Euripides: ‘Rhesus’

The straightforward way is to take the hard questions first.

Did Euripides write Rhesus?

Modern scholars disagree, and so did ancient critics. The official lists credit the play to Euripides. But some ancient critics thought it might be the work of a minor poet. 

Is the play good?

H.D.F. Kitto doesn’t mention it — except for parenthetical clause in an account of another play. He calls Rhesus“wretched.”

Richmond Lattimore, who translated the play, said the author “made a book of the Iliad into a drama, but the story did better as an episode in epic than as a self-contained tragic action.”

That seems to me precisely the kind of thing that the audacious Euripides might do — trying something that everyone else believed shouldn’t be attempted.

The play deals with a peculiar idea of fate — everything rides on one fateful day. After 10 years of fruitless battle, the fate of Troy rests not on Greeks and Trojans but on a Thracian king, Rhesus. He’s the son of one of the nine Muses. Infuriatingly, Euripides doesn’t say which.

Rhesus is powerful, and Hector, leader of the Trojans, has been pleading with him to come to Troy’s aid. Rhesus has had to put down an attack by the Scythians and has been delayed. He arrives, bone tired, at night.

Hector awakened by the guards who saw fires by the Greek ships, is convinced the Greeks are about to flee. He plans to smash them at dawn. The arrival of Rhesus and the Thracian army, just when the spoils are about to be divided, strikes Hector as awful timing.

Rhesus replies that Hector has been trying to drive the Greeks away for 10 years. He asks his friend to give him one day.

It’s the idea of the fateful day. As the goddess Athene tells Odysseus and Diomedes, who’ve been sent to scout the enemy camp, the fate of the war depends on what happens to Rhesus.

 

For if he survives the night and is alive tomorrow,

not even Achillies, and not Ajax with his spear,

can keep him from destroying all the Argive fleet,

smashing, demolishing your walls and storming in

to fight with level spears.

Kill him, and all is won.

 

I like those lines. 

But I love the asides in Euripides’ poetry, and I love what he says about candor: how a straightforward approach is best. These lines are spoken by Rhesus to his friend Hector, who is mad at him:

 

I have a path

straight through arguments. I too have no diplomacy.

 

 

• Sources and notes: Rhesus, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-49. The quotations are on pp. 4, 32 and 24.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto’s dismissive remark is in Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954, p. 421.

If the idea of the fateful day sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of Sophocles’ Ajax.

On the audacity of trying to turn Book 10 of the Iliad into a drama: Two audacious American writers, Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud, took material from historical records and made short stories. Those stories aren’t smash hits. But if I were compiling an anthology, they’d be among the stars.