Finally, the prophet Calchas announced that the wrath of the goddess could only be propitiated by the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia.

At the Greek's journey to Troy, Artemis becalmed the sea and stopped the journey until an oracle came and said they could win the goddess ' heart by sacrificing Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter.

In the seventeenth century, Racine expressed admiration for Sophocles but was more influenced by Euripides ( e. g. Iphigenia at Aulis and Hippolytus were the models for his plays Iphigénie and Phèdre ).

Thus for example two extant plays, The Phoenicean Women and Iphigenia at Aulis, are significantly corrupted by interpolations ( the latter possibly being completed post mortem by the poet's son ) and the very authorship of Rhesus is a matter of dispute.

Some of the others include Troades by Euripides, Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare, Iphigenia and Polyxena by Samuel Coster, Palamedes by Joost van den Vondel and Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz.

Cimon, by loving, waxes wise, wins his wife Iphigenia by capture on the high seas, and is imprisoned at Rhodes.

He is delivered by Lysimachus ; and the twain capture Cassandra and recapture Iphigenia in the hour of their marriage.

According to some versions of the legend, the hunting goddess Artemis replaced her at the very last moment with a deer on the altar, and took Iphigenia to Tauris ( See Iphigenia en Tauris by Euripides ).

After the war, Agamemnon, returning, was greeted royally with a red carpet rolled out for him and then was slain in his bathtub by Clytemnestra, who hated him bitterly for having ordered the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia ( although the life of the latter had been saved ).

Scene from the tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides.

Orestes was absent from Mycenae when his father, Agamemnon, returned from the Trojan War with the Trojan princess Cassandra as his concubine, and thus not present for Agamemnon's murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, in retribution for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia to obtain favorable winds during the Greek voyage to Troy.

The story of Orestes was the subject of the Oresteia of Aeschylus ( Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides ), of the Electra of Sophocles, and of the Electra, Iphigeneia in Tauris, Iphigenia at Aulis ( in which he appears as an infant carried by Clytemnestra ), and Orestes, of Euripides.

According to the earliest versions he did so, but other sources claim that Iphigenia was taken by Artemis to Tauris in Crimea to prepare others for sacrifice, and that the goddess left a deer or a goat ( the god Pan transformed ) in her place.

In Euripides ’ Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon is told by Calchas that in order for the winds to allow him to sail to Troy, Agamemnon must sacrifice Iphigenia to Artemis.

Agamemnon fools Clytemnestra into bringing Iphigenia to Aulis by sending a letter to Clytemnestra telling her that Iphigenia will be married to Achilles.

Iphigenia explains that she would like to clean the strangers and the statue in the sea, to make for a purer sacrifice.

After Iphigenia and Clytemnestra mourn together, Iphigenia makes the noble decision to die in honor and by her own will and asks Achilles not to stop the men.

Cymon and Iphigenia c. 1884 by Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton | Frederic Leighton

The episode of Iphigenia and Cymon that inspired such painters as Benjamin West ( 1773 ), John Everett Millais ( 1848 ) and Frederic Leighton ( 1884 ) is not a Greek myth, but a novella taken from Boccaccio's Decameron and developed later by the poet and dramatist John Dryden.

* Cymon and Iphigenia, a solo Cantata by Thomas Arne ( 1753 )

He also created various religious paintings and an altar-piece in the Cowgate Episcopal Church, Edinburgh, and easel pictures of Cymon and Iphigenia, Sigismunda Weeping over the Heart of Tancre, and Agrippina with the Ashes of Germanicus.

Image: Iphigenia. jpg | Cymon and Iphigenia, oil on canvas painting, 1884, Art Gallery of New South Wales

In Euripides Iphigenia in Aulis, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother and Helen's sister, begs her husband to reconsider his decision, calling Helen a " wicked woman ".

In Aeschylus ' Oresteia trilogy, Clytemnestra kills her husband, King Agamemnon because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to proceed forward with the Trojan war, and Cassandra, a prophetess of Apollo.

According to the legend Orestes founded Nemi together with Iphigenia.

Hesiod and Stesichorus tell the story according to which after her death Iphigenia was divinised under the name of Hecate, fact which would support the assumption that Artemis Tauropolos had a real ancient alliance with the heroine, who was her priestess in Taurid and her human paragon.

* an escapist period with a focus on romantic intrigue ( Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen )

However, about 80 % of his plays have been lost and even the extant plays don't present a fully consistent picture of his ' spiritual ' development ( for example, Iphigenia at Aulis is dated with the ' despairing ' Bacchae, yet it contains elements that became typical of New Comedy ).

Possibly out of vengeance for the death of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra plotted with her lover to kill Agamemnon.

Artemis was enraged with a sacrilegious act of the Greeks, and only the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia, could appease her.

Clytemnestra ( unsuccessfully ) warns Agamemnon that sacrificing Iphigenia for Helen's sake is, " buying what we most detest with what we hold most dear ".

After Agamemnon and Menelaus have an argument, Clytemnestra arrives at Aulis with Iphigenia and Orestes.

Iphigenia wants to be remembered with honor through her self-sacrifice, unlike how Helen of Troy is viewed.

These close identifications of Iphigenia with Artemis have encouraged some scholars to believe that she was originally a hunting goddess whose cult was subsumed by the Olympian Artemis.

" Not all poets took Iphigenia and Iphianassa to be two names for the same heroine ," Kerenyi remarks, " though it is certain that to begin with they served indifferently to address the same divine being, who had not belonged from all time to the family of Agamemnon.

Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country contained a similar idea, with a play named Iphigenia at Ilium running through the novel as a leitmotif.

In Glyn Iliffe's Gates of Troy, Iphigenia is in fact the daughter of Eperitus, a friend and bodyguard of Odysseus, who slept with Clytemnestra during the courtship of Helen.

Artemis, however, had instantly switched Iphigenia, as she lay upon the altar, with another deer without anyone noticing, and had taken her to distant Colchis, there to be her priestess.

Image: Goethe Iphigenia in Tauris 1803. jpg | Scene from the 1802 première in Weimar of Goethe's " Iphigenia in Tauris, with Goethe himself as Orestes in the centre.

# Film scores: Iphigenia ( M. Cacoyannis ), The Man with the Carnation ( Nikos Tzimas )

Sébillet replied in the preface to his translation of the Iphigenia of Euripides ; Guillaume des Autels, a Lyonnese poet, reproached du Bellay with ingratitude to his predecessors, and showed the weakness of his argument for imitation as opposed to translation in a digression in his Réplique aux furieuses defenses de Louis Meigret ( Lyons, 1550 ); Barthélemy Aneau, regent of the Collège de la Trinité at Lyons, attacked him in his Quintil Horatian ( Lyons, 1551 ), the authorship of which was commonly attributed to Charles Fontaine.