Von Iphigenie zu Medea

For the relationship between Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenie on Tauris] and Grillparzer’s trilogy Das goldene Vließ [The Golden Fleece] there are two structural features of fundamental importance? the evaluative opposition of the Greek and the barbaric and the reference to the genre of Greek mythological tragedy, in which that opposition has an ethnocentric function, which applies also to modern (e.g. ethnographic) transmissions of the concept of barbarism. Grillparzer’s tragic exposure of humanism stands in contrast to Goethe’s humanistic engagement with this tradition.