1. Finality as an agentic modality

Finality is an existential certainty, encompassing not only an end, but also a way of travelling to a close. Simply, to live is also to die, a universal truth, yet the mode of finality can often evoke more than metaphysical ends. For an individual caught in a life deprived of political agency yet faced with the certainty of finality within a politically charged atmosphere, the mode of finality can take on an entirely new strength of meaning. Modes of suicide and sacrifice become nuanced and intentional within this context. If, in this deprivation, one can face the certainty of death with intentionality, can she capture this mode in order to claim a moment of agency, until then, never supplied? “Oh yes but you won’t win glory/won’t you be praised/it’s not as if you’re dying of disease or war/you choose to live autonomous/and so you die/the only one of mortals to go down to Death alive” (817–22; Carson Reference Carson2015, 38) – the refrain of the ancient Chorus to the doomed Antigone offers an answer.Footnote ¹

It was in the ancient tragedies that certain modes of finality in such an impossible and entirely political context would play out. Though almost all characters in tragedy are placed in an impossible situation and left to an ill fate, often via suicide, sacrifice, or murder, it is particularly female characters who embody the utility of their finality as it is the only choice afforded to them.Footnote ² The ultimate question concerns what the choices of these female characters concerning their mode of finality are doing within the broader context of the tragedy and ancient society? Are their choices agentic moments? Are they claiming in their intention-filled modes of death an agency they did not have up until their demise? These questions are perhaps interwoven in the further question: What can we make of the treatment of women in tragedy as it contrasts with society, in order to understand this intentioned modality? Not only does focusing on these questions prompt the need for a new understanding of gender for female tragic figures in antiquity, but it also seeks to delve into the motivations of the tragedians for writing female characters as they did.

Antigone and Iphigenia at Aulis are tragedies especially well-suited to help articulate the phenomena of finality as a mode, both the ending of life itself and the action of coming to an end. Sophocles’s Antigone and Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, feature the title-women as leading characters centered amidst wholly political and constrained decisions.Footnote ³ Antigone commits suicide among questions of divine justice and human law, while Iphigenia is sacrificed among decisions of war, domestic and foreign policy, and political, divine, and familial alliances. Conceiving of finality as a mode, I argue, reveals how some traditionally conceived dichotomies (suicide and sacrifice/masculine and feminine) can be bypassed, making sense of the two titular figures in a way that highlights the deep intermingling of their action. Both tragedies illuminate how women sequestered in a society which prized non-feminine agency and cornered in a politically charged moment can, through their imminent and unchangeable finality, grasp at agency. Even if that agency ultimately propagates the male-only-agentic state, shifting into this mode allows them to access both the masculine and the feminine powers available to them.

To go to Death, alive, especially for Antigone and Iphigenia, is a mode of finality that blurs the passive and the active, reveals a difficult intersection of agency and non-agency, and just as complex an interchanging of gender. Through a deep textual analysis both in the source-texts of these two tragedies and in translation, I read sacrifice and suicide as a strictly feminine power of over finality. Then, I identify movements which force that active, vocal power back into the passive and silent through a critical regendering of the characters – the feminine into the masculine – during moments of intentionality where finality is certain. Much of the discussion will serve to reveal the duality, rather than binary, of active and passive, men and women, suicide and sacrifice, and align these with the actions of both Antigone and Iphigenia at crucial moments when both become male-gendered, as a singular actor, and when they become female-gendered, as a communal victim.

Antigone’s masculine-gendered portrayal and seemingly agentic suicide bears many important similarities to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which recasts both modes as feminine, stripping active visibility. Iphigenia’s turn from a sacrifice being imposed on her to walking, willingly to the sacrificial altar, similarly, carries the tenor of Antigone’s masculine resolution to suicide, but at the last moment Iphigenia is quite literally vanished. Both Antigone and Iphigenia become cloistered as figures who makes male choices, contradictory to her womanhood, relegated back to the realm of sacrifice, compelled by religious and honorific mores, both of which are male-engineered foci of ultimate ends.

Yet the continued puzzle remains, that portrayals of women in Greek tragedy are both powerful and illuminatingly present, despite their cultural relegation to invisibility. Of the 32 surviving tragedies, only one does not feature a pivotal, vocal female character. The plots share a common and melancholy theme, relying on their women characters to act on impossible decisions, which must ultimately and most often lead to their deaths by sacrifice or suicide or murder.Footnote ⁴ This paper aims to unite sacrifice and suicide as an interchange of gender roles and as nuanced modes of finality being a mechanism of intentionality and agency for women in Greek culture. Although these poignant moments of agency may seem to liberate a female character momentarily from the limits of male-dominated Greek society, in fact, by relegating these actions only to female characters, and characterizing them as male during crucial moments of intentionality, the action of suicide and sacrifice with tragedy again represents another method in which women were sequestered and silenced in ancient Athens.

Understanding how ostensibly female characters are actually male-gendered in the intense moment of their deaths rests entirely on the pivotal political moment in which they reside. There is a seemingly clear consensus among classical scholars that playwrights, not only the tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, but also the comedians, especially among those Aristophanes, would use the stage as a vehicle for multiple social functions, not only religious observance, entertainment, but also a forum to explore, voice, and mimic political speech, litigation, and the virtues and vices of democracy.Footnote ⁵

Just as the Greek tragedies not only shaped, voiced, and preserved ancient Athenian political community, for the scholars of today “Greek tragedy also shaped the tradition of political theory as a whole.”Footnote ⁷

Sophocles’s Antigone, performed in 441 bce, begins after the turmoil left in Thebes in the wake of the events of Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex. With Thebes left kingless, Oedipus’s two sons, Antigone’s brothers, battle for control of the kingdom and vanquish each other. Antigone’s uncle Creon takes the throne and outlaws the burial of Polyneices, the previously exiled brother. The tragedy primarily concerns the decision of Antigone to bury her brother under penalty of death through an appeal to justice. The tragedy ends with Antigone’s death ordered, yet in a moment of clarity Creon goes to release her only to find she has killed herself in her prison.

Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, written around 410 bce, recounts in dramatic form the oral tradition of a seminal event launching the Trojan War, that of the general Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in exchange for his fleets sailing on calm seas. Though this event is only alluded to in the Iliad, Euripides’s interpretation ends with a remorseful Agamemnon who tries to stop the sacrifice. Iphigenia, herself, turns from a submissive sacrifice, to a willing one for the good of all Greeks. Yet the tragedy ends with her blood unshed, miraculously rescued by the goddess Artemis, who has replaced her with a deer.

These two tragedies provide a uniquely rich portrait of a political suicide by a female character and a political sacrifice of a female character. Unlike their surviving counterparts, which feature female suicides, sacrifices, and murders, Antigone and Iphigenia are given a larger text of solo speeches, a clear implication of their importance and comparative utility. The two also have a long tradition of being compared with each other. Aristotle first brought the characters of Antigone and Iphigenia into conversation in the Poetics.Footnote ⁸ For Aristotle, the themes of fear and pity for the two female characters evoke the cleansing force of κάθαρσις (katharsis) necessary for a well-functioning Athenian citizen.Footnote ⁹ One motivation of bringing the two back into context is certainly from this Aristotelian foundation.

As a matter of literary lineage and cultural interconnectedness, the texts are inextricably tied. Both Sophocles and Euripides are writing in conversation with Aeschylus, either as continuing his myths or taking on aspects of his theatrical style. These works became embedded in the Greek consciousness, adding to their mythic history, and they were cited in everything from their contemporary works of philosophy to law. Not to compare across them would be missing the bouquet for the flowers, yet discussing all of Greek tragedy would overwhelm the blooms.

The argument, and comparison, as I have foregrounded them so far is not entirely novel. Scholarship on Antigone alone is particularly vast and choices must be made. I employ the scholarly tradition where I find useful synergies, outcroppings of similar findings along gender and finality, and attempt to read them together.

2. Two tragic figures, regendering

In building this larger argument understanding finality as an agentic modality, I acknowledge the limits of the figural comparison, which concerns the majority of the paper. This comparison of Antigone and Iphigenia is only a small viewpoint into a larger vista of conceptualizing this understanding, but it is a particularly illuminative first glance. I employ a diverse body of literatures, feminist, literary, historical, and philosophical, to show an aggregation of similar viewpoints looking onto the same vista, taken from different vantages. And just as views from different vantages can reveal the enormity of the vista, so too can they co-create an understanding of it. I rely on multi-disciplinarity and readings where they are common and uncommon, to understand these figures of women in Greek tragedy.

I argue alongside Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone which also elicits themes of death, political life, and agency. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler too reads Antigone as needing to embody masculine ends in order to act as she does (Butler Reference Butler2000). Although Butler reimagines a destabilizing kinship dynamic which in turn bucks heteronormative structures of law, the textual reading, perhaps lamentation, still comes through: “She assumes manhood through vanquishing manhood, but she vanquishes it only by idealizing it” (Butler Reference Butler2000, 11). When reading Antigone with Iphigenia, Butler’s claim that Antigone’s action is not fully her own but one that must “assert a ‘manly’ and defiant autonomy … only through embodying the norms of power she opposes” helps lay the groundwork for how a moment of regendering can recast the action itself (Butler Reference Butler2000, 10). Laying aside the Lacanian symbol of kinship, incest, and desire, I pick up the string of finality as a complex mode. Where Butler writes that Antigone’s “life is a living death” with her desire denied to her (Butler Reference Butler2000, 23), I argue, more simply, that Antigone’s death is also a dying life, an agency snuffed out by a masculine gendering of a female character.

Following Butler, Bonnie Honig’s interpretation of Antigone’s exemplification of a politics of lamentation is particularly striking as it adheres to the context of public grieving outside of the courts as markedly feminine (Honig Reference Honig2013, 2–7). In Antigone, Interrupted, Antigone takes on grief for her brother, but also her own future as a wife and mother, informing her finality in a visible, public procession to death (Honig Reference Honig2013). This will help to illuminate Iphigenia’s public grief for her own future, the promised marriage to Achilles. Honig similarly puts Antigone’s suicide in terms of a sacrifice in place of her sister Ismene, a sacrifice of sorority (Honig Reference Honig2013, 156–71). Furthermore, Honig lends the vocabulary of the impossible choice made possible by a choice in finality as death (Honig Reference Honig2013, 172–77). Though Antigone is faced with a choice of two evils, she nevertheless chooses, and even in choosing death, reclaims her own demise to be by her own hands. Honig firmly connects the finality of human life with an opportunity to turn toward just and ethical choices.Footnote ¹⁰ However, justice and ethics for Antigone and Iphigenia become male definitions.

In Groaning Tears, Elise Garrison, comprehensively maps suicides in Greek tragedy, and similarly interprets Antigone through the lens of family and marriage. Like Aristotle, Garrison reads Antigone as the empathy-inducing figure at the mercy of the irony of Creon’s poor decision-making.Footnote ¹¹ Garrison also categorizes Iphigenia and Antigone as both belonging to the category of noble suicide, which seems to conflate the nuance of sacrifice while also continuing with the marriage themes rather than notions of gender that lead their deaths to be considered “noble.”Footnote ¹² From her explication of androcentric nobility in the Greek, Garrison, on this point, seems to at least superficially agree with the feminist reading in Nancy Loraux’s Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, which I will return to in the figural comparison to follow.

In The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum concerns herself with Creon as the true tragic figure as it is his poor decisions which lead to the tragic deaths which culminate the play (Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum1986, 51–84). Nussbaum presents a resolute reading of a one-dimensional Antigone as a figure bound to religious duty, law, and community, rather than highlighting the bondage of her gender.Footnote ¹³ And yet, she writes of Antigone as willing to risk, to sacrifice, more than Creon: “There is a complexity in Antigone’s virtue that permits genuine sacrifice within the defense of piety” (Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum1986, 67). Antigone has access to a feminine power that Creon does not, and so she is willing to risk, to sacrifice. In Latin America, for example, the reception of Antigone as a figure of a political movement protesting state-sanctioned vanishings reveals this kind of sacrificial power as one that is a militant act of grieving (Castro Reference Castro2021). The militant grief of Antigone, for the women of Latin America who lose brothers to oppressive, violent states, is a recapturing of the masculine warrior but with the very public personal risk of the feminine ability to sacrifice, as Nussbaum and Honig separately reveal.

Although it is not possible to read either Antigone or Iphigenia entirely outside of the frames of marriage and kinship, an overfocus on it would overshadow the regendering of agency that happens specifically in the moment of intentioned finality. This reclamation of an individual’s own death, outside of the dynamics of marriage and kinship, can be best understood in reference to Simon Gikandi’s work on enslavement. Gikandi points to a viable agency space where suicide takes on a strategic motivation, a way to avoid oppression, and reclaim not only the mastery of one’s own life but also justice.Footnote ¹⁴ Elaborating on Gikandi’s perception of suicide as an agentic decision for silenced individuals, specifically how Antigone and Iphigenia go about choosing their impossible choices, could point to something similar.

However, in case of a sacrifice, which is generally taken to be against one’s will, is there any agency? Again, making the impossible choice possible in regard to this question and the case of Iphigenia might show that sacrifice can be elevated to agentic space of suicide if a choice is made, but so equally can a suicide be removed of its agentic power if the choice is viewed as a natural result of the powerful hegemony. This is the slave-holder, the colonialist, embodied by a white man as a figure whose re-archiving of the suicide could force a moment of agency back into slavery. By revealing how Antigone and Iphigenia act in a moment where they seem to be given a political birth through their political deaths, it becomes all the more poignant to discover that the male tragedians gendered their female characters as male in their moments of political birth through death.Footnote ¹⁵ They remain ultimately female, and thus non-agential, in their inescapable finality, mirroring Athenian society, rather than radically departing from it.Footnote ¹⁶ Introducing Gikandi’s work here reflects how finality can be understood dynamically within the pre-existing language and social strata of the oppressive.

Finally, I utilize the extensive literature on the historical position of women, socially and politically, in ancient Athens to explicate this in the comparison following.Footnote ¹⁷ However, it is important to note that, although reading finality as I do here “in terms of Athens,” a term borrowed from Hanink and Kasimis (Reference Hanink and Kasimis2021), there were many hundreds of unique city-states which likely did not create the structural apparatus which cornered women as non-agential. Most notably, Spartan women likely enjoyed far more freedoms in regular daily life which led them to be vocal and visible enough to earn the disfavor of the Athenian writers from whom we mostly gain a record of Spartan life (Pomeroy Reference Pomeroy2002).

3. The masculine agency of suicide

“It is true that once the firm line has been drawn separating feminine from masculine, Greek creative imagination delights in blurring it” (Loraux Reference Loraux1987, 62). Understanding how modes of finality can impart an agency, rather than regular action, relies in part on the context of the period. The extensive historical context brings the masculine and feminine into relief – what would the Greek audience have expected as the masculine-political and the feminine-political? Following Loraux, I locate the firm lines in the historical, then delight in reading the blur.

Aristotle’s treatment of Antigone draws attention to her only insofar as she presents a foil to Creon, the tragic hero to whom attention must actually be paid (Poetics 1454a1). Aristotle’s discussion provides an important look into how the Greek audience would consider the gender of these titular figures. Consider these lines from Aristotle’s Poetics where he defines two of the four characteristics of the tragic hero:

To the contemporaneous audience member, and certainly to Aristotle, only male characters can be the focal tragic hero, as they behave appropriately manly, where a female character could not embody that gender with the same appropriateness. Therefore, it is not that Aristotle is claiming no female character is capable of behaving manly, but that no manly female is appropriately the tragic hero. This leaves us with an admonition in Poetics that female characters, even for the audience, are complexly viewed in gender terms. The tragedians, in making female characters act in masculine ways, put a harsher light on the male heroes through the mechanism of the male-gendered female deaths.

“Within the imaginary world of tragedy, there still remains an impossibility through which reality reclaims its rights: when young girls die … there are no words available to denote the glory of a woman that do not belong to the language of male renown” (Loraux Reference Loraux1987, 48). Following Loraux, the choice of a single word denoting masculinity qualifies the female character’s action and intentionality. The single word is enough to regender her action and intention as masculine as Aristotle would prefer, and therefore recontextualize gendered agency (63).

From the outset of both tragedies, the title-women are immediately set into conditions decided by the ruling elite, naturally the powerful men in the plots, Creon in the case of Antigone and Agamemnon and Menelaus in the case of Iphigenia. For Antigone, Creon’s ruling that her brother is not to be buried goes beyond all reasonable cultural norms at the time, which dictated that a body must have the correct funeral rites, performed by family, or the souls of the recently dead would wander, homeless, on the earth. Though he buries her other brother, Eteocles, with proper honors, Creon decrees that anyone who touches Polyneices will be stoned to death publicly: “Kreon is resolved/to honor one of our brothers with burial/the other not/Eteokles he has laid in the ground in accordance with justice and law/Polyneikes is to lie unwept and unburied/sweet sorrymeat for the little lusts of the birds” (21–30, Carson Reference Carson2015, 13).Footnote ¹⁸ Already, in Antigone’s opening speech to her sister, Creon’s decree is framed as a sure death to Antigone who seems to have decided before the play even begins that she will honor the old burial customs (νόμοι), instead of the new decree, spelling her inevitable death as a love for her brother (Butler Reference Butler2000).

As for Iphigenia, the tragedy begins with Agamemnon’s realization that listening to his brother, Menelaus,Footnote ¹⁹ and sending for his daughter under false marriage pretenses to the hero Achilles, was not only dishonorable but a sin against family. “You have acted with terrible boldness, King Agamemnon, in promising your daughter as wife to the son of the goddess, when you meant to bring her here to be slaughtered for the Greeks/AGAMEMNON: “O misery! I was out of my mind. Alas! I am falling into mad ruin” (133–38, ed. Morwood 2000, 87–88). He attempts to write for her to stay home instead, but is again persuaded by political pressure, especially from Menelaus, insisting the Greek ships must sail, and Iphigenia’s death is the only way to accomplish it. Two stark differences seem obvious from the beginning. Antigone knows she will die from the first moment, but Iphigenia does not.

Iphigenia is (passively) being brought to the marriage with Achilles by her mother Clytemnestra at her father’s behest. Her transit embodies the “handing off” which women experienced in ancient Athens. In part as a result of the non-existent conception of women as a unified group in ancient Athens as well as the general regard for women as being weak-willed and mentally inferior to men,Footnote ²⁰ each woman was supposed to be under a κύριος or male authority (Martin Reference Martin1996). Either the woman’s father, brother, or husband was meant to structure and guide her course of life. Aristotle uses this same term for an ultimate authority of the πόλις (polis), so not only does it carry the connotation of authority and power in general but, in particular, of complete political agency as well. Iphigenia is transported, carried, and unknowing in this first half, all things the Athenian would view as perfectly womanly (Worman Reference Worman2021).

It is only when Iphigenia has made her turn to willing sacrifice that she no longer embodies the passive and becomes active. As Loraux notes, Euripides’s Iphigenia is a different figure than Aesychulus’s, as Iphigenia (in Aulis) walks freely, willfully, agentic to the sacrificial space (44). As Worman (Reference Worman2021) reads her particular embodiment Iphigenia does not even let the Greeks touch her, like they would a traditional animal sacrifice (1559).

Unlike Iphigenia, from the outset Antigone is forcefully attached to her decision to die, similar to Creon in her dogma.Footnote ²¹ Antigone resoundingly affirms within the first hundred lines of the tragedy to her sister, Ismene, “I will bury him/and this is right to do/though I die for it … let me go/for I’ll not suffer anything so grievous as to rob me of a noble death” (93–97, Carson Reference Carson2015, 15). Both Plato and Aristotle write on women’s proclivity to be easily deceived, unable to make good judgments, as well as having little to no strength of will (Hornblower and Spawforth Reference Hornblower and Spawforth1996, 1623–25; Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1985, 37–91). Yet, these lines are imbued with will, strength, and the clearly good judgment to follow the law of capital delta, Justice (Butler Reference Butler2000), a political therefore masculine concern.

When Antigone is arrested and brought before Creon, she quickly confesses, and reaffirms “I know that I must die,/Even if you did not order it;/and if I die before my time, I say it is a gain” (460–62).Footnote ²² This strength of will and opinion is entirely masculine, whereas vacillation is usually denoting as a feminine trait. Even Agamemnon is criticized by Menelaus as unmanly for being so irresolute in the case of Iphigenia:

Compare those lines of Antigone’s to the resolute Iphigenia in the second half of Euripides’s tragedy, “Hear what has settled in my mind, mother, as I thought about this. I have made the decision to die. I want to do this gloriously, to reject all meanness of spirit. Only consider these things with me, mother, and you will see how nobly I am speaking … And indeed it is right that I should not be too much in love with life” (1374–79; ed. Morwood Reference Morwood2000, 125). Here in Iphigenia’s moment of decision, she also takes on the masculine identity, referring to seeking glory, being noble, and appeals to country – all things Achilles does in the earlier parts of the tragedy.

Yet, this change of attitude for Iphigenia is not met with the same anger which Agamemnon’s indecision received from Menelaus. Because she has changed her mind based on masculine motives and serving the male character’s ends, she is praised. As the messenger reports after Iphigenia is gone: “She has won glory throughout Greece, glory that will never die” (1605; ed. Morwood Reference Morwood2000, 131). Of course, for Antigone, her choice to die is ignoble, until her suicide is completed: “For the noble death is not sought after, but accepted.” (Loraux Reference Loraux1987, 46). In this way, Antigone takes on the ignoble, masculine suicide, while Iphigenia is able to regain a feminine sacrifice, noble in its acceptance.Footnote ²³

The moments of intentionality here are quite similar, and quite male-gendered, even though the outcomes are not. Antigone is at the start of her tragedy, hot and willful, focused on nobility and honor, active in her decisions, up until the moments she is turned passive upon her arrest. Iphigenia at the end of hers has become willful, concerned with glory and nobility, imbued with an activity that she did not have during her transit:

Iphigenia’s turn to willful sacrifice has returned to her the same kind of agency which Antigone’s decision to die has made what would have been her regular action of burial. Yet the gendering in these moments of masculine words and ends gives their suicidal choices a masculinity, depriving them of a feminine sacrificial narrative, likening them as tools for Menelaus, Agamemnon, and Creon.

Garrison makes an even stronger argument to identify Antigone’s suicide as being closer to a sacrifice by comparing her to the adjacent suicide of Creon’s wife, Eurydice, whose death Creon refers to in the same breath as Antigone’s as σφάγιον, a sacrifice (Garrison Reference Garrison1991, 27). Though Garrison conceives of Antigone and Eurydice’s death as sacrifices, I find they are inconsistent with typical sacrificial deaths, because they lack a clear transactional exchange and the passive action of a sacrifice (Garrison Reference Garrison1991, 26). Although there is a sense of straightforward sacrificial exchange for Iphigenia (her death, a negation, in exchange for granting calm seas), her rescue at the end complicates this. The pre-existing knowledge of the audience that the choice to sacrifice Iphigenia would only bring doom to the house of Atreus,Footnote ²⁴ in fact, flips the relationship to resemble Antigone’s slightly more closely. Like Antigone, Iphigenia’s active march toward finality becomes a positive which rights the negative of the immoral choices of her male authorities, her father and uncle.

Aristotle even likens women to malformed men, a result of the womb being too cool, and relates their weakness of action and conviction as a matter of temperature, i.e. women are too cold where men are hot.Footnote ²⁵ Temperature was one of the few biological heuristics available to ancient Greek doctors, and the measuring and assigning of value to temperature remained an important metric for Greek medicine and biology, especially between the sexes.Footnote ²⁶ Men are referenced as bright, hot, dry, and representative of air, sky, and sunlight, as any rudimentary knowledge of the Olympian gods might confirm.Footnote ²⁷ While women are the opposite, dark, cold, wet, and belonging toward the water, earth, and night, just as the chthonic goddesses are represented.Footnote ²⁸

In lines 49–77, Antigone and Ismene have an extended interchange on agency, as choices beyond their regular action, and death. Ismene represents the expected feminine silence, protestation, and it is her opening lines, not Antigone’s, that first grieve the loss of her brothers (11–16). Ismene bears witness in these lines to the moment of deep intentionality that represents Antigone’s shift into her chosen mode of finality. She questions Antigone, and through a kind of dialectic, brings out Antigone’s resolution. Of Ismene’s first six lines, five of them are questions (20, 39–40, 42, 44, 47). And in this intentionality, Sophocles gives Ismene the chief manly descriptor for her sister: “So hot, among cold things, do you hold your heart” (88).Footnote ²⁹ The apposition of θϵρμὴν to ψυχρός reveals the rapid regendering the audience experiences towards Antigone – her intention and decision hot and masculine, but her finality cold, like corpses, and like water, feminine (89).

Antigone and Iphigenia are strikingly similar in terms of their power potential. They live within an engineered context, which grants them limited choice, with the only culturally accepted mode allowing them to die honorably. Their choices, however, seem ultimately muted, because before they die the male agents know that there is no need for them to die, and that they themselves, the agentic male actors, have simply deliberated and chosen foolishly. The tragedies, then, exemplify less the agency and power of women, but the folly of men wielding poor judgment. In fact, Sophocles enumerates this lesson exactly, “what does this teach us?/bad judgement/bad judgement/is the worst thing in the world a man can have” (1240–43, Carson Reference Carson2015, 51, emphasis mine). So, what power is left to the two female sacrifices if not the seeming heroic martyrdom, negated by the knowing folly of the contrived situation?

4. The feminine power of sacrifice

Antigone and Iphigenia have resilience to decide willfully and directly for themselves and accept their deaths knowing that they do not need to die. Brian Lush argues this in the frame of political subjectivity. Using his framework, the female characters must create a new political narrative in order to survive in the male-dominated political landscape, which will not reasonably hear their protests even if invoking justice, the law of the gods, or the ancient customs (Lush Reference Lush2015, 207–210). Antigone and Iphigenia are less creating their own narrative as the tragedian authors are reframing the women themselves as male.

Passivity, invisibility, and silence were prized among women in ancient Athenian society. Women were widely viewed as the passive receptors, contrasted starkly to the active male agent. Women could not own property, sit on juries, vote, attend, or speak in the Assembly.Footnote ³⁰ A woman could appear in court as a family member or directly related party but only to grieve or more accurately display grief, not speak or offer arguments.Footnote ³¹ In fact, a good Greek woman was to be completely silent in public outside of the grief function; even uttering a woman’s name in public was deemed unrespectable.Footnote ³² Pericles’s funeral oration exemplifies the standard account: “If I should say a word on the duties of the wives who will now be widows, I will sum up the whole in a short piece of advice: your great glory is not to fall beneath the nature you have been given, and hers is the greatest glory who is least talked about among the men for praise or for blame.”Footnote ³³

In contrast to the nobility that Antigone enjoys in her resolute action in the beginning of the tragedy,Footnote ³⁴ and in contrast with the glory Iphigenia partakes in at the end, being talked about as she is, these glorious moments are above their nature. So they must employ their finality to recapture not just the agency that allows their death to keep this glory, but to situate it within the feminine as well. “Death, for young girls and mature women alike, was bound up with marriage and glory, but there is no doubt that the renown of virgins resembled the eukleia (glory) of warriors more than the renown of wives did. Glory indeed is essentially virile” (Loraux Reference Loraux1987, 47). Yet, Iphigenia’s last words are even that she will “bravely yield my neck without a word” (1559). Her spoken silence is her particularly feminine power for the Athenian spectator. Her silent sacrifice is what Pericles would have them expect of a noble woman. Iphigenia “bravely submits” her neck (1560), but Euripides does not use the androcentric form of courage, rather “bravely” is ϵὐκαρδίως, a word more easily fluid in gendered terms.

The tragedians needed a woman to exemplify male traits for a moment if only to show the real tragedy, not the sacrifices of women, but the potential folly of men. Take this telling moment in Antigone, “No one is so foolish to love (desire) death.”Footnote ³⁵ Carson’s translation is “Who could be so rash, so suicidal” (19). The Chorus utters these words foreshadowing for the audience Creon’s misgendering of Antigone only a few lines later: “What man would have dared?” (248, Carson Reference Carson2015, 20). And later, “if you don’t find and bring to me the guilty manFootnote ³⁶ /I’ll make you beg for death” (304–9, Carson Reference Carson2015, 22) Sophocles creates a gendered tension by this juxtaposition of Creon’s disbelief that anyone other than a man could act so willful, and the audience’s dramatic foreknowledge that it is certainly Antigone. The audience knows a woman took this role, but Creon, the patriarchal authority, presumes only a man could be “so suicidal” so agentic in their choice to be criminal. It seems that the underhanded hope for women’s sacrificial power is threaded throughout a context of women acting more male than the men in the tragedies themselves.

The contrast becomes clearer, when considering as we just have for Agamemnon that in both tragedies the men representing the political authority are called womanly. “The woman in tragedy is more entitled to play the man in her death than the man is to assume any aspect of women’s conduct, even in his manner of death. For women there is liberty in tragedy—liberty in death” (Loraux Reference Loraux1987, 17). In this way, the actions of the male tragic hero are made even more tragic and centered. It is Creon’s rash actions that punish him at the end via the death of his wife and son, not a poignant victory for Antigone. Not only this, but other points from the play noticeably mark Creon as the tragic hero not Antigone.Footnote ³⁷ To draw attention to this, Creon, like Agamemnon before, is called womanly. “And she boasts of it she laughs/surely I am not a man here/she is the man/if she wins this trick and walks away,” Creon declares, fully gendering Antigone as masculine, but also denying his own masculinity, albeit in a conditional (480–90, Carson Reference Carson2015, 30).

For Creon to not be correct, for him to remain a man after uttering these lines, Antigone must not walk away, alive. Later, Creon reminds us again of the impossibility of his masculinity surviving Antigone’s life: “I will not be bested by a woman” (679, Carson Reference Carson2015, 29). Antigone’s femininity is the threat to Creon’s masculinity, just as Agamemnon’s feminine proclamations of grief and indecision were threats to the masculine authority.

A traditional classical reading of the chorus asserts similarly: “Another dramatic means of manifesting the heroine’s isolation is the constitution of the Chorus. It is usually composed of persons belonging to the same class as the chief character; but here it consists of men. One might almost suspect that Creon is the hero; especially as we hear nothing more about Antigone after her death is announced” (Humphreys Reference Humphreys1891, 14). Fascinatingly, the chorus in Iphigenia at Aulis is a group of married women who have travelled to see the Greek ships sail, not unlike Iphigenia herself, but most like Clytemnestra; neither, however, seem to inhabit the tragic trope of poor judgment as much as their male counterpart, Agamemnon. So, to return to the discussion of Antigone, I rely on the traditional reading here of Euripides’s very conscious choices to alert his audience to long shadow of Aeschylus’s tragedies of the same myths.

Antigone is constantly being referred to as masculine, bold, active, and even hot, θϵρμὴν, the way men in Greek medicine are qualified.Footnote ³⁸ Creon presumes, based on the boldness of the action and the doing of the action itself, that the culprit must be a man, and even when she stands in front of him, Creon remains in disbelief and likens women to horses and slaves, incapable of being high-spirited. Presuming, Antigone to be entirely manly, hot and hard, Creon says of her: “Here’s something to ponder/say we have a piece of iron baked in the fire till it’s super hard/I can show you how to smash it/I’ve seen high-spirited horses broken to a tiny tiny bit/slaves shouldn’t think big/this girl knew her act was criminal” (473–76, Carson Reference Carson2015, 27).

Iphigenia is framed in a similar way, but only after she has changed her mind to consent to the sacrifice. I would like to make a claim similar to Edith Hall’s at this point: “Aristotle notoriously complained about the ‘inconsistent’ characterization of Iphigenia, whose understandable rejection of the plan to sacrifice her is subsequently replaced by a passionate death-wish … But Iphigenia is only imitating the male characters in her own play.”Footnote ³⁹ Iphigenia as initially gendered feminine, wishing to be spared, calling on her womanhood and her viability for marriage as reasons to be rescued. Not until she meets Achilles, practically one of the male Olympians, is she inspired by glory and honor, partly to save his reputation, partly to save all women of Greece (from the raping and sack of Athens that will occur should Greece not sail first to Troy). Before she consents, she self-deprecates herself for wishing to live based on the fragility and baseness of none other than her womanhood: “The success of my whole case rests on this single point. This light of day is very sweet for men to look upon and what is below the ground is nothing. The person who prays to die is mad. To live basely is better than to die nobly” (1249–1252, ed. Morwood Reference Morwood2000, 121).Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet when Iphigenia is incapsulated in her turn of intentionality toward not only accepting her finality, but reveling in it, she is surrounded by the pressure of the most essential male-gendered figure in perhaps all of Greek mythology—Achilles. After she consents, she cites glory, nobility, and a manly honor, as well as a call on her mother and family not to mourn for her honorable death. She even becomes the active agent upon her own body now: “I give my body to Greece. Sacrifice me and sack Troy. This shall be my lasting monument, this shall be my children, my marriage and my glory. It is right that the Greeks should rule barbarians, mother, and not barbarians Greeks. For they are slaves and we are free” (1399–1401, ed. Morwood Reference Morwood2000, 126, emphasis mine). To her mother she invokes the desire not to mourn an honorable death, “Do not cut off a lock of your hair, or clothe your body in black robes” (1438, ed. Morwood Reference Morwood2000, 127). In the moment of Iphigenia’s intentionality she seems to be entirely masculine, trading her womanly rights, marriage and child-bearing, for masculine aspirations, glory and honor.

Citing the current political climate of an Athens on the brink of war with the “barbarians of Asia,” Hall writes that the Athenian audience, especially the conscripted male attendees, would have felt a deep kinship and connection with her, agreeing with her political claims that the Greeks ought to rule barbarians, not be ruled (Hall Reference Hall and Morwood1999, 24). “Iphigenia’s real problem is how to die nobly in an ignoble cause for the sake of thoroughly ignoble men” (Hall Reference Hall and Morwood1999, 25). The choice to go ahead with her sacrifice, just as Antigone chooses suicide before death allows their political birth and death to coincide in this moment of feminine intention, though the motivations for their agentic action is ultimately postured as masculine.Footnote ⁴¹

In Euripides’s tale, Iphigenia is not so unlucky as Sophocles’s Antigone. At the last moment, Artemis replaces Iphigenia with a deer on the sacrificial altar and vanishes the girl to a far-off temple.Footnote ⁴² As the messenger reports to Clytemnestra:

Animal sacrifice as a mode of religious practice was traditional and mundane in ancient Greece as it represented a religious exchange between mortals and the divine (DeMaris Reference DeMaris2013). Human sacrifice was uncommon, if existent at all, but was dramatized in the literature of the time with the same unique tie to maintaining social status and identity as well as political power (DeMaris Reference DeMaris2013, 65). In this light Iphigenia’s sacrifice again pulls a type of power, but a masculine one, even a militant one, if we read Hall, as she becomes a lynchpin for the politically tense move to commence the Trojan war.

The demand for her sacrifice discloses the differing motives of the Greek generals, on the one hand, Agamemnon does not want to sacrifice his daughter, his army, or his fatherly honor for the sake of sacking Troy and reacquiring Helen for his brother, Menelaus. Menelaus, however, frames the Trojan War as a preemptive attack which will save the Greeks from the conquest of the Trojans if they are victorious, as well as bring back his promised wife. Iphigenia’s sacrifice not only reunifies the camps of the Greek armies, but also legitimizes the Trojan campaign. Her rescue by the goddess Artemis at the end even saves Agamemnon’s fatherly obligation from being mired yet, though all things end up well for the male leaders, the female characters including Iphigenia and her mother Clytemnestra end up still suffering the loss of marriage and family. Clytemnestra still views her daughter as lost to her despite her replacement under the sacrificial knife: “O my child, which of the gods has stolen you? By what name can I call you? How can I be sure that this story has not been made up to console me so that I can lay to rest my cruel grief over you?” (1614–18, ed. Morwood Reference Morwood2000, 132, emphasis mine). Everything conventionally feminine has been stripped from Iphigenia, marriage and children, just as they were from Antigone (Butler Reference Butler2000). These womanly things Clytemnestra mourns, as a female-gendered character in the events of this tragedy.

Antigone, though, faces her own turn when she is caught, arrested, and brought (note the passive) before Creon. For the remainder of the play, Antigone is lead, guarded, and enfolded in the cave-like tomb, making her suicide her last active moment, enshrouded as she has been for the second half of the tragedy by passivity (Worman Reference Worman2021, 154–55). Loraux notes that Antigone’s virginal suicide is itself a marked exception (Loraux Reference Loraux1987, 31). Dying as a virgin, with the overtones of a lost marriage-bed, and her bridal veil, her noose, Antigone has both the active and passive at once. As a virgin, she is killed, but, as a “bride of Acheron” (816) she kills herself. In this way, Iphigenia and Antigone both enact “weddings in reverse” through their deaths, facilitated as they are by the male-dominated process of marriage (Loraux Reference Loraux1987, 36–37).

The inability and undesirability of women to make decisions outside of the home, especially in legal or political matters, meant a woman’s only agentic role was within the house, not outside of it. Within the household, her agency was one that blurred the traditional gender roles of regular, expected action, and she was able to wield and organize resources and labor according to her own mind (Cuchet Reference Cuchet, Lion and Michel2015). “Female workers were almost invisible because of texts oriented by androcentric organization and shaped by masculine forms of language” (Cuchet Reference Cuchet, Lion and Michel2015, 549, emphasis mine). It is precisely this masculine form of language that robs Antigone and Iphigenia, outside of the household and marriage as they are, of their agency.

It is one of the ways in which Antigone and Iphigenia are denied an agency in this cultural sense, as they are removed from the possibility of taking on their agentic role in the household. They have already reached their final moment before marriage, under the kurios who would provide that role. Agamemnon (the father) gives Iphigenia away to death (the bridegroom), as Antigone is quite literally under the guardship of Creon then escorted to death. In their finality, they have access to the expected feminine agency, the one of the household and the economic roles reserved for them.

One possible counter-argument to the male-gendered role of Antigone could rest with the suicide of her cousin, Creon’s son Haimon, and her betrothed. Upon learning of her fated death, he seals himself in her prison and commits suicide as well. There could be two possible categorizations for his suicide that would still fit soundly in my reading. First, he could represent a man with sound judgment who is ignored by his unreasonable father and thus contributes more to the tragedy of the plot in dying. Second, Haimon could actually be gendered more feminine to offset the masculine overtones of Antigone herself and bring the tragedy to bear as a love denied by death and injustice.Footnote ⁴³ It seems the more likely reading is the first, as it lends credence to Antigone’s suicide as a masculine-agentic action. Haimon is not forced like Antigone to die, so though her suicide can be read as a sacrifice it holds that the choice of suicide which she makes would still ring as a masculine action to onlookers uniquely via the suicide of Haimon who also protests Creon’s choices.