Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella & Stories

Product Information

Three goddesses — Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite — claim it, and Zeus picks Paris, a prince of Troy, to judge who gets the apple. But this is where I gently venture to disagree with the great man – or rather, to quibble slightly with that final sentence. Some scholars have assumed that Homer suppresses the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (although the events of the epic’s first book seem to rely on that tension). Some sources claim that Iphigenia was taken by Artemis to Tauris (in Crimea) at the moment of the sacrifice, the goddess having left a deer in her stead, [8] or else a goat (actually the god Pan) in her place.

While in Tauris, Orestes is to carry off the xoanon (carved wooden cult image) of Artemis, which had fallen from heaven, and bring it to Athens. The latter had been, apparently, sent to war by Stalin in a gesture implying that all Russians were equal; in fact, says Kadare, Stalin’s gesture had a much more sinister and cynical motivation: the sacrifice of his own son gave him free hand in demanding anyone’s life from then on. Sophokles, who also wrote an Iphigeneia (lost), has Elektra defend her father’s decision by portraying him as accidentally killing the deer and having no choice in the killing of his daughter ( Elektra, 563-576).

Antoninus Liberalis said that Iphigenia was transported to the island of Leuke, where she was wedded to immortalized Achilles under the name Orsilochia. Nevertheless, one of the main reasons for the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra is his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, the story of which is told by Euripides in his tragedies Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris. When the carcass had been reduced to ashes in Hephaestus's fire, Calchas offered a prayer for the safe homecoming of the army. This is my first Kadare book and it is not an easy read to begin with yet once the allusions to Albania pre-1985 became clearer over the first 20-30 pages I really found it riveting - helped by my exposure to Albanian society over the last 10 years and the stories told by its people about life under Enver Hoxha. People say that locals who happened to be around at the time couldn't believe their eyes when they saw a huge black bird carrying a human skeleton on its back.

In the movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell, the myth is drawn into a present-day thriller where the family of a surgeon is haunted because of his accidental killing of a patient years before. One after the other the surgeon's children are plagued with paralysis (a direct allusion to Agamemnon's immobile armies) and the surgeon's family is forced to sacrifice one of its members to atone for the accidental surgical killing. In Aulis, the goddess Artemis prevents the fleet from sailing and Agamemnon is faced with a terrible decision: he has to sacrifice either his daughter Iphigeneia or the purpose of his expedition.He's had a relationship with the daughter of Albania's second in command, but the woman, Suzana, has broken it off, sacrificing her relationship so her father can continue his upward climb through the ranks. When Bald Man finished off the piece of meat he had brought, he cut into his own flesh and fed the eagle with it, and by the time the eagle came out into the upper world, Bald Man was a mere human skeleton carried on the bird’s back. These close identifications of Iphigenia with Artemis encourage some scholars to believe that she was originally a hunting goddess, whose cult was subsumed by the Olympian Artemis. Agamemnon’s daughter, Suzana, also a protagonist in The Successor, is here the narrator’s lover, though she only appears indirectly through the latter’s reminiscing.

Later, Clytemnestra is told of her daughter's purported death—and how at the last moment, the gods spared Iphigenia and whisked her away, replacing her with a deer. Not all poets took Iphigenia and Iphianassa to be two names for the same heroine," Kerenyi remarks, [5] "though it is certain that to begin with they served indifferently to address the same divine being, who had not belonged from all time to the family of Agamemnon. Reminiscent of the parade in Richard Ford's Independence Day, an unknown first person narrator mixes with the crowd at a May Day celebration, on his way to an invitation only grandstand seat.Athena sends Iphigenia to the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron where she is to be the priestess until she dies. The fleet assembled at the port of Aulis in Boeotia but was prevented from sailing by calms or contrary winds that were sent by the goddess Artemis because Agamemnon had in some way offended her.

A chorus of tourist women, in camp to admire the soldiers, witness their discussions and consider the fates of women in war. this doesn't appear in any of the surviving passages of the Hesiodic catalogue but is attested for it by Pausanias, 1.Yet Graves' book, for all its ancient and mythological subjects, has profound resonance, a relevance that evidently slipped under the censors' radar. West (2013, 110) concludes that in this tradition (following Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon once had four daughters). The scene is in front of Agamemnon’s tent at the port of Aulis, where the Greeks are waiting to sail. This has particular resonance because Albania's indigenous name (Shqipëri) actually means Land of the Eagles - hence the double-headed eagle on the national flag. Strangely, according to one scholion, the lost Kypria named both Iphigeneia and Iphianassa as Agamemnon’s daughters.