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A father’s sorrow - The sacrifice of Iphigenia in Ancient Greek art.

I’m bringing you this beautiful post to share some historical moving and touching facts. In modern fiction, Agamemnon is unfairly portrayed as some evil father and a cold-blooded man, when, the ancient Greeks depicted him in a very different light.

The artist Timanthes of Cythnus painted “The sacrifice of Iphigenia” and his portrayal of Agamemnon was praised by many different authors and thinkers as genius and brilliant. It was a piece worthy of the most admiration.

In Natural History (Book 35) Pliny the Elder commented:

As to Timanthes, he was an artist highly gifted with genius, and loud have some of the orators been in their commendations of his Iphigenia, represented as she stands at the altar awaiting her doom. Upon the countenance of all present, that of her uncle (Menelaus) in particular, grief was depicted; but having already exhausted all the characteristic features of sorrow, the artist adopted the device of veiling the features of the victim’s father (Agamemnon), finding himself unable adequately to give expression to his feelings. There are also some other proofs of his (Timanthes’) genius…

Others like Cicero (Oratoria XXII 74), Quintilian (l.c.), and Valerius Maximus (8.11. ext. 6) also praised Timanthes’ choice of depicting Agamemnon as veiled, and even Euripides echoed this image in his Iphigenia in Aulis:

As soon as we reached the grove of Artemis, the child of Zeus, and the flowery meadows, where the Achaean troops were gathered, bringing your daughter with us, at once the Argive army began assembling; but when king Agamemnon saw the maiden on her way to the grove to be sacrificed, he gave one groan, and, turning away his face, let the tears burst from his eyes, as he held his robe before them.

There is an interesting analysis by Henry Fuseli about Timanthes’ painting that says:

Timanthes felt like a father : he did not hide the face of Agamemnon, because it was beyond the power of his art, not because it was beyond the possibility, but because it was beyond the dignity of expression, because the inspiring feature of paternal affection at that moment, and the action which of necessity must have accompanied it, would either have destroyed the grandeur of the character, and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter with the majority of his judges to the imputation of insensibility. He must either have represented him in tears, or convulsed at the flash of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father, or shown him absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction, which levels all features and deadens expression; he might indeed have chosen a fourth mode, he might have exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his attendants, and by this confusion of male and female character, merited the applause of every theatre at Paris. But Timanthes had too true a sense of nature to expose a father’s feelings, or to tear a passion to rags…

This motif of Agamemnon hiding his face would be repeated throughout art history. We have other examples like the etchings of Nicolas Béatrizet (1553), the painting of Corrado Giaquinto, the etching of Pietro Testa (1640) or Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s painting in Villa Valderana, and other paintings of the same artist.

Love, sorrow, duty, and public duty were some of the key concepts, as Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses XII, 24-34: The public good at last prevailed above affection, and the duty of a king at last proved stronger than a father’s love. In my Spanish translation: “the state’s sake defeated the love for a daughter, the king defeated the father”. Agamemnon says in Sophocles’ Ajax: “To put country before children befits a king”. This might be one of the most complex myths (if not the most) from Greek mythology, and it’s sad how now, in modern fiction, it has been deprived of all context, religion, and spirit.