Heroes, Maidens, and The Sacrificial Victim: Sacrifices for the Sake of the Other

Katrina Bondari (University of Kansas)

Sacrifice for the Other, according to Lacan, has a political dimension. He explains: "The offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell. . . .But for whoever is capable of turning a courageous gaze towards this phenomenon -- and, once again, there are certainly few who do not succumb to the fascination of the sacrifice in itself -- the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other."[1] Zizek, in Enjoy Your Symptom builds on Lacan's idea in the following fashion: "What is then concealed by the fascinating spectacle of the sacrifice? . . . In its most fundamental dimension, sacrifice is a 'gift of reconciliation' to the Other, destined to appease its desire. Sacrifice is a guarantee that the Other exists.[2]”

The concept of the Other can be useful to consider how sacrifice as a form of cultural referent may be read into classical Greek drama. In this paper, I use the term Other to refer to what Lacan calls “obscure gods” and sacrifice to refer to a destructive act that reinforces this cultural construct. Specifically, I will examine sacrifices for the sake of the Other in The Trojan Women, Iphigenia at Aulis, The Heracleidae, and Hecuba. In these plays, Euripides' heroes most clearly fit the paradigm: hero needs to manipulate the masses, hero convinces the innocent victim that the sacrifice is necessary, hero sacrifices the victim, hero's status as part of the Other is reaffirmed.

Euripides uses the sacrifice of maidens in his plays as one method of debasing the heroes and the gods of the Athenian world. In Hecuba, Troy has fallen to the Greeks and Polyxena, Hecuba's daughter is sacrificed. According to Odysseus: "[she]must die as a victim and prize of honor for the grave of Achilles."[3] Here, Achilles, although dead, is given power and an even higher heroic status. Odysseus further explains in lines 310-315 that Achilles is that for which the Achaian soldiers are willing to die.[4]

A similar situation occurs in Iphigenia at Aulis. Here Agamemnon sends for his daughter, Iphigenia, and sacrifices her to appease Artemis whose prophet claims she will provide a favorable wind for the journey to Troy. Menelaus himself exposes Agamemnon's greed for power: “I remember your face then, bewildered, unhappy, fearing you would never captain your thousand ships or fill up with spears the fields of Priam's Tory. . . .you asked me. What scheme, what strategy can I devise that will prevent the stripping-off of my command and the loss of my glorious name?"[5]

In The Heracleidae, the Athenians are willing to help the Heracleidae and defeat the Argives until they learn that the gods will not help them unless they sacrifice a "young lady of respectable descent."[6] The Athenians are not willing to fight without the glory of knowing they have the support of the gods in battle and do not see a reason to sacrifice one of their own daughters for the sakes of the exiled Heracleidae. One of the daughters of the hero Heracles offers herself as that sacrifice. She becomes the link necessary to preserve the Other, or, the good name of the heroes who will fight only if the power of the gods is with them. Even more ironically, the maiden here, and in the other plays, accepts her fate. And as she accepts this fate, she validates the heroes, both Athenian and Heraclean.

Perhaps the most disgusting sacrifice of a maiden to support the Other in Euripides plays, occurs in The Trojan Women. In this play, the audience learns that Cassandra's holy virginity has been sacrificed to Agamemnon. Agamemnon, considered to be a great hero in the Trojan War, is given his choice of women as a spoil of war. He chooses Cassandra, who is a celibate prophetess to Apollo.

In each of these plays, the heroes make these sacrifices to secure the idea that the Other, here a previously constructed positive picture of the power of the heroes and gods, exists. Euripides reveals the corrupted and ignoble view of the traditional, or constructed, noble hero.