Euripides Rhesus 379-526

Gilbert Murray (Translator)

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Rhesus. Euripides. Gilbert Murray (Translator). London. 1913.

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Current edition Perseus

Rhesus (English) (Euripides. The Rhesus of Euripides. Murray, Gilbert, translator. London: George Allen and Company, Ltd., 1913.)

Editions (1)
Ῥῆσος Perseus (Euripides. Euripidis Fabulae, Vol. III. Murray, Gilbert, editor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913. (Reprinted 1920-1978)) — 380-526 focus
Translations (2)
Rhesus Perseus (Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, Vol. I. Coleridge, Edward P., translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1906. (Modernized by Perseus.)) — 379-525 focus
Rhesus (OCR draft) Experimental (Rhesus. Robert Potter's English verse translation, first published in 1781–1783; text from the 1808 Oxford printing.)

No corresponding passage available

Notes on the current edition

Rhesus

1.
P. 23, 11. 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.
2. P. 25, 11. 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.
3. numeration out of sync: 459 omitted
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.