In the final sacrificial scene of Euripides' play, the goddess Artemis substitutes a deer for Iphigenia, who is swept through the heavens by the gods to Tauris.

Based on the writings of Pausanias, Racine decided upon an alternative dramatic solution for the ending: another princess Ériphile is revealed to be the true "Iphigénie" whose life is sought by the gods and thus the tragic heroine of the play is spared.

In Achille's absence, Ulysse convinces Agamemnon that his daughter's sacrifice is necessary to avenge the honour of Helen of Troy and for the eternal glory of Greece.

The arrival is announced of Clytemnestre and Iphigénie with Eriphile, a young girl in their charge, captured by Achille on the island of Lesbos, an ally of Troy: the message has not reached them.

Clytemnestra, outraged after having at last received her husband's message from Arcas, tells Iphigénie that they cannot stay, Achille having reportedly chosen not to marry her because of Eriphile.

Prevented from entering the king's presence, Clytemnestre implores Achille to help, but Iphigénie prevails upon him to wait until Agamemnon is obliged to fetch her in person and is pierced by the extreme suffering of his wife and daughter.

The plight of Iphigénie only serves to increase Eriphile's envy of her: Achille's efforts to save her; Agamemnon's continuing hesitation despite the secrecy of the sacrificial victim's name.

In a heated exchange, Agamemnon defies Achille's attempts to question the personal actions of a king and commander, saying that he must share responsibility for Iphigénie's fate as one of the soldiers pushing to leave for Troy and hinting that his services are not indispensable.

Arcas comes to fetch her on behalf of Achille, who with his soldiers has interrupted the sacrifice; but then Ulysse arrives to reassure Clytemnestre that her daughter has been saved as the result of an unexpected miracle.

At the moment that Achille and the other Greeks were facing each other for combat, the high priest Calchas revealed that, according to the oracle, Eriphile, the secret daughter of Hélène and Thésée, was also called "Iphigénie" and it was she whom the gods had required to be sacrificed.

Eriphile then stabbed herself on the altar, her death being immediately followed by a cosmic cataclysm: lightning, thunder, winds, motions of the waves and a pyre of flames in which the goddess Diana herself appeared.

The lost painting of Timanthes from Ancient Greece copied in a first-century fresco in Pompeii was one of the most celebrated representations of the sacrifice of Iphigenia from antiquity, to which Cicero, Quintillian, Valerius Maximus and Pliny the Elder all made reference.

André Felibien, secretary of the Royal Academy of architecture, recorded his impressions in a booklet: The German classical composer Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera Iphigénie en Aulide, first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1774, was based on Racine's play.