The Rhesus of Euripides by Gilbert Murray (PDF)

The Rhesus of Euripides Gilbert Murray

The Rhesus (traditionally attributed to Euripides, though many scholars doubt his authorship) is a fascinating play because it feels half‑way between legend retelling and dramatic experiment.  

Summary 

In the middle of the night Trojan guards on the lookout for suspicious enemy activity sight bright fires in the Greek camp. They promptly inform Hector, who almost issues a general call to arms before Aeneas makes him see how ill-advised this would be. Their best bet, Aeneas argues, would be to send someone to spy on the Greek camp and see what the enemy is up to. Dolon volunteers to spy on the Greeks in exchange for Achilles's horses when the war is won. and the play goes on.

Form Gilbert Murray's introduction 

This short play needs rather a long Introduction. It has had the bad fortune to become a literary problem, and almost all it's 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  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.

Characters

Odysseus Hector Diomedes Aeneas Paris Dolon Athena Messenger Shepherd Muse Rhesus


Gilbert Murray Publication Date:1913

 

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