So many of the heroines of the Tales of Gnosis College seem willing to step into mad-science driven oblivion (as of the date of my writing this Nanetta and Moira certainly, and, depending on one’s metaphysical view of the matter, Iris and Maureen and perhaps Anwei as well) for some great purpose or another that I sometimes wonder if I haven’t discovered in myself yet another fetish. It wasn’t something I was aware of when I started writing these stories. But one does learn the strangest things about oneself when one starts pouring out one’s imagination onto the (virtual) page.

That I might have dug such a thing out of myself is perhaps not too surprising. Edgar Allan Poe conjectured in The Philosophy of Composition (1846) that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world. As death is one of the things that people hate and fear most, to treat with it in fiction in this manner is thus a Dark Thing. And like most Dark Things, it has Deep Roots. They go all the way back (at least) to the legends of the heroic age of Greece, in a story that lives down to this day, that of Iphigenia, preserved for us in a tragedy of Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, written around 407 BCE.

The story leading up to the bilingual excerpt I am producing here is as follows. The Greeks have gathered their forces under the command of Agamemnon to fight the against the Trojans, one of whose princes, Paris, has abducted Helen, the world’s most beautiful mortal woman and wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. As so often in war, things are going badly from the start, as the Greek fleet is penned in at Aulis by unfavorable winds. A seer, Calchas, claims that the ill winds are the consequence of Agamemnon’s having offended the goddess Artemis. Agamemnon can get back into the good graces of Artemis and get his fleet released only by making a human sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon lures Iphigenia to Aulis with by sending a message telling her that he wants to give her as a bride to Achilles, the mightiest of all Greek warriors. The thrilled Iphigenia promptly shows up at Aulis, together with her mother Clytemnestra (and infant brother Orestes) expecting a wedding. Clytemnestra, however, soon gets wind of Agamemnon’s plans and things soon become rather awkward, all the more so because Achilles also soon gets wind of Agamemnon’s scheme, which scheme Agamemnon had neglected to let Achilles in on. Meanwhile, the rest of the Greeks, sick of being penned in at Aulis, are becoming mutinous. A very grim situation indeed: Clytemnestra and Iphigenia begging and pleading with Agamemnon to spare Iphigenia’s life, Achilles threatening to go ballistic on Iphigenia’s behalf, the rest of the Greeks believed to be threatening murder if Iphigenia isn’t sacrificed.

The situation is resolved with Iphigenia has a change of heart and decides to submit to her being sacrificed for the greater good. And it is something absolutely stunning to read, which I why I am including it as a text here.

The Greek text can be found at the Perseus archive of classical texts. The English language translation is from the Internet Classics Archive and was done by Thomas Bushnell, BSG.