IN PROMOTING GREEK AND ROMAN ideals of public service, early modern humanism finds many ways to extol dedication to the commonweal. Within narrative or dramatic contexts indebted to republicanism or mixed monarchy, episodes involving the rule of law (implacable and, ideally, impartial) expose the tyrant’s contempt for due process or, alternatively, occasion inspiring displays of elite male honor. Such honor demands that the ruler or individual male citizen place the good of the polity before individual and private interests. Where warfare demands sacrifice of the bodily self, civic honor expects a more indirect, ethically significant offering. With its austere expectation that familial bonds be subordinated to those of the state, republicanism may even be disposed to imagine self-sacrifice that involves a child. Livy’s enormously influential history of Rome, for example, shows its liberator, Lucius Junius Brutus, authorizing the execution of his traitorous freeborn sons almost immediately after becoming consul of the newly founded Republic. Equally memorably, Livy presents Verginius slaying his only daughter, whose unlawful enslavement by the tyrannous Appius Claudius represents the enslavement of Rome itself.

On the other hand, human sacrifice is practiced—so early modern humanists argue— only by barbarians (within Graeco-Roman traditions) or idolaters (within Hebraic and Christian ones). In colonialist literature, both barbarism and idolatry are located outside the boundaries of European Christendom in the ritual human sacrifice said to be performed by Indigenous Americans. What, then, did early modern Christian humanists make of Jephtha, the military leader of Judges 11 who ritually sacrifices his only daughter? More specifically, how does George Buchanan, the author of an important sixteenth-century treatise justifying political resistance, represent this sacrifice in his scripturally based drama Iephthes? As a military commander, Jephtha often figured in discussions of the “ just” war (in his case, against the Ammonites). As one of ancient Israel’s judges, he is also a representative of Israel’s pre-monarchical mode of self-governance, which, especially for Dutch and English varieties of republicanism, had something of republican Rome’s simplicity and primitive vigor. Jephtha also, however, appears as the central actor in a disturbing episode of child-sacrifice that was very well known in the early modern period. Jephtha’s plight was the subject of works ranging from learned biblical commentaries and the high-cultural tragedies discussed here to the ballad cited by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and puppet plays that were performed in the first few decades of the eighteenth century at London fairs. The blood-curdling tension and gendered, intergenerational conflict created by Jephtha’s vow became a means of exploring ideologically charged interrelations between public and domestic realms, as well as among military, political, parental, and religious modes of power. It is the basis of Buchanan’s 1554 tragedy, Iephthes sive votum ( Jephtha or the Vow), which in turn is the model for the Dutch dramatist Joost van den Vondel’s Jephtha of Offerbelofte (1659) ( Jepthah or the Sacrifice-Vow) and George Handel’s oratorio Jephtha (1752). Although Buchanan is now best remembered as the author of the 1579 radical treatise, De Jure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship Among the Scots), during his lifetime and well into the seventeenth century he was widely regarded as western Europe’s pre-eminent neo-Latin poet. Buchanan translated two of Euripides’ dramatic works into Latin and wrote two original dramas of his own, Iephthes and Baptistes (1577) (The Baptist), both of which were likely com­posed in the 1540s—that is, significantly earlier than De Jure and other major European treatises on political resistance.

Baptistes was translated into English and published as a text validating resistance against tyranny during the preliminary stages of the English civil wars in 1641. Not having been similarly conscripted, Iephthes is generally thought to be less politically engaged. I shall emphasize features of classical republicanism informing this early work (including the topos of slavery and tyranny so central to early modern discourses of resistance), thereby bringing it closer to Baptistes and De Jure. As I understand it, Buchanan’s Iephthes obliquely undermines both the identification of paternal with political sovereignty and the notion that the ruler stands in privileged association with the Deity, views that play a prominent role in later absolutist doctrines of sovereignty and that inform the third play that I discuss in this essay, John Christopherson’s nearly contemporaneous drama on Jephtha’s sacrifice.

Although it has occasionally been mentioned in conjunction with Buchanan’s Iephthes, Christopherson’s play, originally in Greek, has not been examined alongside it, nor has the possibility been raised that these plays may be in dialogue with one another. (The range of dates editors have proposed for composition is quite close: between 1543 and 1547 for Christopherson’s, and between 1542 and 1545 for Buchanan’s.) There is no evidence that the two authors were acquainted, and at the time the plays were written Christopherson was in England and Buchanan in France. It seems remarkable, however, that at roughly the same period they both chose precisely the same subject matter for a sacred drama modelled on Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (hereafter Iphigenia). One or both texts could conceivably have circulated in manuscript (Christopherson also pro­duced a Latin version), and either drama could have been described by an acquaintance who had attended a performance or had read it. Although denominational and ideological differences were not as fixed or charged in the 1540s as they were later to become, had they known of one another, Christopherson and Buchanan certainly would have been aware of sharply conflicting values. The purpose of this essay, however, is not to advance a conjectural argument regarding an intertextual relationship between the two dramas, but rather to tease out the ideological implications of early modern interpretations of the Jephtha narrative. My primary interest is in demonstrating how, when read in conjunction with both Christopherson’s and Vondel’s plays, Buchanan’s representation of Jephtha’s plight articulates what emerges only later in polemical and theoretical texts as an opposition between patriarchal absolutism and justifications of political resistance, the latter of which gives pride of place to the tyrant who can be resisted, not the father whose authority is beyond dispute.