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Iphigenia in Tauris

by Euripides

This is the translation of the Euripides play about the princess Iphigeneia who narrowly avoided death by sacrifice at the hands of her father, Agamemnon. She was saved by the goddess Artemis, to whom the sacrifice was to be made, and swept off to Tauris. As a priestess at the goddess' temple, she has the gruesome task of ritually sacrificing foreigners who land on King Thoas's shores. It has much in common with another of the Greek playwright's work, Helen, as well as the lost play Andromeda, and is often described as a romance, a melodrama, a tragi-comedy or an escape play.