In Euripides’ rendition of the myth, Iphigenia, saved from death, reappears as a priestess in Tauris by the Black Sea.

Euripides: A New End to the Myth

Euripides concludes the myth of the house of Atreus with his Iphigenia in Tauris, a play which brings the sacrificed Iphigenia startlingly back to life. Artemis, it turns out, secretly whisked the girl away before her death, claiming her as a priestess in the barbarian land of Tauris. Once the victim of human sacrifice, Iphigenia-turned-priestess must now perform such sacrifices in the goddess’s name. When Apollo sends Orestes and his companion to Tauris to steal the statue of Artemis, Iphigenia narrowly avoids unknowingly sacrificing her own brother. Recognizing each other, the long-lost siblings contrive a plan and escape home to Argos with the statue of Artemis.

This episode, invented by Euripides, represents the return of peace to the house of Atreus. The pair escapes their ancestral history of inter-familial violence; unlike her grandfather Atreus (who slew his nephews) and her father Agamemnon (who tried to slay Iphigenia), Iphigenia escapes doing violence to a younger family member. Both siblings leave behind their old brutality: Orestes returns home purified of his guilt in matricide, and Iphigenia ceases her own practice of human sacrifice.

Many years prior, at Aulis, the young Iphigenia and the infant Orestes had beseeched their father to spare the girl's life (1211-52). But Agamemnon chose his child's death, and war. Now the grown siblings, each with a history of violence and exile, are reunited and return together to their lost homeland. Through this episode, Euripides definitively concludes the woes of the house of Atreus: the violence of both the ancestral curse and the Trojan War seem at last to have abated.