‘Sing, Muses, sing to me a story of Olympus and the deathless gods who govern earth, sea and sky.’
So asks the priestess of Tauris.
She is an unlikely executioner; young and beautiful – that’s clear even through the veil. But all Orestes can focus on is the knife glinting in her hand.
He came to Tauris to fulfil a sacred charge: steal the statue of Artemis from her temple. The gods have promised him that it is the final task of his atonement, that it will bring to a close the cycle of kin-killing that has plagued his family. Orestes, who killed his mother, Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra, who killed her husband, Agamemnon. Agamemnon who killed…
But Orestes made it no further than the Taurian coast; a fisherman spied his boat and brought the city guards. You see, the laws of Tauris are simple: any Greek who trespasses their shores must die.
And so Orestes has been brought before this priestess bound and tied. She is to prepare him, to anoint and purify him, and finally to lead him out to sacrifice.
But something gives her pause. She stands before him, meets his gaze, those eyes green flecked with gold. Like tarnished copper.
‘This is the first time a prince’s blood will stain our temple steps.’
Orestes’s surprise is unmistakable.‘
It’s your eyes,’ the priestess explains, ‘They are just like your sister’s. Iphigenia.’
‘How could you know that?’ Orestes replies, ‘My sister died when she was little more than a child. Artemis demanded it in revenge.’
The priestess laughs then, a sudden, sharp thing that cuts like no bronze ever could.‘
Ignorance does not become a prince. Let the Muses tell you. Let them to tell you of Artemis’s true revenge.’
The Muses start their song with the snapping of canvas and the creaking of bowlines. There are so many ships moored in the Euripus Strait that you could walk from Aulis on one side to Boeotia on the other via their decks and gangways. So many painted sails that the horizon is all but lost in a riot of colour.
It is the greatest armada the world has ever seen. And it is trapped.
A savage wind blows from the East, from the direction of Troy, and all the kings of Greece know it for a sign: one of the gods does not favour their conquest.
A swarm of prophets, soothsayers and oracles descend then upon Aulis. The haruspices make an offering of one hundred goats, sheep and heifers, consulting entrails for some diagnosis of divine displeasure. The scapulimancers dig through sacrificial offcuts for shoulder bones with ominous abnormalities. The cartomancers cut cards. The cleromancers throw dice. The pyromancers light one hundred fires on the beach, and by their light the numerologists scribble a century of proofs in the sand.
Finally, Calchas the augur comes before Agamemnon, king of kings.
‘While taking a census of the gulls, I spied a buzzard watching not stalking. It was Artemis, the huntress. It is she who keeps this fleet trapped.’
Agamemnon looks up in dread then at the pair of gilded antlers that decorate the temporary throne room on his ship. Artemis’s disfavour is not with the Greek conquest. It is with him.
Words may be winged, but they cannot be caged. Soon all the kings know Agamemnon’s folly: he has killed Artemis’s sacred deer while hunting in the hills of Aulis. And now, Calchas the augur insists there is only one recourse, one way the armada will ever set sail: the king of kings must kill something equally dear to him. He must sacrifice one of his children.
Does Agamemnon do so willingly? Even the Muses cannot agree on that – it happens sometimes, a discord slipping into their song. Truth may be singular to a deathless god, but not to a human; mortal minds always hold truths that are multiple, conflicting, cacophonous. And so one of the Muses’s melodies contends Agamemnon cared nothing for any of his children, only ever for Troy. Another vows he loved them all deeply, that he refused and raged and raved until he saw the threat of mutiny in the other kings’ eyes. And a third insists it was a different fear altogether that guided him: what if by dallying, by arguing, he worsened Artemis’s punishment – what if she demanded a specific child? What if she came for his son, Orestes?
Eventually, the Muses’ song does reach harmony though – for there is no denying a child is summoned to Aulis. One of Agamemnon’s daughters: Iphigenia.
She believes she comes to marry swift-footed Achilles, the best of the Greeks and as the procession leads her down to the beach, her heart soars. Then it stops.
There is no bridegroom. There is no feast.
There is Calchas, and there is a pyre.
Her screams are enough to split the sky, enough to put every bird in Aulis to flight. Every bird except one lone buzzard.
Artemis watches the scene on the beach with confusion.
Yes, she sought to punish Agamemnon – the deer was sacred to her. But so too are young women, virgin girls brought to marriage. She will have her revenge on Agamemnon and the Greeks, but not like this.
She stretches gilded talons. She unfurls great golden wings. And she explodes into the sky like a spark from the anvil.
Down on the beach, Iphigenia begins to feel the lick of the flames when something descends, draping her in a feathered cloak. It is a moment of calm in the heart of the inferno. A single smoke-less breath. And then comes the lightness – her limbs shedding their weight till she is little more than a feather herself, caught in the pyre’s updraft.
When she finally looks down, she can see them: soldiers, kings, Calchas, her father. Cowards all, they have turned away in the final moments, and so none of them notice her flight.
Then the beach slips away and she is gliding over wooden hulls and canvas sails, the greatest armada the world has ever seen.
And then, the ships slip away too, and there’s nothing, nothing but the endless wine dark sea.
‘It was a long way Artemis carried that young girl,’ the priestess says, waving her knife as if conducting the Muses’ song to a close.
‘Across the Aegean, all the way to this temple in Tauris Artemis brings her. There the goddess gives her a sacred charge: any Greek who trespasses Tauris’s shores must die. And Iphigenia – that girl who every Greek stood back and watched die – she carries it out willingly. Gladly. Because she is Artemis’s true revenge. But now the gods send to Iphigenia…you. Her father’s son. Her father’s favourite.’
And as she speaks, the priestess edges closer and closer, bringing the knife closer and closer, till Orestes can see a reflection in the polished blade.
Eyes green flecked with gold. Like tarnished copper.
But it is not his reflection.
It is the priestess. It is Iphigenia.
‘We always were a family of kin-killers,’ she whispers, and the knife trembles at Orestes’s throat.
Commissioned by HistoryHit for The Ancients podcast
Written by Andrew Hulse