Rhesus

Euripides

Euripides. The Rhesus of Euripides. Translated into English rhyming verse with explanatory notes by Gilbert Murray. Murray, Gilbert, translator. London: George Allen and Company, Ltd., 1913.

  1. Achilles? Nay, his spear ye cannot meet.
RHESUS.
  1. How so? Fame said he sailed here with the fleet.
HECTOR.
  1. He sailed, and he is here. But some despite
  2. ’Gainst the great King now keeps him from the fight.
RHESUS.
  1. Who next to him hath honour in their host?
HECTOR.
  1. Next, to my seeming, Ajax hath the most,
  2. Or Diomede.—But Odysseus is a tough
  3. And subtle fox, and brave; aye, brave enough.
  4. No man of them hath harmed us more than he.
  5. He climbed here to Athena’s sanctuary[*](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.)