᾿ αὐτῶν δ᾿ ὠμοθέτησαν.

When they had prayed and sprinkled the barley grains, they first drew back the [victims’] heads and slaughtered [them] and skinned [them]; and they cut out the thigh-bones and wrapped them in fat, folded double, and placed slices of raw meat on top of them.

These lines are formulaic building blocks of the sacrifice type scene, familiar from many other iterations. But it is perhaps significant that we begin in verse 459 with a string of verbs that lack a direct object, which has to be supplied by the larger context. This imprecision is not unique, but for audiences who have recognized the underlying Iphigenia pattern, the extra semantic space could invite them to recall Iphigenia’s own similar treatment at Agamemnon’s hands: the verb ἔσφαξαν (1.459), in particular, resonates with the language regularly used of Iphigenia’s sacrifice from Hesiod onwards.¹¹¹ Moreover, this whole verse only appears once elsewhere in archaic epic, in the description of the sacrifice that precedes the Catalogue of Ships (1.459 = 2.422), an episode that itself resonates strongly with the gathering of the host at Aulis.¹¹² Perhaps this language was particularly associated with the Aulis episode in tradition. Whether or not this was the case, however, it is clear that the sacrifice not only has the same goal as Agamemnon’s (removing the divinely induced λοιγός), but also leaves space for us to recall the original slaughter of Iphigenia. As with the preceding reunion of father and daughter, there is once more a significant difference here: the (at least attempted) human sacrifice at Aulis is again defused, and we are instead presented with an archetype of orderly, civilized sacrifice—a point to which we shall return.

(F) After the sacrifice, the Greeks receive a favorable wind from the offended deity and sail to Troy

The day after the sacrifice, the Greeks receive a favorable wind from Apollo and set sail back to the Greek camp (1.477–83). On their arrival, they drag the boat onto the shore, set props beneath it and immediately disperse (1.484–87).

The outcome of the sacrifice is thus the same as at Aulis: the offended deity is appeased and allows for smooth sailing. Of course, the favorable wind here is far more incidental to the immediate plot than it was at Aulis, where fair weather was the main goal of the ritual. Yet this only makes it all the more striking that Homer devotes so much attention to it here, with the Iliad’s only proper account of seafaring (1.479–83):

τοῖσιν δ᾿ ἴκμενον οὖρον ἵει ἑκάεργος Ἀπόλλων·οἱ δ᾿ ἱστὸν στήσαντ᾿ ἀνά θ᾿ ἱστία λευκὰ πέτασσαν,ἐν δ᾿ ἄνεμος πρῆσεν μέσον ἱστίον, ἀμφὶ δὲ κῦμαστείρῃ πορφύρεον μεγάλ᾿ ἴαχε νηὸς ἰούσης·ἡ δ᾿ ἔθεεν κατὰ κῦμα διαπρήσσουσα κέλευθον.

And Apollo who works from afar sent them a favorable wind. They set up the mast and spread the white sails, and the wind filled the belly of the sail. The dark waves hissed loudly around the keel’s stem as the ship went: and it sped over the waves, accomplishing its route.

By contrast, the poem makes no explicit statement that the plague has ended, despite it being the embassy’s primary objective—an absence that seems to have troubled ancient commentators.¹¹³ Its resolution is only implied by the passing comment that Apollo “heard” and thus “granted” Chryses’ initial prayer (τοῦ δ’ ἔκλυε Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων, 1.457).¹¹⁴ Conversely, the double mention of wind (οὖρον, 1.479; ἄνεμος, 1.481) foregrounds an outcome of the sacrifice which directly parallels that at Aulis: the appeased deity sends a favorable wind.¹¹⁵ Such Apolline involvement in the winds is very unusual: even in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, it is Zeus, not Apollo, who sends a tailwind for the Cretan sailors (Διὸς οὔρῳ, 427; ἄνεμος ... ἐκ Διὸς αἴσης, 433). Apollo’s control of the winds in Iliad 1 thus departs significantly from his usual practice and aligns him even more closely with the appeased Artemis of Aulis.¹¹⁶

The envoys’ concluding actions also match what the Greeks would have done on their first arrival to Asia Minor from Aulis: setting their ships up on props to preserve them (1.484–86). This final element of the Chryseis story closes the replay of Iphigenia’s fabula at a structurally significant moment, echoing the Greeks’ first arrival in Troy. The episode concludes at a moment of transition and new beginning.

Table 2.

the parallel sequences summarized

Iii. the architecture of homeric allusion

The opening moves of the Iliad thus map closely onto the Iphigenia fabula. In the previous section, we have established an underlying symmetry between the events of Iliad 1 and the traditional Aulis story (summarized in Table 2). The debate over Chryseis and her eventual return to her father replay and rework Iphigenia’s sacrifice through a sustained sequence of narrative connections. Each reader will no doubt have found some correspondences more convincing than others. But given the sheer accumulation of parallels and the shared overarching sequence, the overall connection is difficult to deny.¹¹⁷ In this final section, I want to move beyond this point-by-point comparison and dwell on the larger significance of this allusive pattern: what does it add to our understanding of Iliad 1 and to Homeric poetics more generally?

At one level, the allusive background of Iphigenia’s sacrifice adds further depth to the opening scenes of the Iliad, reinforcing the characterization of key protagonists by echoing and recalling their past behavior. Agamemnon, in particular, repeats the same hubristic actions as before, angering both a god and Achilles. He has clearly not learned from his past mistakes. Moreover, when we recall his own past losses as a parent, his maltreatment of Chryses appears even more heartless. Against the shadow of tradition, Agamemnon emerges as a callous ruler. More generally, Agamemnon’s fraught relationships with both Calchas and Achilles also reverberate pointedly with their prior history. These opening scenes are not an isolated occurrence, but rather a repeated—and repeatable—scenario. Indeed, Agamemnon’s complaint against Calchas at 1.105–8 stresses this continuity (esp. αἰεί, “always,” 1.107); and Agamemnon goes on in the next line to emphasize the parallel between Calchas’s past and present conduct: the seer is behaving in the same way “now too” (καὶ νῦν, 1.109).¹¹⁸ There is a strong sense of déjà vu as events at Aulis are replayed on the Trojan shore. Agamemnon’s critique of Calchas signposts the larger motif transference at work in book 1.

The parallel motifs are not only grounded in continuity, however. There is also significant divergence, especially between the fathers Agamemnon and Chryses. As the sequence progresses in the Iliad, we have noted an increasing contrast between the pair, as Chryses’ joyful reunion with his daughter serves as a foil to Agamemnon’s past loss: Iphigenia’s tragic fate is defused and reframed in a more positive light. As we noted above, this fits with the Iliad’s general downplaying of human sacrifice and immortalization, reducing the supernatural elements of Iphigenia’s story to a lingering shadow. But there may be more at stake here: the Iliad begins by implicitly distancing itself from this prior tradition of (attempted) filicide and barbaric human sacrifice. The elaborately described ritual at Chryse (1.458–74) becomes a programmatic archetype of proper, orderly sacrifice, a demonstration of how sacrifice should be done and indeed will be done in the remainder of the poem. Through its divergence from the Iphigenia story, the Iliad begins by underlining that it is not a tale of such perverted violence, but one which rather models proper ritual conduct for Homer’s own audiences.¹¹⁹

The comparison of Agamemnon and Chryses also highlights a further aspect of this parallel sequence: the prominence within it of allusive doublets, whereby one traditional character’s role is split between two different figures. The Agamemnon of the Iphigenia fabula is replayed in the Iliad by both Agamemnon himself (abusing Calchas, losing a female possession) and Chryses (facing the loss of a daughter, performing the sacrifice). Such doubling is also apparent in the reworking of Iphigenia: she shares features in common with both Chryseis (a possession of Agamemnon) and Briseis (a potential bride of Achilles). Such a lack of one-to-one mapping between the mythical fabula and the Iliad could perhaps be thought to undermine my overall argument for this allusive scheme, but such splitting of a single character’s fabula can be readily paralleled in other cases of Homeric allusion. Elsewhere in the Iliad, both Diomedes and Ajax play the role of the absent Achilles, while both Patroclus and Achilles allusively reflect later events of Achilles’ own life and death.¹²⁰ Moreover, in the case of Chryseis and Briseis, the two are already close doublets of each other: besides their onomastic similarity (each formed as a patronymic adjective), both are war-prizes of prominent Greek warriors, captured in Achilles’ sack of Thebe and Lyrnessus (1.366–69, 2.688–93), and both are described with a similar array of epithets, especially καλλιπάρῃον (“fair-cheeked,” Chryseis: 1.143, 310, 369; Briseis: 184, 323, 346).¹²¹ They are thus an apt pair to adapt and recalibrate different aspects of Iphigenia.

Overall, therefore, this Iphigenia pattern offers further insight into Homeric allusive practice. In its totality, it serves as a parallel for the large-scale motif transference surrounding Achilles’ death in the second half of the Iliad. As Jonathan Burgess has demonstrated, “many transferred motifs concerning Achilles’ death ... occur in extended narrative patterns,” reworking traditional sequences of narrative in order, a practice which he has plausibly grounded in archaic modes of performance. Ancient rhapsodes and performers appear to have picked up a story in sequence, a custom already reflected in the series of Demodocus’s songs in Odyssey 8.¹²² The Iphigenia pattern of book 1 parallels this phenomenon, complementing the closing Iliadic prolepsis of Achilles’ death with an opening analepsis of Iphigenia’s sacrifice. In addition, it inaugurates a whole series of retrospective replays of tradition in the following books, initiating an ongoing allusive pattern.¹²³ Contrary to common scholarly assumptions, these analeptic echoes are active from the very start of the poem.

However, the presence of this Iphigenia allusion at the very start of the Iliad also has a greater significance for the structure of the whole poem. We should note that the Iphigenia myth has a particularly inceptive aspect: the sacrifice is a key moment of beginning, initiating the expedition against Troy. Of course, there are multiple important “beginnings” in the Trojan war story (including the Judgement of Paris and Paris’s theft of Helen), but events at Aulis were crucial for the commencement of the war itself and later tradition certainly considered the sacrifice an important moment of beginning. Lucretius begins De rerum natura with a description of the sacrifice (1.82–101), while Statius’s Achilleid, which promises to lead Achilles through the “whole Trojan story” (tota ... Troia, 1.7), begins with the gathering of the Greeks at Aulis and may well have continued in book 2 with Iphigenia’s sacrifice, as Alessandro Barchiesi has argued.¹²⁴ Such an initiatory resonance also seems to be presupposed by Hesiod’s mention of Aulis as the starting point of both his own voyage and that of the Achaeans in the Works and Days (650–53: see § I (A) above), as well as the likely allusion to Aulis in one of the introductory hymns of the Theognidea, framing the episode as a moment of beginning (11–14: see § I (F) above). In Iliad 1, then, Homer similarly exploits the story’s introductory aspect, aligning the structure of his poem to that of the larger war. By looking back to the sacrifice story, the start of the Iliad replays the start of the whole Trojan war. The larger structure of the whole expedition is mapped onto the narrow contours of our epic.

To conclude, I would like to suggest that this Iphigenia allusion is only the most extended and elaborate instance of a broader allusive strategy at the start of the Iliad.¹²⁵ Homer’s opening also looks to other major beginnings of the war. The proem’s “plan of Zeus” seems to evoke and rework the foundational moment of the whole story: Zeus’s “plan” to relieve the overburdened earth by destroying the race of heroes (familiar from the Cypria and Hesiodic Catalogue). Here too, the Iliad looks back to this inaugural moment and incorporates it into its own beginning, redirecting the god’s “plan” to focus specifically on Achilles’ wrath.¹²⁶ Similarly, at a more thematic level, Agamemnon’s “theft” of Briseis also parallels Paris’s initial abduction of Helen, another major catalyst of strife. Like the whole war, the Iliad begins with an episode of contested “bride stealing.”¹²⁷ The start of the poem thus echoes and reworks multiple key “beginnings” of the larger story: Zeus’s plan, the theft of Helen, and the sacrifice of Iphigenia.

With these various inceptive allusions, Iliad 1 is thus thoroughly integrated into the broader analeptic replays of the poem’s first half, evoking and embracing the wider tradition. But more than that, it also exhibits an alert self-awareness about its own place in that tradition. It was always a challenge to commence an epic poem because there were so many different starting points available—a challenge that is explicitly recognized in the Odyssey’s instruction for its Muse to begin “from any point” (ἁμόθεν, Od. 1.10). The start of the Iliad equally faces up to this challenge, but comes to a rather different solution: it legitimizes its opening by incorporating and reworking the war’s earlier major starting points. In a way, the Iliad is restarting the song of the Trojan War, and to do so most effectively, it both acknowledges and appropriates multiple other beginnings.