Family and Duty Theme Analysis

Family, lineage, and inheritance are all vitally important in Iphigeneia at Aulis. The world of Greek myth is a small one in which gods and goddesses intermingle and breed with mortals, resulting in a sense of reverence for and duty to one’s heritage—heritage which, for the characters within the play, is often divine. Euripides shows, however, that while many characters respect their lineage in word and deed, few actually respect the extant bonds within their families or feel any sense of duty to the spouses they’ve chosen or the children they’ve produced. Ultimately, Euripides argues that in the Ancient Greek world, while family and duty are hailed as vital and important parts of one’s life and identity, few actually appreciate, love, or honor the families they have in the right ways—or while they have the chance.

Though it’s difficult to ascertain definitive details of Euripides’s biography, politics, or personal beliefs, there are clues in his writing as to the social issues and emotional problems that might have fascinated him as a man and as a writer. Throughout Iphigeneia at Aulis, Euripides unravels the inner conflict within Agamemnon, a man who feels a sense of commitment to his ancestral legacy and yet betrays the family he has around him. He does so in order to demonstrate how a sense of duty to one’s lineage rather than one’s immediate family is a foolish and destructive waste of time. Agamemnon and Menelaos—two brothers of royal rank, the king of Mycenae and the king of Sparta, respectively—are the two characters in the play whose unrelenting focus on duty to their lineage rather than to their actual, living family members is a source of strife, shame, and conflict. The brothers know that their power rests entirely on their house’s greatness, and that knowledge dictates their interactions even with each other: for example, Menelaos swears “by Pelops, whom [their] father / called ‘Father,’ and by Atreus himself / who sired [them] both” to tell the truth before speaking plainly to his brother about the impending sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia. Menelaos can’t even open up to his own brother without invoking his duty to do so based on the integrity of their forefathers—he sees his duty as lying with the preservation of his family’s legacy rather than helping the family before him. Menelaos, caring nothing for the life of his niece, begs Agamemnon to sacrifice Iphigeneia in order to summon the winds that will enable the Greeks to travel to Troy to steal back Helen, Menelaos’s wife who absconded with a younger, more desirable man. The layered, occasionally convoluted tiers of shirked duty and flimsy responsibility to the living form the very bedrock of both Agamemnon and Menelaos’s relationships—not just with each other, but with their wives and, in Agamemnon’s case, their children.

Agamemnon, like his brother Menelaos, takes his duty to restoring his family’s pride and honor more seriously than he does his duty to his own living wife and children. Agamemnon does agonize over whether or not it is too big a betrayal, even for him, to sacrifice his own daughter on behalf of securing glory for kin and country—but ultimately, Euripides shows how the fact that Agamemnon would even consider sacrificing his own living child is itself an indictment of him, no matter the choice he ends up making. Iphigeneia even appeals to Agamemnon’s reverence for familial lineage by begging him to spare her life “in the name / of [his grandfather] Pelops, of [his] father Atreus, of [her own] mother [Clytemnestra]”. She’s aware that honoring his family’s legacy is of utmost importance to him and she knows that he doesn’t care enough for the lives of his living, breathing family, even his children, to spare her on that reasoning alone. Even as Iphigeneia begs for her own life, there is a sense of contempt in her words as she appeals to her father’s foolish preoccupation with duty to his ancestors rather than his progeny. Iphigeneia even holds her baby brother, Orestes, up to Agamemnon’s face, begging him to see, in the infant boy’s presence, his duty to the future of his house rather than its past.

Ultimately, Euripides uses Iphigenia at Aulis to argue that the ancient Greek impulse to revere one’s lineage or parentage while effectively ignoring the duty one has to one’s living, breathing family is one which creates sadness, discord, anger, and even the impulse for revenge. By demonstrating Agamemnon’s willingness to betray his own child for the sake of his line’s glory, Euripides foreshadows the fall of the house of Atreus. Ultimately, he suggests that focusing too hard on securing familial glory rather than upholding familial duty will actually bring about the end of the very line one seeks to glorify.