No brave man seeks so dastardly to harmHis battle-foes; he meets them arm to arm.This Greek of thine, this sitter like a thiefIn ambush, I will make of him my chiefCare. I will take him living, drive a straightStake through him, and so star him at the GateTo feed your wide-winged vultures. ’Tis the deathMost meet for a lewd thief, who pillagethGod’s sanctuary, or so we hold in Thrace.HECTOR.(making no answer)Seek first some sleep. There still remains a spaceOf darkness.—I will show the spot that bestMay suit you, somewhat sundered from the rest.Should need arise, the password of the nightIs Phoebus: see your Thracians have it right.Turning to the Guards before he goes.Advance beyond your stations, men, at someDistance, and stay on watch till Dolon comeWith word of the Argives’ counsel. If his vowProsper, he should be nearing us by now.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.

Exeunt HECTOR and RHESUS and Attendants. The Guards, who have been below, come forward sleepily from the camp fire, and sit watching by HECTOR’S tent.

CHORUS.

Pp. 28-30, 11. 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 (1. 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 Philomêla, or in the older story Procnê, an Athenian princess, wedded to the faithless Thracian king, Têreus. In a fury of vengeance on her husband she slew their only son, Itys or Itylus, and now laments him broken-hearted for ever.

Say, whose is the watch? Who exchangesWith us? The first planets to rise