Abstract
After an incursion into tragedies that evoke human sacrifice, animal sacrifice is analyzed in three tragedies: Aeschylus'Agamemnon , Euripides' Electra and Sophocles' Antigone. The Agamemnon, in which the human sacrifice of Iphigenia is described right up to the moment of carrying her over the altar, also evokes animal sacrifices, which are all easily recognizable social devices in the form of thanksgiving to the gods of the city or household. But here again, the perversion of the process is the key to their place in the plot, and these operations are analyzed, whether it's Clytemnestra's offerings to all the city gods upon the announcement of Agamemnon's return, or Cassandra's sacrifice of welcome to the king and integration at the altar of Zeus Ktesios, which turns into a double murder. In Euripides'Electra, two sacrifices also end in murder: Aegisthe's sacrifice to the Nymphs is interrupted when Orestes puts him to death over the young bovine immolated for the goddesses, and Clytemnestra's is part of a deceptive good-birth sacrifice that ends with the queen's body falling onto her lover's corpse. Finally, in Antigone, the soothsayer Tiresias, very worried about the bad omens he receives from the birds, begins a divinatory sacrifice that goes horribly wrong: the gods' share refuses to burn, and this is the concrete, frightening translation of the breakdown in communication between the city and its deities.
