Cimon's Love for and Marriage to Iphigenia

Cimon's Love for and Marriage to Iphigenia is a romance shaped by transformation, force, and reversals of fortune. Cimon’s first sight of Iphigenia awakens a new capacity for admiration; his love then drives him to seize her from the voyage that would carry her to Rhodes. Although the story ends with their marriage and long life together, Iphigenia’s tears and condemnation of his presumption make clear that Cimon’s account of the affair as a triumph of love does not erase the coercion by which it proceeds.

Awakening to Love

Cimon encounters Iphigenia asleep in a green clearing in May, beside a spring. He has been regarded as uncultivated, but now studies her beauty with intense attention, praising her features and feeling himself become, in the story’s terms, a judge of beauty. He longs to see her eyes, yet holds back from waking her because he suspects she may be a goddess and believes divine things deserve reverence. When she wakes and sees him standing over her, she becomes wary of his fixed gaze and leaves with her attendants. The beginning of the relationship is therefore unequal: Cimon’s inward transformation is immediate, while Iphigenia’s first response is caution.

Love as a Claim and a Seizure

Cimon’s attachment becomes the motive for an armed attack at sea. After secretly recruiting young noblemen and equipping a ship, he intercepts the vessel carrying Iphigenia toward Rhodes, where she is to marry Pasimondas. Cimon grapples the ship to his own, boards it, and overpowers its defenders. He tells the Rhodians that he seeks Iphigenia, not their goods, and insists that he intends to take the place of the husband she was promised. The distinction he draws between love and robbery is his own: the action itself is a violent seizure, and the Rhodians surrender Iphigenia under compulsion.

Iphigenia’s response resists Cimon’s romantic framing. Seeing her weep, he tries to comfort her by claiming that his long love makes him more deserving of her than Pasimondas, whose claim rests on a formal promise. Yet aboard the ship she grieves, fears the storm, curses Cimon’s love, and says that the gods oppose his effort to make her his wife against their will. Her distress makes the conflict between his desire and her consent explicit, even as the narrative later brings them to marriage.

Storm, Reversal, and Further Violence

Cimon turns away from Cyprus and sets course for Crete, hoping to find safety among his kin and friends there. Before four hours have passed, however, a violent storm rises. The winds and waves leave the crew unable to steer, and the ship is driven toward Rhodes, the very destination from which Cimon had taken Iphigenia. At dawn they discover that they have come close to the ship they had released the previous day. Cimon tries to put out to sea, but the wind forces his vessel ashore. The apparent success of his rescue thus turns into a trap: fortune returns the party to the place they had hoped to escape.

The relationship’s eventual resolution follows another armed intervention. Cimon and Lysimachus, with their companions, break into a wedding celebration and carry off the women they love. When Pasimondas confronts them, Cimon kills him; Ormisdas is also killed in the fighting. The group reaches Crete, where Cimon and Lysimachus marry Iphigenia and Cassandra with public ceremony. Their actions leave uproar in Cyprus and Rhodes, and their eventual return to their respective countries comes only after a period of exile and the intervention of their friends and kin.

Marriage and Narrative Tension

Cimon returns to Cyprus with Iphigenia, while Lysimachus returns to Rhodes with Cassandra; the story says that each man lives long and happily with his beloved. For Cimon and Iphigenia, the ending converts a relationship begun in private admiration and pursued through abduction into a recognized marriage. The contrast between those stages matters: the narrative grants Cimon a conventional romantic conclusion, but it has also shown Iphigenia’s fear, grief, and explicit objection to being taken against her will. Her eventual place as his wife resolves the plot’s marriage question without making the earlier violence disappear.

The couple’s course also belongs to a story of unstable fortune. Cimon’s transformation begins in a quiet woodland encounter, his attempt to secure Iphigenia leads to a storm and a return to danger, and their final union follows a second, bloodier raid and a period of exile. Love gives Cimon purpose and propels the action, but it does not guarantee a smooth passage from desire to partnership; the route to the story’s happy ending is repeatedly redirected by force, resistance, and chance.