The Songs of Kings was a novel published in 2002 by Barry Unsworth that retells the story of Iphigenia at Aulis told by the Greek tragic poet Euripides.

The Greek army under King Agamemnon is stuck on the island of Aulis en route to Troy because of a mysterious dying down of the winds.

The army is restless and rumor and gossip fly around seeking a reason for the becalming as the men gamble and squabble while they wait and Odysseus connives and schemes behind the scenes with the help of Chasimenos, Agamemnon's chief scribe.

Sisipyla offers to take her place but, at the last moment, convinced of her own destiny, Iphigenia sacrifices herself.

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Hilary Mantel says about the book on one level it is quite clearly, directly related to the present world situation: to wars and rumors of wars, religious intolerance, the power of the storyteller to distort, lose, bury the message..[1] In The Guardian, Alfred Hickling says that Unsworth has recognized the essential modernity of the various retellings of this story and, comparing the impatience of Agamemnon to wage war to the American war in Iraq, says that the novel effortlessly proves that modern life is the stuff of ancient myth.