On a steamy July afternoon in the ‘90s, I absently picked my way through the throngs at Jerusalem’s central bus station. All my thoughts were focused on Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, the tragedy that I was to teach that day to students in my course on gender in Greek myth at the Hebrew University. The only notice I had given to the Yesha (the name of the settlers in the occupied territories of “Judea and Samaria”) who flooded the city on that day was to worry earlier in passing that they might make me late for school. Jerusalem with its one main access road was all too easily rendered impenetrable by any group who chose to block the way. The year was 1994, and right-wing demonstrators were protesting the “Oslo Accords.” So, for too many Sundays during that semester, I had sat sweltering in a bus worrying about missing office hours as virtually every group with a grievance against the Rabin government took its turn at barring my way to work.

The Iphigenia at Aulis is Euripides’s version of the story of Agamemnon’s daughter who, like the biblical daughter of Jephta, paid the price of her life for her father’s political and military victories. When the Greek army en route to Troy had assembled at the port of Aulis, the winds died and the fleet was stalled. The prophet declared that the winds would not rise again until Agamemnon, commander and chief of the united Greek forces, sacrificed his daughter to the goddess Artemis. The girl was sacrificed, the winds blew the Greeks to their fields of glory, and the rest of the story, if not exactly history, is played out on the epic panorama of Homer’s Iliad. Usually in such stories of child sacrifice, the child has no voice of her own. It is all her father’s story.

Euripides wrote his play on Iphigenia at the close of the fifth century B.C.E., a less than heroic time for his city of Athens, grinding toward its inexorable eclipse by the rival Greek polis of Sparta after the decades-long Peloponnesian War. Like all Athenian tragedians, Euripides uses the traditional stories of his people to think about contemporary issues — in this case, war, heroics, and glory. In the play that he wrote, his Iphigenia does have a voice and his Iphigenia, at least at first, does not want to die.

When the play begins, Agamemnon has sent a message to his wife Clytemnestra in Argos telling her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis for a glorious wedding to Achilles, the best of the Achaean heroes. Although Agamemnon has agonized over his decision to give up his child for Greece and for glory, Iphigenia arrives at the Greek camp escorted by her unwitting mother, with both expecting a marriage. When the grim truth becomes clear, Clytemnestra is desperate at the betrayal and Iphigenia begs her father for her life (all translations of Euripides by Charles R. Walker):

O, Father, My body is a suppliant’s, tight clinging to your knees.

Do not take away this life of mine before its dying time.

At this point in the play, myth and ritual potentially have reached an impasse. (Imagine this speech delivered by Isaac in the biblical Akedah.) Like the archaic bride, so, too, the sacrificial animal, however passive, must offer at least the fiction of consent for the sacrifice to be ritually valid. As for the myth, without Iphigenia’s acceptance of her role as a bride of death, there may be life, but there will be no story.

The tension between myth (the way things “have to be”) and life (“the way things are”) grows unbearable as complicated machinery is set into motion to counter the inevitability of the story. To save Iphigenia, Achilles, her fictive bridegroom, grandiosely, if unrealistically, offers to take on the whole Greek army singlehandedly. And then suddenly, Iphigenia reverses her position. She wills her own death as the bride of Greece (IA 1375–76; 1396):

I shall die — I am resolved — and having fixed my mind

I want to die well and gloriously putting away from me

whatever is weak and ignoble…

To Greece I give this body of mine.

Slay it in sacrifice and conquer Troy.

In the classroom in modern Jerusalem, I ask my students to account for Iphigenia’s dramatic reversal. Does the voice that Euripides gave Iphigenia speak with any reason? Or does Euripides intend her speech as a parody of the frenzied patriotism of children intoxicated by the ideal of their own sacrifice on the altar of their father’s wars? On the final exam, the options will emerge ridiculously cut and dried:

In the Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, Iphigenia agrees to her own sacrifice:

a) because she has no choice

b) because in all wars the young must voluntarily sacrifice themselves for the community

c) because she loves her father

d) because she wants to be the bride of Greece

e) because she wants to keep peace between her father and mother

f) all of the above

g) none of the above.

Like most multiple choice questions, this one is hopeless. Iphigenia must die simply to save the myth, in this case a Greek myth. Myth is the way things have to be, or at least the way each culture believing in its own myths believes that things have to be. In myth there are no alternative endings, and certainly no compromises. In this sense, the mythic life is an unproblematic life to live, for the collective megaplot is available to direct the story of individual lives, occluding the uncertainty and ambiguity of particular real lives as each is and must be individually lived. As Thomas Mann put it, “Myth is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”

Aside from a comfortably fixed megaplot, myth also enlarges individual lives. In dying, Iphigenia saves the myth, but she also saves herself. Unlike the countless young girls married to strangers by the fathers of archaic Greece who simply survive as mothers, we remember the names of Iphigenia, Antigone, and Poyxena who die with glory. (The list of Greek brides of death is long.) Iphigenia correctly sees her sacrifice as her chance (her only chance) to be a hero like the male warriors who perform on an epic stage where the prize for death is immortal glory. In her choice of death, Iphigenia fully renounces “female” values of survival for “male” values of transcendence.

In her now classic The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir explained male supremacy in the context of culture’s valuation of the reasons for living above mere life. Man’s activity is seen not merely to repeat life but to transcend life, his design is not to repeat himself in time, but to take control of the future. Here de Beauvoir (like Euripides’ Iphigenia) identifies with the values of the culture that has oppressed her. What she describes are Western cultural ideals, and these ideals were first enacted on the epic plain of Homer’s Troy where war is a heroic stage and Greek heroes seeking to transcend the limits of mortality through immortal glory are the actors. In Western culture, simple survival is seen as the woman’s way.

Passion, myth, and the beautiful death — the life that is larger than life — are particularly intoxicating to the narcissist young and, of course, to old unrepentant narcissists. For confident and daring youth, war provides the grand and exciting backdrop to epic action with its absolute vision of good and evil and ultimate test of death. Peace is boring, compromising, and miniature, work for women and old men. The Iliad, described by Simone Weil as a poem of force, is a young man’s poem. Passion is a drug that expands the ego and so quite unparadoxically the drunken heroic ego, however “self-sacrificing,” inevitably performs not for the community but ultimately only for itself and often at the community’s expense.

The Odyssey, with its focus on survival at any price and by cunning, is described by the critic Longinus as the work of a man at sunset: a poem for old men by an old man ([Ps.] Longinus, on the Sublime 9.11–13). Is it mere chance that to me Odysseus has always seemed the most Jewish of the Greek heroes and that the Odyssey, the story of a survivor seeking and winning his home, the more “Jewish” of the Homeric epics? Could it be that for cultures—as for individuals—the options are either a youthful and glorious death or survival won at the price of growing up and growing old?

Not every culture has heroes. Heroism is not necessary for survival; indeed it may be antithetical to survival. Heroism is Greek, western, and masculine; it may be antithetical or superfluous to Judaism.

The heroic is more an attitude, a stance toward life than any particular set of actions. While heroes are particular useful for Greek culture (which has a problem with limits), Jews (for whom the line between God and man was clear cut and continually reasserted in ritual) lack heroes in the Western sense of the word. So argues Lionel Trilling in his Sincerity and Authenticity (85–86, passim):

Not all cultures develop the idea of the heroic. I once had occasion to observe… that in the Rabbinical literature there is no touch of the heroic idea…As ethical beings, the Rabbis never see themselves… They imagine no struggles, no dilemmas, no hard choices, no ironies, no destinies, nothing interesting; they have no thought of morality as a drama. They would have been quite ready to understand the definition of the hero as an actor and to say that, as such, he was undeserving of the attention of serious men…. And if, in the Jewish tradition, we go back of the Rabbis to the Bible, we do not find the heroic there either… Oedipus confronting the mystery of human suffering is a hero. Job in the same confrontation is not.

The power of myth is strong today precisely because myth entails the heroic life that is larger than life, enlarged into epic proportions. And the hero is an actor, absorbed only in himself. This was the Greek way, and Athens is no longer, nor the many Hellenized Jews who fell in love with the Greeks.

The Jewish focus on God has allowed for alternative “Odyssean” strategies: to survive inglorious to live and learn another day; to sneak out of the besieged city of Jerusalem at night, ignominiously, in a coffin in order to negotiate with Vespasian; this was the response of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakk’ai without whom Judaism might well have disappeared after the fall of the Second Temple. A woman’s way, a slave’s way, the Greeks would say. And yet here I survive to study and teach and write as a Jew about Greeks, a child of a people whose God in the foundational text of Genesis rejected a child’s sacrifice, a daughter of those rabbis who even when martyred never saw themselves as actors, never knew that they were brave.

As I picked my way once again through the throngs at the Jerusalem bus station, done at last with the day’s lecture, I began finally to see the many faces of the Jerusalem protesters that day and they were all indistinguishable. All wore the “Iphigenia look”: the smug expression of people existing in seamless complicity with their own myths and (especially the younger faces) all drunk on glory, mad as Euripides described all Greece as driven mad (IA 412), intent on their own beautiful deaths by sacrifice, high as only heroes can be high, as they watched themselves perform their high souled epic actions on Jerusalem’s tragic stage.

Later, as I rode home, it seemed to me that I had seen too many Iphigenias in Jerusalem that day.

That was some twenty years ago. Today as I walk through Jerusalem, I see the daughters of those would-be Iphigenias from the ‘90s, together with their Palestinian sisters, all too ready to sacrifice themselves on the altar of their own and their people’s destruction. And again, I think back to R. Yohanan ben Zakk’ai who chose life with compromise over the extreme of martyrdom and who is quoted as saying: “If the children tell you come let us build the Temple, do not listen to them and if the old folks say come let us destroy the Temple listen to them. For the building of children is destruction and the destruction of elders is building.” (Avot de Rabbi Natan B 31.5–6).

Note: An earlier version of this essay was published in Hebrew in Nekuda, No. 180 (September 1994): 50–53.

Molly Levine is a professor of Classics at Howard University. She previously taught Classics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel for many years. Her research focuses on Roman Poetry, cultural diffusion and constructions, gender criticism, and the interface between early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.