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. Or word I have offended, let me bleed!
  2. Bury me here alive! I ask no pardon.
THRACIAN.
  1. Why threaten them? Art thou a Greek to blind
  2. My barbarous wit so nimbly, in a wind
  3. Of words? This work was thine. And no man’s head
  4. Is asked by us, the wounded and the dead,
  5. Save thine. It needs more play, and better feigned,
  6. To hide from me that thou hast slain thy friend
  7. By craft, to steal his horses.—That is why
  8. He stabs his friends. He prays them earnestly,
  9. Prays them to come; they came and they are dead.
  10. A cleaner man was Paris, when he fled
  11. With his host’s wife. He was no murderer.
  12. Profess not thou that any Greek was there
  13. To fall on us. What Greek could pass the screen
  14. Of Trojan posts in front of us, unseen?
  15. Thyself was stationed there, and all thy men.
  16. What man of yours was slain or wounded when
  17. Your Greek spies came? Not one; ’tis we, behind,
  18. Are wounded, and some worse than wounded, blind