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Document Details : Title: Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians and European Identity Author(s): HALL, Edith Journal: Pharos Volume: 17 Issue: 1 Date: 2009-2010 Pages: 91-102 DOI: 10.2143/PHA.17.1.2136894 Abstract : The reception of Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians from the Renaissance onwards reveals the crucial role which Greek representations of inter-ethnic encounters have played in the historical process of the building of the European, Christian and colonial identity. The play enacts a plot with a transparently ‘colonial’ agenda that involves Greeks stealing something valuable (a statue of Artemis) from a less advanced, ‘barbarian’ community and removing it to their homeland. The reception of the play needs to be read in close conjunction with perceptions of the peninsula known as the Crimea, ruled from 1441 to 1783 for the Ottoman Empire through the Crimean Khans. The use of the tragedy to negotiate the emergence of a European identity is clear from Giovanni Rucellai’s attempt to turn the ancient Greek play into a tragedy acceptable to contemporary readers and spectators, his Oreste of 1525. Rucellai’s Greeks behave in the Black Sea as if aware that they are destined to become exemplars of Christian humanism, and his play was the Renaissance bridge over which Iphigenia, Thoas, Orestes and Pylades walked from antiquity and into the modern world. The exceptional appeal of Iphigenia among the Taurians in the late 17th and 18th centuries, during the course of which it was made into very many operas and plays besides those by Goethe and Gluck, is set against a background of the countless abduction plays and operas of the time and indeed the eventual Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783, leading to the creation of a revived ancient Greece in the Black Sea — the most telling of symbols of European resistance against the Ottoman Empire. It was only in the 20th century that the barbarism of the Taurians became called into question through writers critiquing colonialism and its supremacist ideologies. |
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