“O Argives, ye have brought my city low, And I will die; yet, for I bare my throat, Myself unflinching, touch me not at all. As ye would please your gods, let me die free Who have lived free; and slay me as ye will. For I am queenly born, and would not go As a slave goes to be among the dead.” Then all the people shouted, and the king Called to the youths to set the maiden free; And at the sheer command the young men heard, And drew their hands away, and touched her not. And she too heard the cry and the command; Then straightway grasped her mantle at the knot, And rent it downwards to the middle waist, So standing like a statue, with her breast And bosom bared, most beautiful, a moment; Then kneeling spoke her last heroic words: “This is my breast, O youth, if here the blow Must fall; or if thou choose my neck, Strike; it is ready.” And Achilles’ son, Willing and willing not, for very ruth, Cleft with his iron blade the slender throat, And let the life out there. And this is true, That even in death she kept her maiden shame, And falling drew her robe against men’s eyes. These pathetic scenes, we should remember, were enacted before the people of Athens at a time when the lust of empire and the greed of expanding commerce had thrown Greece into a war which was to leave the land distracted and impoverished of its men, to be a prey to the ambitions of Alexander and the armies of Rome. What deep and poignant emotions Euripides stirred in the breasts of the spectators those can guess who have seen his _Iphigenia_ and _Trojan Women_ acted in English in these similar days of trial. And the _catharsis_, or tragic purgation, was the same then as now, only more perfect, no doubt, and purer. By these echoes of cruel deeds, ancient even in the years of the Peloponnesian war, the mind is turned from immediate calamities and apprehensions to reflecting on the fatality of sin and madness that rests on mankind, not now alone but at all times. With the tears shed for strange, far-off things, some part of the bitterness of our personal grief is carried away; the constriction of resentment, as if somehow Fate were our special enemy, is loosened, and the hatred of cruel men that clutches the heart is relaxed in pity for the everlasting tragedy of human life. Instead of rebellion we learn resignation. When at last Iphigenia surrenders herself to be a victim for the host, the chorus commend her act and draw this moral: Noble and well, it is with thee, O child; The will of fortune and the god is sick. In later times Lucretius was to take up this thought, and in repeating the story of Iphigenia was to denounce the very notion of divine interference in perhaps the most terrible line that ever poet wrote: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.