THIS short play needs rather a long introduction. It has
had the bad fortune to become a literary problem, and
almost all its few readers are so much occupied with
the question whether it can be the work of Euripides
-and if not his, whose?-that they seldom allow themselves to take it on its merits as a stirring and adventurous piece, not particularly profound or subtle,
but always full of movement and life and possessing at
least one or two scenes of great and penetrating
beauty.
The outlines of the Rhesus Question are these.
The Rhesus appears in the MSS. of Euripides; we
know from the Athenian Didascaliae, or Records of
Performances, that Euripides wrote a play of the
name; some passages in it are quoted by early
Alexandrian writers as from "the Rhesus of Euripides;" no passage is quoted under any other name.
This seems about as strong as external evidence
need be. Yet the ancient introduction to the play
mentions that "some think the play spurious," and
expresses the odd opinion that " it suggests rather the
Sophoclean style." Further, it tells us that, besides
the present opening scene, there were extant two different prologues, one of which was "quite prosy and
perhaps concocted by the actors." This seems to show
that the Alexandrian scholars who tried for the first
time to collect the complete works of Euripides, some
two centuries after his death, found this play current
as " Euripides' Rhesus," but that it was credited with
three different openings and that its style was felt to
be somehow peculiar.
The peculiarity of style is incontestable. It does
not to our judgment suggest Sophocles. It suggests a
young man imitating Aeschylus, and it has a great
number of Euripidean expressions. Hermann, who
collected what he took to be "imitations" of early
poets in the Rhesus, noted only 25 of Sophocles, 38
of Aeschylus, and 84 of Euripides.
Is it, then, the work of a somewhat imitative fourth-century poet, naturally influenced by his great forerunners? Hardly: because, with a few exceptions,
the verse and diction of the Rhesus, are markedly early
in character, the verse severe and smooth, the diction
direct and rather grandiose, the choral lyrics strictly
relevant. In Euripides' later years Drama was moving
rapidly away from all these things and, as far as we
can judge, continued so moving after his death. If
the Rhesus is a post-classical play it can hardly be
honest fourth-century work: it must be deliberately
archaistic, a product of the Alexandrian spirit if not
actually of the Alexandrian age. This is what Hermann believed. But unfortunately it is not a bit
more like our fragments of Alexandrian tragedy than
it is like the Medea; and, further, if it is an Alexandrian pseudo-classic tragedy, how did it succeed in
deceiving the Alexandrian critics, detectives specially
trained for this kind of work?
Let us try quite a different hypothesis, and begin by
accepting the external evidence as true. The famous
critic, Crates, of the second century B.C., happens to
mention-in excuse of what he took to be a slip in the
poet's astronomy-that the Rhesus of Euripides was
a youthful work. Now the earliest dated tragedy of
Euripides that we possess is the Alcestis, B.C. 438,
written when he was about forty-six. His style
may well have been considerably different fifteen or
twenty years earlier, and must certainly have been
much under the influence of Aeschylus. So far, so
good. Then what of the other difficulties, the three
different opening scenes and the few passages of late
phrasing or technique? One obvious explanation
suits both. The three different openings pretty
clearly imply that the play was reproduced more than
once after the poet's death and adapted by the producer
for each occasion. This happened to many plays of
Euripides, and in one case we even know the name of
the producer; he was Euripides the Younger, son of
the poet. Among other things we have reason to believe that he wrote some parts of the Iphigenia in
Aulis. And in this connexion we can hardly help
noticing that the Iphigenia in
Aulis, like the Rhesus
and like no other Greek tragedy, has two alternative
openings, one a dull prologue and one a lyrical scene
in anapaests under the stars. The general style of the
two plays is utterly different; the Iphigenia is most
typically late Euripidean; but one would not be surprised to learn that they had both passed at some time
through the same revising hand.
This hypothesis seems to work well. But one
difficulty remains.
We have so far gone on the supposition that
Euripides at twenty-five or thirty perhaps wrote very
differently from Euripides at forty-six, and that the
manner we call Euripidean is only the manner of
his later life. There is nothing improbable in this
suggestion, but have we any evidence? Yes, a very
little, and unfortunately it does not say what we
want. We have some fragments-twenty lines altogether-preserved from the Peliades, with which
Euripides won his first victory in the year 455, seventeen years before the Alcestis, and as far as they go
they are just in his ordinary manner-a good deal
more so, in fact, than much of the Alcestis is. Let us
face this difficulty.
The ordinary style of Euripides is full, flexible,
lucid, antithetic, studiously simple in vocabulary and
charged with philosophic reflection. If we look in his
extant remains for any trace of a style, like that of
the Rhesus, which is comparatively terse, rich,
romantic, not shrinking from rare words and strong
colour and generally untinged by philosophy, we shall
find the nearest approach to it in the
Cyclops. Next to
the
Cyclops I am not sure what play would come, but the
Alcestis would not be far off. It has especially
several Epic forms which cannot be paralleled in
tragedy. Now the conjunction of these two plays with
the Rhesus is significant. The three seem to be three
earliest of the extant plays; they are also- if we
count the Heraclidae as mutilated-the three shortest.
But, what is more important, the
Cyclops is not a
tragedy but a satyr-play, and the Alcestis is a tragedy
of a special sort, written to take the place of a
satyr-play. It is a tragedy with some half grotesque
figures and a fantastic atmosphere.
This is no place for a close analysis of the diction of
the various works of Euripides; but taking one rough
test, just for what it is worth, we may try to count
the number of words in each play which are not found
elsewhere in Euripides. The Medea, a central sort of
play, has in its 1419 lines 103 such words. The
Alcestis, with 1163 lines, has 122; the Rhesus, with
less than 1000 lines, has 177; the
Cyclops, with only
701 lines, has actually 220. This calculation is
doubtless slightly inexact: in any case it is worth
very little until it is carefully analysed. But on the
whole it accords with my general impression that the
Rhesus in its variation from the Euripidean norm goes
further than the Alcestis, and not so far as the
Cyclops, and goes in very much the same direction. I
feel in the Rhesus a good deal of that curious
atmosphere, not exactly comic, but wild and
extravagant, which the Greeks felt to be suited to the
Satyr horde; the atmosphere normally breathed by the
one-eyed Giant of the cavern on volcanic
Aetna, or the
drunken and garlanded Heracles who wrestles with Death
and cracks his ribs for him at midnight among the
tombs. The whole scene and setting of the Rhesus; the
man-wolf crawling away into the darkness and his two
enemies presently crawling in out of the same darkness
with his bloody spoils; the divine Thracian king with
his round targe that shines by night and his horses
whiter than the snow; the panic of the watch, the
vaunting of the doomed chieftain, the goddess disguised
as another goddess, the thrilling half-farcical scene
where the spy Odysseus is actually caught and befools
his captors: these things are not of course comic, like
some incidents in the
Cyclops. They belong to tragedy;
but they are near the outside limit of the tragic
convention, and would perhaps be most at home in a
pro-satyric tragedy like the Alcestis.
In the upshot I see no adequate reason for rejecting
the external evidence which makes this play a work of
Euripides, if we suppose it to be an early pro-satyric
play which was produced again after the poet's death
by Euripides the Younger or some contemporary.
Most scholars, however, prefer to think it simply an
archaistic work of the fourth century.
On this theory the Alexandrians when looking for
the Rhesus of Euripides found an anonymous play
called Rhesus and accepted it for what it was worth.
The Prologues mentioned in the argument would
perhaps belong to other plays of the same name;
one, no doubt, to the real play of Euripides. The
rich and severe style may, for all we know-for
direct evidence fails us-be the natural work of some
reactionary archaistic school about the time of Plato
or Aristotle. The same date might well be indicated by the great interest our play takes in the
Iliad, and by its almost "Alexandrian" use of
the gods as ornamental machinery. I cannot call such
a theory improbable; but it really amounts to rejecting the external evidence in order to place the Rhesus
in a period of tragic style of which we happen to
know nothing. It is certainly not confirmed by
the scanty fragments we possess of Theodectes or
Chairemon.
And, if one is to venture into more speculative
and subjective arguments, I find it rather hard to
think of any lyric poet except Euripides who could
have written the Adrasteia chorus or the lines about
the Nightingale in the Watchers' Song; of any playwright except Euripides who would have ended a
play of gallant martial adventure with the vision of a
solitary mother clasping her dead son. There are
many other passages, too, like the mysterious sobbing
in the dark that heralds the entry of the wounded
Thracian, and the final passing out of the army to its
certain defeat, which seem to me more like undeveloped genius than common imitative mediocrity. If
a nameless fourth-century poet wrote this play, I think
we should have heard more of him.
The story of the play is taken straight from the
Doloneia, an Epic rhapsody which now takes its place
as the Tenth Book of the Iliad, but was very likely
independent in the time of Euripides (Rise of the
Greek Epic, p. 313 f.). The play seems in one or
two points to follow a more archaic model than the
version in our Homer. (See notes on l. 150 and 1.
175.)
In Rhesus himself-the name is said to be the
Thracian form of rex 1-we seem to have the traditional divine king of the Thracian tribes about Pangaion, seen through the eyes of Greek romance. He
is the son of the greatest of Rivers and the Muse of
the Mountain: she is simply "The Muse," otherwise nameless, and we are lost if we try to bind her
down to the identity of any Greek goddess. Like
many Thracian heroes Rhesus has a dash of the Sun-god in him, the burning targe, the white horses
and the splendour. Like them he is a boaster and
1Perdrizet, Cultes et Mythes de Pangée, p. 17.
a deep drinker, a child of battle and of song. Like
other divine kings he dies in his youth and strength,
and keeps watch over his people from some "feasting presence, full of light," where he lies among
the buried silver-veins of Pangaion. If the uttermost need comes, doubtless he will wake again.
When the Athenians began making their dangerous
settlements on the coast of Thrace-ten thousand
settlers were massacred by Rhesus's people about
465 B.C.:
Amphipolis not fully established till 437-they found the legend of Rhesus in the air, and
eventually they thought it prudent to send for his
hallowed bones from the
Troad, where they were
supposed to be buried, and give them a tomb in
the Athenian colony. Possibly that pacified him.
And his legend in the mouth of the poets seemed
perhaps like the story of his own mountaineers,
multitudes of strong men, stormy and chivalrous, terrible in onset, who somehow in the end melted away
before the skill and persistent courage of a civilised
Greek city.
CHARACTERS OF THE PLAY
HECTOR, , Prince of
Ilion and General of the Trojan Armies.
AENEAS, , a Trojan Prince.
DOLON, , a Trojan.
PARIS, , also called ALEXANDER, brother of Hector.
RHESUS, , King of
Thrace, son of the River Strŷmon and the Muse of the Mountains.
A THRACIAN, , the King's charioteer.
ODYSSEUS, , a Greek chieftain, famous for craft and daring.
DIOMEDES, , a Greek chieftain, famous for valour.
A SHEPHERD.
The Goddess ATHENA.
The MUSE OF THE MOUNTAINS.
CHORUS
of Trojan Guards with their LEADER
.
Some THRACIANS
with their CAPTAIN
, Attendants
, &c.
The date and authorship of the play are unknown; it
probably belongs to the Fifth Century B.C., and is attributed
to Euripides.
