Tauris

Tauris, the land of the Tauri or Taurians, was the mountainous country on the Crimean peninsula on the north shore of the Black Sea. In Greek myth it is the place to which Artemis carried Iphigenia, who became priestess in a temple where strangers were sacrificed, and the place to which Orestes was sent to bring back the goddess’s image.

The Land of the Tauri

Herodotus describes the Tauric country as a hilly land projecting into the Black Sea, inhabited by the Tauric nation as far as the Rough Peninsula, and he compares it to the part of Attica around Sunium if a different people held it (Histories 4.99). He says that the Tauri lived by plundering and war. They sacrificed to a “Virgin” goddess all shipwrecked men and any Greeks they captured at sea. After the first rites they struck the victim on the head with a club; according to some accounts, they then set the head on a pole and threw the body from the cliff on which their temple stood, while others said the body was buried. The Tauri themselves said that the goddess to whom they sacrificed was Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon (Herodotus, Histories 4.103). Strabo also mentions the Tauri, a Scythian tribe, whose bands of pirates gathered in the harbour called Symbolon Limen near the city of Chersonesus. In that city, he says, was a temple of the Parthenos, a certain deity, and the cape in front of it, called Parthenium, had her shrine and wooden image (Geography 7.4.2).

Iphigenia in Tauris

The Greek myth of Tauris is told most fully in Euripides’ play Iphigenia Among the Taurians. In the prologue, Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, explains that Calchas told Agamemnon that the fleet at Aulis would not sail until Artemis received Iphigenia as a victim. She was brought to Aulis on the pretext of a marriage to Achilles, and she was lifted above the altar to be killed, but Artemis stole her away, put a deer in her place for the Achaeans, and settled her in the land of the Taurians (Euripides, Iphigenia Among the Taurians 1–30). Euripides gives the vow to sacrifice the most beautiful creature of the year as the reason. Other sources give a different cause for the goddess’s anger. In Sophocles’ Electra, Agamemnon shot a dappled stag in the grove of Artemis and made a boast about it (Electra 566–576), and the Epitome of Apollodorus says that he had said Artemis herself could not shoot better, and that Atreus had never sacrificed the golden lamb to her (Epitome 3.21). Apollodorus adds that some said Artemis made Iphigenia immortal (Epitome 3.22).

The Temple and Thoas

In Euripides, the ruler of the Taurians is Thoas, a barbarian king who, as Iphigenia says, received his name from his swiftness of foot. Artemis made Iphigenia priestess in the temple. By a custom of the city established long before, she sacrificed every Greek man who landed in the country. She began the rites, and other people carried out the unspeakable parts inside the shrine (Iphigenia Among the Taurians 31–41). The altar dripped with the blood of Greeks, and the cornices were hung with spoils of slain strangers (Iphigenia Among the Taurians 72–75).

Orestes and Pylades

Orestes came to Tauris because of an oracle of Apollo. After he avenged his father by killing his mother, the Furies drove him from land to land. Apollo told him to go to the borders of the Tauric land, where Artemis had an altar, take the statue of the goddess, which was said to have fallen there from heaven, and bring it to Athens. If he did this, he would have rest from his labours (Iphigenia Among the Taurians 77–92). He came with his friend Pylades, and the two were caught by the herdsmen and brought to Thoas, who sent them to the priestess. Apollodorus gives a short version of the same events (Epitome 6.27).

Recognition and Escape

Iphigenia, who did not know the strangers, was willing to spare one of them if he would carry a letter to her friends at Argos. Orestes insisted that Pylades be the one to go, so that he himself would die, and when the letter was read, brother and sister recognized each other. Iphigenia then told Thoas that the strangers were polluted by the blood of kin and that she must wash them, and the statue as well, in the sea. In this way she led them and the image toward their ship. When Thoas set out after them, Athena appeared and told him to stop. She said that Orestes had come in obedience to Apollo’s oracle, to take his sister and the sacred image to her land, and that Poseidon would calm the sea for the voyage. Thoas accepted her words (Iphigenia Among the Taurians 1435–1485).

The Statue in Greece

Athena told Orestes to build a temple at Halae, at the edge of Attica, near the Carystian ridge, and set the image in it, to be named for the Tauric land and for his labours. Men would call Artemis there Tauropolos, and at her festival a sword would be held to a man’s throat to draw blood, in payment for the sacrifice of Orestes. Iphigenia was to be the temple keeper at Brauron, to be buried there, and to receive the robes of women who died in childbirth (Iphigenia Among the Taurians 1446–1467).

Later writers disagreed about where the image went. Pausanias says that at Brauron there was an old wooden image of Artemis, the Tauric Artemis as she was called, and that Iphigenia, according to the legend, landed there with the image when she fled from the Tauri (Description of Greece 1.23.7; 1.33.1). The Spartans said that the wooden image of Artemis Orthia at the Limnaeum was the one that Orestes and Iphigenia stole from the Tauric land and brought there because Orestes was king in Sparta, and Pausanias thought this more probable than the Athenian story. He adds that the Cappadocians on the Euxine and the Lydians who had a sanctuary of Artemis Anaitis claimed the image too (Description of Greece 3.16.7–8).

Tauris Sources

Euripides, Iphigenia Among the Taurians 1–41, 72–92, and 1435–1485; Sophocles, Electra 566–576; Herodotus, Histories 4.99 and 4.103; Strabo, Geography 7.4.2; Apollodorus, Epitome 3.21–22 and 6.27; Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.23.7, 1.33.1, and 3.16.7–8.

See Also: Iphigenia, Trojan War, Agamemnon, Artemis, Orestes, Clytemnestra, Pylades, Thoas