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
Pelerinage 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 Philomela, or in the
older story Procne, an Athenian princess, wedded to the faithless
Thracian king, Tereus. 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.
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
The line numbers refer to the lines in the original Greek text, not to
the lines as translated.
The following change was made to the original text:
Page 26: changed whv to why
Other than the addition of missing periods, minor variations in spelling
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