Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris is a tragedy marked by ‘complexities of … mood, tone and design’. It ends happily, comprehensively so, but that very happiness, and above all the way it is brought about, brings with it a nagging question. Should we allow ourselves to be swept along by the wondrous coincidences and benign divine interventions, or is there a disconcerting sense of too-good-to-be-true that should put us on our guard and leave us quizzical more than cheered after the denouement? The play has been read, alternatively, as an escapist fantasy of wish-fulfilment and as a nihilistic exploration of the world’s epistemological opaqueness, both readings supported by forceful arguments, and there are many defensible positions in between.