War, Sacrifice, Pride, and Glory Theme Analysis

At the center of Iphigeneia at Aulis is the impending Trojan War—a bloody conflict in which Greece will sail on Troy to steal back Helen (the wife of Menelaos, king of Sparta), who has absconded across the sea with a handsome young Trojan prince named Paris. The war itself is one fought on the basis of pride: the Greeks see it as their moral duty to restore glory to their humiliated king Menelaos, and the only way they can get across the sea is by sacrificing Menelaos’s brother Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia. Throughout the play, Euripides engages the idea of war and human sacrifice as two activities in which bloody terror and resounding loss are the only routes to pride and glory. Ultimately, Euripides exposes the folly of both war and sacrifice, suggesting that a vicious and never-ending cycle of violence will never produce the desired ends of true glory and grandeur.

Iphigeneia at Aulis is near-revolutionary in its anti-war stance. Throughout the play, Euripides demonstrates how wars fought due to wounded pride or in pursuit of far-off glory are not just foolish but cruel—and how they often lead to a damaging, distracting vortex of chaos which, ironically, makes the attainment of pride and glory all the more unlikely. One of the major ways in which Euripides broadcasts his contempt for wars fought in pursuit of pride and glory is through Achilles. A famous figure of Greek myth known for his skill as a warrior, Achilles—a descendant of Zeus destined to soon to be a hero of the Trojan War—laments that a “frenzy has seized Greece for this war” early on in the play. He knows that the gods themselves have condoned the war and they have urged Greece to retaliate against the Trojans—but Achilles seems to believe that the war itself is a “waste,” fought to restore the pride of one man: Menelaos. In popular imagination, Achilles is often associated with pride and hubris—he is a man made invincible by the gods but he is cursed with one weak spot on the back of his heel. Achilles’s presence in myth or popular culture therefore often signals ignorance and the prideful pursuit of glory. In Iphigeneia at Aulis, however, Achilles is a morally astute, level-headed young man who tries to teach others to “curb [their] grief in adversity,” to live by “reason” instead of anger, and to not let “pride […] draw [them] on.” Euripides cannily uses the figure of Achilles to demonstrate that warmongering in the name of pride and glory does not befit any real soldier—Achilles, the greatest hero of the Trojan War, is depicted as someone who goes into battle somewhat begrudgingly and never without weighing the costs of what a war really means. Achilles’s speeches and actions throughout the play are all in this vein, and as such, they and warn against the foolish pursuit of victory in war as a means of one’s personal glorification.

Euripides also shows how sacrifice is, unfortunately, regarded among the Greeks as a casualty of war—a necessary evil meant to bolster the greater good. Prophet Kalchas declares that Agamemnon must sacrifice Iphigeneia to the goddess Artemis in order to move the winds which will enable the Greeks to sail to Troy. Agamemnon’s resultant internal conflict—and Iphigeneia’s martyrlike wish to glorify Greece by giving up her own life—mirror Euripides’s indictment of sacrifice as a means of attaining glory. “We’ll buy back our own harm / with what is most dear to us,” Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, warns her husband when she learns of his plan to sacrifice their eldest daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess Artemis. She implores her husband to understand that killing Iphigeneia in order to enable the fighting of a war based on restoring Menelaos’s wounded pride will harm their family irrevocably—they will “buy” no glory with Iphigeneia’s life, only pain. Clytemnestra is one of the few characters to see sacrifice as a crime that should be avoided rather than a necessary evil that is a part of life. She sees no glory in the act of sacrifice or in the role of being the mother to a sacrificial figure—she knows there is only “harm” in selling off what is “most dear” in hopes of appeasing the gods or the prophets. Euripides also uses Iphigeneia’s own eventual resignation to her role as a sacrifice to indict the idea of sacrifice as a means to pride and glory. “I have made up my mind to die. I want to come to it / with glory,” says Iphigeneia as she declares that she will no longer struggle to be spared from the sacrificial altar. Instead, she’ll willingly give her life so that the people of Greece can defeat the Trojan army and restore pride to their nation. Up to this point, Iphigeneia has begged ferociously for her father to change his mind and spare her life—but now, she essentially gives up and resigns herself to being sacrificed for the greater good. Her words reflect the same thoughtless striving toward an invisible, ineffable “glory” which is embodied by the very soldiers calling for Iphigeneia’s blood so that they might sail on Troy to bring pride back to their country’s name. 

Euripides uses the mechanism of tragedy to show how often vain attempts to secure pride and glory through bloody, cruel means such as war and sacrifice end instead in pain and chaos. Euripides deconstructs the cultural and religious myths of ancient Greece in order to provide a commentary on the cruelty of a society which seeks above all to bestow glory upon its own name—at any cost, no matter how terrible.