Ifigenia goes through three lives and becomes a woman of today

The heart and reason, ethics and politics. Insanable dichotomies, today, as in the shadow of the Parthenon or between the folds of the myth that, in some of its faces, is contemporary. As Francesca Ghedini's new book, Ifigenia. The Three Lives of a Woman Who Became a Myth, 'the story of the emotions of a young girl moving towards maturity, of the rebellion of an adult who sees her dreams fade, of the resignation of a woman who finally finds peace at the end of life'. In short, it is a snapshot of many women today, at every latitude. And the charm of this work is its hic et nunc, rooted in the ancient and the modern.

Ghedini, professor emerita of Classical Archaeology at the University of Padua, has behind her important essays on ancient female figures, read through the iconography of ceramics or the frescoes of Pompeii or literary sources in a kaleidoscope of references and suggestions. This was the case for Maledette. The Women of Myth, the study on Circe, Pasiphae, Ariadne, Phaedra and Medea. And so it is with the story of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, which shows the height of Greek tradition and at the same time the ferocity of that world. Not all that glitters is gold, contrary to what we often think, deceived by the beauty of the lines and the balance of thought: 'While Greek culture, to whose achievements in philosophy and historiography, science and art we are still indebted, can be considered one of the highest expressions of Western history, it also shows a closed and obtuse social structure, dominated by a male elite, which kept women, minorities and foreigners in a position of marginalisation and subalternity that is unacceptable to us. Proof of this is the fact that that macho and patriarchal culture was able to condition female thinking to such an extent that Iphigenia not only accepts the absurd tribute of blood, but also shares its rules: 'Besides, I don't even have to love this life of mine too much. You have begotten me not for you alone but for all Greece,' she tells her father on her way to martyrdom. And then he rejoices: 'The life of one man is worth that of a thousand women'".

Agamemnon, lord of nations, is the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy but the divine response is without appeal: 'No ships will sail from the coast unless Artemis has obtained your daughter Iphigenia as an immolated victim'. It is the first unacceptable crossroads in life, how can a father sacrifice his own daughter? And even the ancient sources are not unambiguous in the antithesis akousa/ekousa, that is, of a reluctant/consenting Iphigenia. The akousa, the rebel, is sketched in Aeschylus' Agamemnon; the noble figure of the consenting heroine (ekousa) arises with Euripides in Iphigenia in Aulis. The sword falls on the young girl, but a doe lies on the ground. It is the prodigy that saves Iphigenia, destined, however, for the ends of the earth, far from Mycenae.

In the land of the Tauri, the woman understands what awaits her. Torn from her land, her marriage, her dreams, she becomes guardian of the temple of Artemis, the ruthless goddess responsible for and guarantor of human sacrifice. Pain gives way to acceptance of fate: how many women like Iphigenia? The priestess is alone, with her thoughts, memories, immersed in pages full of scents and rustles, glances and dramas, which give the myth the traits of a novel. Francesca Ghedini constructs a perfect clockwork interlocking of art and feelings because the narrative charge of the frescoes and sculptures also becomes the figure of the story.

The mother Clytemnestra took revenge on her husband Agamemnon and killed him, the son Orestes killed his mother. Blood flows in rivers, it is revenge after revenge. Meanwhile, Iphigenia thinks of her beloved brother Orestes whom she finds in the guise of a prisoner and we find him in so much art, as in the fresco from the House of Caecilius Jocundus in Pompeii.