The Rhesus of Euripides

Captain.

Odysseus (in a tone of authority).

Captain.

Odysseus (to Captain).

Captain.

[Flies at Odysseus, but other men hold him back.

Odysseus.

Voices.

Odysseus (as they attack him).

Captain.

Odysseus.

Captain.

Odysseus.

[He makes off into the darkness. Diomede follows, and some Thracians.

Captain.

A Man.

Captain.

[The Thracians go off in pursuit. Meantime the original Guards who form the Chorus have hastened back. The two Greeks are presently seen crossing at the back in a different direction.

Chorus.

Divers Guards (talking).

Chorus.

Divers Guards (talking).

Voice.

Leader.

[There enters a wounded man, walking with difficulty; he is the Thracian Charioteer who came with Rhesus.

Thracian.

Leader.

Thracian.

Hector.

[One party of Guards lifts carefully the wounded Thracian and goes off bearing him: another departs with the message to Troy.

Chorus.

[In the air at the back there appears a Vision of the Muse holding the body of her dead son Rhesus.

[The Guards hide their heads in their mantles.

Muse.

Hector.

During the following lines Hector goes to his tent to get his shield, and as he enters sees Dolon's bloody wolf-skin hanging. He takes it, looks at it, and throws it down without a word. Then he puts on his helmet, takes his shield and spear, and follows the Guards as they march off.

Chorus.

NOTES

The play presupposes a knowledge of the Iliad in some form, if not exactly in the form which it now wears. We are not only supposed to know that Hector, son of Priam, leads the Trojans and their allies ("Trojans, and Lycians, and Dardans bold": in tragedy they are also called Phrygians) in defence against the Greeks—Argives, Achaeans, Hellênes—under Agamemnon, king of men, and his brother Menelaüs, husband of Helen. This sort of supposition is usual in all Greek tragedy. It merely means that the poet takes for granted the main outlines of the heroic saga. But in this play we are also supposed to take up the story as it stands at the opening of the Doloneia or Tenth Book of the Iliad. Indeed one might almost say that the Rhesus is simply the Doloneia turned into drama and set in the Trojan camp. The only other play that is taken straight from Homer is the Satyr-play, Cyclops, which tells the story of Odyssey IX., but it is likely enough that if we possessed more of the earlier epic literature we should find many other plays closely hugging their traditional sources.—The Trojans are camping out on the field of battle, close to the Greek lines. Hector, always ready for danger, seems to have his tent or log-hut set up quite in the van, just behind the outposts. In Il. X. 415 ff. he is holding counsel with the other chieftains "away from the throng"; the allies are taking their sleep and trusting to the Trojans, who keep awake in groups round the camp fires; no watchword is mentioned.

P. 5, l. 30, The priest.]—He would be needed to make the sacrifice before battle.

P. 5, l. 36, The lash of trembling Pan.]—i.e., a panic.

P. 5, l. 41, Great beacons in the Argive line.]—In the Iliad it is the Trojan watch-fires that are specially mentioned, especially VIII. 553-end. There is no great disturbance in the Greek camp in the Doloneia; there is a gathering of the principal chiefs, a visit to the Guards, and the despatch of the two spies, but no general tumult such as there is in Book II. One cannot help wondering whether our playwright found in his version of the Doloneia a description of fires in the Greek camp, such as our Eighth Book has of those in the Trojan camp. The object might be merely protection against a night attack, or it might be a wish to fly, as Hector thinks. If so, presumably the Assembly changed its mind—much as it does in our Book II.—and determined to send spies.

P. 5, l. 43 ff., The shipyard timbers.]—The Greeks had their ships drawn up on the beach and protected by some sort of wooden "shipyard"; then came the camp; then, outside the whole, a trench and a wall. The fires were in the camp.

P. 8, l. 105, Brother! I would thy wit were like thy spear!]—In Homer Hector is impulsive and over-daring, but still good in counsel. On the stage every quality that is characteristic is apt to be overemphasized, all that is not characteristic neglected. Hence on the Attic stage Odysseus is more crafty, Ajax and Diomedes more blunt, Menelaus more unwarlike and more uxorious than in Homer.

This speech of Aeneas, though not inapposite, is rather didactic—a fault which always remained a danger to Euripides.

P. 10, l. 150 ff., Dolon.]—The name is derived from dolos, "craft." In our version of Homer Dolon merely wears, over his tunic, the skin of a grey wolf. He has a leather cap and a bow. In the play he goes, as Red Indian spies used to go, actually disguised as a wolf, on all fours in a complete wolf-skin. The same version is found on the Munich cylix of the early vase-painter Euphronius (about 500 B.C.), in which Dolon wears a tight-fitting hairy skin with a long tail. The plan can of course only succeed in a country where wild animals are common enough to be thought unimportant. The playwright has evidently chosen a more primitive and romantic version of the story; the Homeric reviser has, as usual, cut out what might seem ridiculous. (See J. A. K. Thomson in Classical Review, xxv. pp. 238 f.)

P. 12, l. 175, Ajax, Îleus' son.]—"Ajax" is mentioned here and at ll. 463, 497, 601, as apparently next in importance to the two Atreidae or to Achilles. That is natural, but it is a shock to have him here described as son of Ileus. In the Iliad we should have had "Ajax son of Telamon." The son of Ileus is "Ajax the less," a hero of the second rank. Scholars have conjectured on other grounds that in some older form of the Iliad-saga Ajax son of Ileus was of much greater importance. The father "Telamon" and the connection with Aegina are neither of them original in the myth.

P. 12, l. 182, Achilles' horses.]—They are as glorious in the Iliad as they are here. Cf. especially the passages where they bear Automedon out of the battle (end of XVI.), and where Xanthos is given a human voice to warn his master of the coming of death (end of XIX.). The heroic age of Greece delighted in horses. Cf. those of Aeneas, Diomedes, Eumêlus, and Rhesus himself.

P. 15, ll. 225-263, Chorus.]—Apollo is appealed to as a God of Thymbra in the Troad, of Delos the Ionian island, and of Lycia in the South of Asia Minor; the god of Asiatics and barbaroi, the enemy of the Achaeans. This is also to a great extent the conception of Apollo in the Iliad, where he fights for Troy and is Hector's special patron. The sudden ferocity towards Helen in the last strophe is quite in the manner of Euripides; cf. Trojan Women, 1107 ff. (p. 65), 766 ff. (p. 49), and often; also Iph. Taur. 438 ff. (p. 21), where her name comes somewhat as a surprise.

The stage directions here are of course conjectural: it does not seem likely that the playwright, having made Dolon describe his wolf's disguise in detail, would waste the opportunity of making him crawl off in it. Cf. on l. 594, p. 63, and at the end of the play.

P. 16, l. 267. Hector is as bluff and hasty here as he is impulsively obstinate in l. 319 ff., p. 19, impulsively frank to Rhesus in l. 393 ff., p. 23, and splendidly courteous under the gibes of the wounded charioteer, l. 856 ff., p. 47. A fine stage character, if not a very subtle study.

P. 17, l. 284 ff. The description of the march of the mountaineers, the vast crowd, the noise, the mixture of all arms, suggests personal observation. A great many fifth-century Athenians had probably served some time or other in Thrace.

P. 20, l. 342, Adrasteia.]—She-from-whom-there-is-no-Running, is a goddess identified with Nemesis, a requiter of sin, especially the sin of pride or overconfidence. In spite of the opening apology this whole chorus, with its boundless exultation, is an offence against her.—It is interesting to notice that a town and a whole district in the north of the Troad was called by her name; the poet is using local colour in making his Trojans here, and Rhesus in l. 468, speak of her. There seems also to be something characteristically Thracian in the story of the Muse and the River, in the title "Zeus of the Dawn" given to Rhesus, in the revelry to be held when Ilion is free, and in the conception of the king in his dazzling chariot, Sun-god-like.

P. 23, ll. 394-453, Speeches of Hector and Rhesus.]—The scene reads to me like a rather crude and early form of the celebrated psychological controversies of Euripides. It is simple, but spirited and in character. The description of Thracian fighting again suggests personal knowledge, and so does the boasting. The Thracians apparently bound themselves with heroic boasts before battle much as Irish and Highland chieftains sometimes did, or as the Franks did with their gabs. (See, e.g., Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, as described in Gaston Paris, Litt. du Moyen Age, I. p. 122 ff.) It was a disgrace if you did not fulfil your gab afterwards.

Rhesus's defence is apparently true, though in a modern play one would have expected some explanation of the rather different story that his mother tells, l. 933 ff., p. 51. Perhaps he did not realise how she was holding him back. In any case ancient technique prefers to leave such details unsettled: cf., for instance, Helen's speech in the Trojan Women, in which the false is evidently mixed up with the true, and they are never separated afterwards.

P. 25, ll. 454 ff. This little Chorus seems to represent—in due tragic convention—an irrepressible outburst of applause from the Trojans, interrupting Rhesus's speech. In spite of the words about possible "wrath" that may follow the Thracian's boasting, the applause excites him at once to a yet bolder gab.

P. 26, l. 480. It may be remarked that the play here uses a fairly common Homeric phrase in a sense which the scholars of our tradition knew but rejected.

P. 27, l. 501 ff. These three achievements of Odysseus are all in the traditional saga. The Rapt of the Palladium, or figure of Pallas, by Odysseus and Diomedes, was in an old lost epic, called The Little Iliad; the Begging in Troy in the Little Iliad and also in Odyssey IV. 242 ff.; the great ambuscades in Odyssey IV. 290 ff., VIII. 493 ff., and in Odysseus's own feigned story, XIV. 468 ff. According to our tradition they belong to a later period of the war than the death of Rhesus, but perhaps the sequence was different, or not so definite, at the time of this play.

P. 28, l. 528. Rhesus shows the simple courage of a barbarian in his contempt for the ruses of Odysseus, the brutality of a barbarian in the methods of punishment he proposes. Such proposals would disgust a Greek; it looks as if they displeased Hector. In any case his abruptness here, and his careful indication of the place where the Thracians are to sleep, far from the rest of the camp, have some dramatic value for the sequel.

Pp. 28-30, ll. 527-564, Stars and Nightingale chorus.]—The beauty of these lines in the Greek is quite magical, but the stage management of the scene is difficult. Apparently Hector (l. 523) bids the Guards come forward from where they are and wait nearer the front for Dolon; obeying this they come up from the orchestra, we may suppose, to the stage. Then watching somewhere near Hector's tent they partly express, in the usual song, the lyrical emotion of the night, partly they chat about Dolon and the order of the watches. The scene is technically very interesting with its rather abrupt introduction of realism into the high convention of tragedy. Meantime the Trojans' time of watch is over and the Lycians, who ought to watch next, have not come. In a modern army it would of course be the duty of the new watch to come and relieve the old; in an ancient barbaric army—characteristically—the old watch had to go and wake the new. You could not, one must suppose, trust them to take their turn otherwise. At the end of the first strophe a Guard suggests that they should rouse the Lycians; at the end of the second the Leader definitely gives the word to do so. The Guards go, and so the stage (and orchestra) is left empty.

This is plain enough; but why were the Guards brought away from their original position—from the orchestra to the stage? Probably to allow the Greek spies to pass on towards the Thracian camp by a different and unoccupied way, not by the way which the Guards had just taken.

The story of the Nightingale is well known: she was Philomêla, or in the older story Procnê, an Athenian princess, wedded to the faithless Thracian king, Têreus. In a fury of vengeance on her husband she slew their only son, Itys or Itylus, and now laments him broken-hearted for ever.

P. 31, l. 567 ff., Odysseus and Diomedes.]—Observe how we are left gradually to discover that they have met and killed Dolon. They enter carrying, as far as we can make out, a wolf-skin that looks like his: they had evidently spoken to him, ll. 572, 575: it is his and they have killed him—l. 592 f.

All the Odysseus-Diomedes scenes have something unusual about them, something daring, turbulent, and perhaps lacking in dramatic tact. The silent rush on Hector's empty tent is hard to parallel. The cruel Athena is Euripidean; but her appearance in the midst of the action is startling, though it may be paralleled from Sophocles' Ajax. In Euripides Gods are generally kept for the prologue or epilogue, away from the ordinary action. (The vision of Iris and Lyssa in the middle of the Heracles has at least the stage clear of mortals and the Chorus apparently in a kind of dream.) Again the conception of Athena pretending to be Cypris is curious. The disguised Athena is common in the Odyssey, but she does not disguise herself as another goddess. (It is sometimes held that this scene requires four actors, which would be a decisive mark of lateness; but this is not really so. The actor who took Odysseus could easily get round in time to take Paris also—especially if he made his exit at l. 626, before Athena sees Paris. And the Greek stage had no objection to such doubling.) Lastly, the scene of turmoil between the spies and the Guards is extraordinary in a tragedy, though it would suit well in a pro-satyric play. See Introduction.

P. 33, l. 594, Stage direction.]—They bear Dolon's "spoils" or "tokens": probably his wolf-skin. If they bring it with them they must probably do something with it, and to hang it where it may give Hector a violent start seems the natural proceeding. Also, they can hardly be carrying it in the scene with the Guards, l. 675 ff., p. 38 f. That would be madness. They must have got rid of it before then, and this seems the obvious place for doing so.

P. 36, ll. 637 ff., Athena as Cypris.]—It is not clear how this would be represented on the Greek stage, though there is no reason to think there would be any special difficulty. On a modern stage it could be worked as follows:—The Goddess will be behind a gauze, so that she is invisible when only the lights in front of the gauze are lit, but visible when a light goes up behind it. She will first appear with helmet and spear in some hard light; then disappear and be rediscovered in the same place in a softer light, the helmet and spear gone and some emblems of Cypris—say a flower and a dove—in their place. Of course the voice will change too.

The next scene, where the two spies are caught and let go, is clear enough in its general structure; the details must remain conjectural.

P. 40, l. 703, What the High God.]—It would be unparalleled in classical Greek to describe a man by his religion; but this phrase seems only to mean: "What is his tribal God?" i.e. what is his tribe? Thus it could be said of Isagoras in Herodotus (v. 66) that his kinsmen sacrificed to Carian Zeus, suggesting, presumably, that he had Carian blood.

P. 42, l. 728, Voice of the wounded man outside.]—The puzzled and discouraged talk of the Guards round the fire, the groaning in the darkness without, the quick alarm among the men who had been careless before, and the slow realisation of disaster that follows—all these seem to me to be wonderfully indicated, though the severe poetic convention excludes any approach to what we, by modern prose standards, would call effective realism.

P. 44, ll. 756-803. This fine vivid speech has something of the famous Euripidean Messenger-Speeches in it; though they are apt to be much longer and also are practically never spoken by a principal in the action, always by a subordinate or an onlooker. Cf. the speech of the Messenger-Shepherd above, p. 17 f. An extreme sharpness of articulation is characteristic of Euripides' later work: each speech, each scene, each effect is isolated and made complete in itself. The Messenger prepares his message, relates his message and goes, not mixing himself up in the further fortunes of the drama. But this extreme pursuit of lucidity and clear outlines is not nearly so marked in the early plays: in the Cyclops the Messenger's speech is actually spoken by Odysseus, ll. 382-436, and the Serving Man and Serving Maid in the Alcestis are not mere abstract Messengers.

P. 46, ll. 810-830, Hector and the Guard.]—There is intentional colour here—the impulsive half-barbaric rage of Hector, the oriental grovelling of the Guard, and of course the quick return to courteous self-mastery with which Hector receives the taunts of the wounded man.

P. 46, l. 819. The Guard seems to think that the spies got past him when he came to Hector's tent at the beginning of the play. It was really later, when he made his men leave their post to wake the Lycians. Perhaps he is lying.

P. 48, l. 876, Justice knows.]—It is a clever touch to leave the Thracian still only half-convinced and grumbling.

P. 49, l. 882, Appearance of the Muse.]—A beautiful scene. It has been thought to come abruptly and, as it were, unskilfully on top of the familiar dialogue between Hector and the Thracian. But the movements, first of soldiers lifting and carrying the wounded man, and then of messengers taking word to Priam for burial of the men slain, make the transition much easier.

P. 50, l. 895 ff. and l. 906 ff., A dirge of the Thracian mountains.]—Such dirges must have struck the Greeks as the fragments of Ossian struck the Lowlanders among us. I have found that the dirge here goes naturally into a sort of Ossianic rhythm.

P. 51, l. 915. The speech of the Muse seems like the writing of a poet who is, for the moment, tired of mere drama, and wishes to get back into his own element. Such passages are characteristic of Euripides.—The death of Rhesus seems to the Muse like an act of vengeance from the dead Thamyris, the Thracian bard who had blasphemed the Muses and challenged them to a contest of song. They conquered him and left him blind, but still a poet. The story in Homer is more terrible, though more civilised: "They in wrath made him a maimed man, they took away his heavenly song and made him forget his harping."

Thamyris, the bard who defied Heaven; Orpheus, the bard, saint, lover, whose severed head still cried for his lost Eurydice; Musaeus, the bard of mystic wisdom and initiations—are the three great legendary figures of this Northern mountain minstrelsy.

P. 52, l. 950. These short speeches between Hector and the Leader of the Guard make a jarring note in the midst of the Muse's lament. Perhaps it would not be so if we knew how the play was produced, but at present this seems like one of several marks of comparative crudity in technique which mark the play, amid all its daring and inventiveness.

P. 52, l. 962 ff., My son shall not be laid in any grave.]—Like other Northern barbaric princes, such as Orpheus (l. 972 below) and Zalmoxis (Herodotus, iv. 95) and Holgar the Dane, Rhesus lies in a hidden chamber beneath the earth, watching, apparently, for the day of uttermost need when he must rise to help his people. There is no other passage in Greek tragedy where such a fate is attributed to a hero, though the position of Darius in the Persae and Agamemnon in the Choephori or the Electra is in some ways analogous.

The last lines of the Muse have a very Euripidean ring: cf. Medea, l. 1090 (p. 61, "My thoughts have roamed a cloudy land"), Alcestis, l. 882.

P. 54, ll. 983-end. This curious and moving end—not in death or peace but in a girding of tired men to greater toil—reminds one of the last words of The Trojan Women: "Forth to the long Greek ships And the sea's foaming," and the last words of the Chanson de Roland there quoted.

The Trojans evidently go forth under the shadow of disaster, though with firmness and courage. The stage direction is of course purely conjectural. If Diomedes left some sign of Dolon's death for Hector to see, as he probably must have done, then Hector must at some time or other see it. If so, this seems to be the place.

THE END

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
Edinburgh & London

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Published by William Heinemann

HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE. 1897. 6s.

CARLYON SAHIB: A Play. 1899. 1s. 6d.

ANDROMACHE: A Play. 1900. 1s. 6d.

Published by the Clarendon Press

EURIPIDIS FABULAE: Brevi Adnotatione Critica Instructae, Vols. I. II. and III. 1901-1909. Third Edition. From 3s. each.

THE RISE OF THE GREEK EPIC. Second Edition. 1911. 7s. 6d. net.

FOUR STAGES OF GREEK RELIGION. 1913. 6s.

NEFREKEPTA: An Egyptian Story Done into Verse. 1910. 4s. 6d. net.

Published by George Allen & Co., Ltd.

EURIPIDES: Hippolytus; Bacchae; Aristophanes' 'Frogs.' With an Appendix on The Lost Tragedies of Euripides and an Introduction on The Significance of the Bacchae in Athenian History, and 12 Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top, 7s. 6d. net.

Also separately

PLAYS: Translated into English Rhyming Verse, with Explanatory Notes.

FOOTNOTE

[1] Perdrizet, Cultes et Mythes de Pangée, p. 17.