Fate vs. Action Theme Analysis

At the ideological core of Iphigeneia at Aulis is the tension between fate and action or choice. Throughout the play, king of Mycenae Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra, and their daughter Iphigeneia see themselves repeatedly as victims of fate, or pawns of their own destinies—and ultimately use the whims of fate and destiny as excuses for eschewing any meaningful action-taking or decision-making in the face of disaster and calamity. Though Euripides highlights several major moments where a decisive choice or canny action could change the course of events, his characters are unable to see themselves as individuals with any real sense of agency. Ultimately, Euripides uses tragic irony to argue that the inability to see oneself as capable of changing one’s fate is, in fact, what seals one’s fate. In other words, people are only victims of their own destinies if they envision themselves that way in the first place.

“Oh destiny, / spare those I pray for!” cries one of Clytemnestra’s servants at a crucial point in the play. Throughout the play, Euripides shows how all of his characters, major and minor, believe themselves to be at the mercy of the unseen forces of destiny and fate. Those who might otherwise have had a chance to affect real change in their own lives or in the lives of others miss those chances by believing themselves to be pawns of fate and destiny. In this way, they perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy of their lives, surrendering to fate because they believe there is no other option and then professing their belief that fate has been the force guiding them all along. Early on in the play, Agamemnon declares in a self-pitying soliloquy that he has “fallen into the snare of fate” and has been “outwitted / from the start by the cunning of destiny.” Agamemnon’s also declares himself a “slave of the mob [of commoners he] lead[s]” and a victim of “Priam’s son Paris” who has flung Greece into chaos “by winning the love of Helen.” Agamemnon is a mighty and noble king—but from almost the outset of the play, Euripides characterizes him as a man who, for all his pomp and power, sees himself as a victim of almost everything around him: his fate, his own station, and his political enemies. This establishes that even the most powerful people in Greece conceive of themselves as both hapless and hopeless in the face of forces beyond their control, such as fate and destiny, and would rather blame the whims of the divine for their problems than take any real action to change their circumstances. Euripides seems to have both deep contempt and a twisted kind of empathy for Agamemnon: his tragic flaw is that he can see no other option but to surrender to the “cunning of destiny,” and yet this tragic flaw is also presented as laughable.

Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigeneia, also sees herself as a victim of fate and destiny. She arrives in Aulis under false pretenses, having been summoned to camp by a letter from her father which declares that she is to marry the hero Achilles. Iphigeneia willfully submits to the arranged marriage—but when she realizes it is nothing but a ruse meant to draw her to camp so that she can be sacrificed for the Grecian cause, she finds herself facing a crisis of fate and faith. At first, she struggles against the idea that she is doomed to be a human sacrifice, begging her father to spare her life—but after Agamemnon tells her that he himself is compelled by “stronger hands than [his] own” to take her life, she softens and begins to go along with what she believes the fates have decreed for her. “It is hard to hold out against the inevitable,” Iphigeneia says as she announces that she’ll willingly offer herself as a sacrifice to Artemis and die for the Grecian people. Iphigeneia’s motivation for accepting what she believes to be the “inevitable”—her fate as a sacrifice—stems from a desire to appease the gods and not further anger them by resisting the pull of destiny. “Lead me to the altar / if this is what destiny has decreed,” she declares, ignoring the idea that perhaps it is not the idea of destiny to which she is beholden but instead her own will. The roles of fate and destiny in the classical world are, of course, impossible to dispute: prophets and oracles were figures believed to have a direct connection to the gods, and the play’s action is indeed set in motion because the prophet Kalchas declares Iphigeneia must be sacrificed. Euripides and his contemporaries no doubt wrestled with the veracity of prophecies and visions and questioned whether will could ever trump destiny. But Iphigeneia at Aulis, with its almost unbelievably solemn march toward an ending which no one wants, seems to be a play which directly mocks the idea that humanity has no agency whatsoever and instead must submit to the wills of the fates.

Ancient Greece was a society ruled by a complex mythological hierarchy of gods, goddesses, demigods, and spirits; almost every chance happenstance or twist of fate could be seen as the will of forces larger and more powerful than humanity itself. Euripides uses Iphigeneia at Aulis to show how such a line of thinking, when societally reinforced, can lead to a destruction of personal agency and create the sense of one being a victim of fate or destiny, incapable of affecting change through action, choice, or deed.