Creon and his men were horrified by the sudden sight - brutal and irrevocable - of Antigone's corpse "hanged by the neck," kremasten auchenos. But the word most used by Euripides to describe those hapless women, hanging with their neck in a noose, is dere. A richer word, no doubt, because it carries a much stronger affective charge. What the daughter of Oedipus, silent and abandoned, has imprisoned in the knot of her veil, auchen, is the neck seen from the nape. Dere, on the contrary, is "the front of the neck, the throat," a strong point of feminine beauty - whether one thinks of the "splendid throat" of Aphrodite by which, in the third book of the Iliad, Helen recognizes the goddess; of the "delicate throat" that Sappho's lover delighted in covering with flowers; or again the "neck of startling whiteness" that Medea, under her nurse's gaze, turns to hide her tears. But here is also what, in an ecstasy of mourning, virgins and women delight in tearing, sharp nail on sharp throat.
Dere is all these things, and, for a woman, it is above all the point of greatest vulnerability. It is by that part that one hangs, and by that part also that death comes to young girls chosen for sacrifie. For in accounts of immolation dere means the exact spot where the officiating priests apply the knife at the moment of execution. So Iphigenia remembers in Tauris: "Ah, when my poor father brought his sword near to my throat..." So Achilles warns the daughter of Agamemnon: "When you see the sword very near to your throat..." Iphigenia's throat, the throat of Polyxena covered in gold, which will soon be stained purple with blood.
There is no point in multiplying examples of Dere in a sacrificial context. All that one need say is that, where there is dere, there is still breath and life. At this word, more than once, the description of an immolation pauses as the menace is for a moment held back, and the virgin, with the knife at her throat, still breathes. But where a throat has already been cut or is being penetrated by the sword, dere gives way to laimos, the word for the throat considered as the gullet; for once the fair surface of the neck has been pierced, death starts to slip into the interior of the body. So the language of tragedy is again, as always, precise, and so too are the descriptions. At the moment of striking Iphigenia, the priest examines the throat (laimos) of the victim with the sharp eye of an anatomist, to pick out the point where the knife will sink in best. In the Orests, just as he thinks he can at last slay Helen as an expiatory victim, the hero forces her neck (dere) against her left shoulder rand prepares to "drive his black sword into her throat [laimos]." More than one commentator has rightly recognized in this the exact picture of a sacrificer in action.
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