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 mark 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 l. 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 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