E. Fabbro, Ifigenia tra i Tauri di Euripide tra distanze e integrazione

Abstract: This paper aims at exploring the intricate geographic and semantic tensions produced by Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. In a clear meta-literary move, Euripides displaces Atreide’s myth beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries set by his predecessor Aeschylus, and stages the story of Iphigenia and Orestes in the furthest reaches of the Greek world. Iphigeneia has survived her own cruel myth, and now lives on in an inhospitable and unknown region among the Taurians. Here, she has integrated within a context of mutual recognition and tolerance. However, the lacerations of her bloody past mingle and overlap in the rites of human sacrifice that she is obliged to officiate here, continually renewing her own mythical biography with the roles reversed. This paper will show how the dramaturgical structure of the play ambiguously polarises proximity to and distance from Greece, and how geographical and ethnic dissonance enables Iphigeneia to create a new identity. Through this process, she will be able to exploit her own painful mythical history and her present situation in order to recompose a different future for herself, her brother, and the goddess who saved her from death. These dynamics of proximity and distance involve Artemis, too: in demanding violence and blood, the goddess reveals her ambiguous and dangerous nature as a divinity set at the crossroads of barbarism and civilization – a twofold nature which will be symbolically recomposed in prosperous Athens. Such ambiguity between civilised and wild nature, it will be argued, contributes to subverting the clearcut geographic and moral contrast between Greekness and barbarism, by alluding to their underlying similarities.