Iphigenia in Tauris is a drama by the playwright Euripides, written between 414 BC and 412 BC. It has much in common with another of Euripides's plays, Helen, as well as the lost play Andromeda, and is often described as a romance, a melodrama, a tragi-comedy or an escape play.
Iphigenie (1871) by Anselm Feuerbach
Pylades and Orestes Brought as Victims before Iphigenia (1766) by Benjamin West
Iphigenia's escape from Tauris. Ancient Roman relief, end of a marble sarchophagus. Middle of the 2nd century A.D.
Iphigenia in Tauride, decoration in Pompeii
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete. There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Bust of Euripides
2nd century AD statue of Euripides, Louvre, Paris
19th century statue of Euripides in a niche on the Semperoper, Germany
Ancient Roman wall painting from House of the Vettii in Pompeii, showing the death of Pentheus, as portrayed in Euripides's Bacchae