IPHIGENIA:
Speed home from Troy, I pray thee, father, as soon as thou hast triumphed there.AGAMEMNON:
There is a sacrifice have first to offer here.IPHIGENIA:
Yea, 'tis thy duty to heed religion with aid of holy rites.AGAMEMNON:
Thou wilt witness it, for thou wilt be standing near the laver.
It is not the case that neither Agamemnon nor Calchas was to blame for the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
If Agamemnon is guilty of anything, it is in lacking the courage to oppose Calchas; was then a coward in the face of the priest of Apollo. However blameworthy he is in this regard, however, it was not for recognizing his own cowardice that Agamemnon’s face was twisted into a horrible grimace as the priests held the knife; rather, it was his knowledge that what he was doing — sacrificing his own firstborn daughter in response to the oracle of Calchas, to ensure fair winds for Troy — was wrong. However, Agamemnon received his Karmic comeuppance at the hands of his wife, Clytemestra, whose ostensible motive for his murder was, in fact, the sacrifice of their daughter at Aulis.
Calchas, for his part, seems rather an emissary of Eris than of Apollo, as Agamemnon accuses him before Achilles in the first book of the Iliad. All the women in Agamemnon’s life – daughter, lover, and wife – are sacrifices to some god. Two of these, Iphigenia and Chryseïs, are lost as a direct result Calchas’ prophesies; the end of the first was Agamemnon’s murder at Clytemestra’s hands, of the other, the split with Achilles that nearly destroyed the Greek army at Troy. The last is, if anything, a sacrifice to Apollo, the God who inspired and sanctioned Orestes’ vengeance against his mother.
Either Clytemestra’s murder was just, or it was not. If Clytemestra’s murder was just, then the prophesy was itself unjust; if the prophesy was just, then Clytemestra’s vengeance was unjust. Again, if the prophesy was unjust, then it was never the message of any god. But if Clytemestra’s vengeance was unjust, then it was avenged by Orestes, who made her pay the penalty. If Clytemestra’s vengeance was just, then Orestes’ murder of her is not.
It may be that the series is nothing more than a series of unfortunate events, injustice compounded of injustice, until justice – the deposition of a tyrant and restoration of a just king to the throne – intervenes, only when no more damage can be done. But what of Calchas? Can he be to blame for the messages of the god? If so — and Lucretius implies that it is so — then we must accept Lucretius’ view that human sacrifice is one of the evils which religion (or what is done in the name of religion) is capable of and has, not uncommonly, done.
If, as Plato writes, God has no part in evil, but the prophesies of Calchas in every case lead to evil, then the evil must be on the part of Calchas, priest and prophet of Apollo.
But then the messages were not inspired by the god; Calchas’ prophesies were then false and lies, calculated by him to the effects that they achieved: the disastrous split between Achilles and Agamemnon, and later the bloodbath in the house of Atreus caused by the murder of Iphigenia, which was for nothing.
Calchas, then, must have hated Agamemnon wholeheartedly, for no God, nor any rational man, could have commanded the atrocity. Again, it was not Calchas who attempted to mediate the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles; that task was left to Nestor, the true sage of the expedition.
Agamemnon received his comeuppance; but what happened to Calchas, who seems to have walked free without so much as a fair and proper trial, we are not told.
This suggests an Old Comedy-style contest at law between the Plaintiff, Agamemnon and the Defendant, Calchas, to determine who was the cause of the bloodshed that rocked the house of Atreus. Odysseus would be a fit judge of their shades, perhaps during the Adventures with the Oar; even better would be Nestor or his shade.
Agamemnon’s shade is in Hades, Clytemestra’s revenge absolving him of further guilt for the crime of Clytemestra’s murder. He is suing the shade in Hades, making the case that he is guilty of many crimes he never stood trial for in life, and that his soul should be condemned to Tartarous, with the tormented Titans.
Calchas’ defenses: he was obeying and communicating the will of the god, and without the action that he prescribed, the ships would be at Aulis still, or the armies of the Greeks destroyed by plague at Troy. To the second, the argument is invalid, by the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. To the first the response is Platonic: God is not the author of evil, but the results of the prophesies of Calchas were uniformly evil.
For Lucretius, then, Calchas becomes the epitome of the evil augur: for we have shown that his prophesies and the authority invested in him as official soothsayer, were nothing more than a means, to the end of the destruction of Agamemnon. The effect of all this is to deny to the superstitious a knowledge of the true operation of the universe — for where superstition reigns, there can be no science, no knowledge of the working of the universe; and conversely where this is lacking, men will embrace superstition and oracle.
Therefore, let us find Calchas guilty of conspiracy in the murder of Iphigenia at Aulis, and of treason in the prophesy concerning Chryseïs. Let the Defendant therefore be condemned to an eternity in Tartarous.