plays not scrupled to immolate Polyxena and Macaria. Perhaps in the case of Iphigenia consistency required of him to save her, since in the play, of which the scene is laid at Tauri, the princess is alive twenty years after her appearance at Aulis. Pausanias, as diligent a collector of legendary lore as Sir Walter Scott himself, says that a virgin was offered up at Aulis to appease the wrath of the divine huntress, and that her name was Iphigenia. This victim, however, was not a daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, but of Theseus and Helen, whom her mother, through fear of Menelaus, did not dare to own. In the Iliad, that common source of the stage-poets when they dealt with the tale of Troy, nothing is said about substitute or sacrifice, nor about Iphigenia's ministering to Diana at Tauri. On the contrary,[1] the Homeric Iphianassa—for that is her epic name—is safe and well with her mother and sisters at Argos, and ten years after her supposed death or escape is offered by Agamemnon as a bride to Achilles.
The "Iphigenia in Aulis," in its relation to the Grecian world, possessed, we may fairly surmise, universal interest. For an audience composed, as that in the Dionysiac theatre was, of Athenians, allies, and strangers, there were associations with the first
