The Silence
The play begins with the Greek warriors prepared to set sail for Troy, but being held up indecision on Agamemnon’s part. His anxiety stems in part from a unnatural state of the natural surroundings. The imagery is situated as beyond the forces of the mere nature:
“Not a sound to be heard anywhere, old man! Not from any birds, not from the sea and not from any of the winds that rule over the waters between us and Epirus…Total silence!”
Indecision
States of indecision or changing of minds recur throughout the narrative. This recurrence is situated in the opening imagery of the play which has Agamemnon clearly flummoxed by a matter driving him to indecisiveness and beyond:
He is writing a letter (on a scroll) an exercise which, it seems, is difficult for him. He writes a few words, then scratches them out and begins again. At one point he is satisfied with what he’s written, seals it with his ring but then, a moment later, he scratches away the seal and re-reads the letter. Later, he becomes so angry that he picks up the wooden frame upon which the scroll rests and throws it violently to the ground. His head falls into his arms and he begins sobbing.
Girl
Throughout, Iphigenia is repeatedly referred to as a “girl.” And we’re not just talking ten or twenty times. Doubling that volume gets you close, but still falling short. In other words, it is quite noticeable. So noticeable that the term becomes imagery representing a number of things: her innocence, her father’s monstrousness, her mother’s grief among others. So noticeable, in fact that eventually even the characters themselves stop and take note:
“Poor, sweet young girl! But why `girl?’ Why do I not call her a `woman?’ Will she not be made Hades’ bride soon?”
Deus Ex Something
This particular work of Euripides stands out from much of his body of work by eschewing the popular cop-out for Greek dramatists, the deus ex machina. Someone, however—and probably not Euripides since he left it unfinished—decided to introduce a deus ex something or other, however, with an ending that may or may not be an intrusion from a goddess:
“All of us –we all heard the awful thud of the striking sword but when we looked up, we could not see the girl anywhere! She had vanished, my lady! Gone!...There, my lady, there, upon the ground, lay a large animal, a beautiful stag, letting out its last breaths. Its blood spattered about, saturating the goddess’ altar!
