Iphigenia at Aulis.

    On his way to join in the Trojan War, Agamemnon killed a deer in a grove sacred to Artemis (Diana). In retribution, the goddess sent adverse winds that kept the Greek fleet in port at Aulis. The soothsayer Calchas decreed thàt the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia, was needed in order to turn ,the winds in the Greeks’ favor. On the pretext that she was to marry Achilles, Iphigenia was brought from Mycenae with her mother, Clytemnestra. According to one version of the story, the sacrifice took place; another says that at the moment of sacrifice Artemis snatched Iphigenia from the altar and replaced her with a deer.
    In the postclassical era, especially the Baroque, the story has been a recurrent subject for opera and for drama. It has been less commonly treated in the visual arts.
    
    Classical Sources. Homer, Iliad 9.145; Odyssey 1.40—44, 3.i93ff., 306—10, 4.546ff. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis. Pa-cuvius, Chryses. Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.84—103. Cicero, De officiis 3.25. Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.1-38, 13.182— 95. Apollodorus, Biblioteca £3.21—22. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.33.1, 1.41.1, 1.431, 2.22.7, 2.35.1, 3.16.7, 7.26.5, 9.19.6. Hyginus, Tabulae 98.