Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When the Achaean fleet first gathered at Aulis, Agamemnon hunting in Artemis’s grove killed a sacred deer (or boasted he surpassed the goddess in the hunt). Artemis sent contrary winds and held the ships. Calchas declared that the goddess would not be appeased unless Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. Odysseus and Diomedes (or Odysseus alone) went to Mycenae/Argos and fetched the girl on the pretext of marriage to Achilles. Clytemnestra brought her; the deception was exposed too late. At the altar Iphigenia was led as victim. In the *Cypria* and in Apollodorus, Artemis snatched her away at the last moment, substituted a deer (or hind) in her place, and carried the maiden to the land of the Taurians to be her priestess. The winds then blew; the fleet could sail. Euripides’ *Iphigenia at Aulis* stages the moral agony of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Achilles and, in the transmitted ending, likewise reports the miraculous substitution—consistent with *Iphigenia among the Taurians*, where the rescued girl lives among the Tauri. Aeschylus’s *Agamemnon* choral memory darkens the deed toward a completed slaughter without on-stage rescue; that harsher tragic accent may be catalogued apart if treated as a truly different ending. This entry follows the cyclic/Apollodorean (and Euripidean TA-compatible) line: the sacrifice is prepared and apparently carried out, but Artemis saves Iphigenia by the deer.