’Tis Ares’ self, this issue strongOf Strymon and the Muse of song,Whose breath is fragrant on thy shore!Re-enter HECTOR.RHESUS.Lord Hector, Prince of Ilion, noble sonOf noble sires, all hail! Long years have runSince last we greeted, and ’tis joy this dayTo see thy fortunes firm and thine arrayCamped at the foe’s gate. Here am I to tameThat foe for thee, and wrap his ships in flame.HECTOR.

P. 23, 11. 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 Pèlerinage 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.

Thou child of Music and the Thracian flood,Strymonian Rhesus, truth is alway goodIn Hector’s eyes. I wear no double heart.Long, long ago thou shouldst have borne thy partIn Ilion’s labours, not have left us here,For all thy help, to sink beneath the spear.Why didst thou—not for lack of need made plain!—Not come, not send, not think of us again?What grave ambassadors prayed not beforeThy throne, what herald knelt not at thy door?What pride of gifts did Troy not send to thee?