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. My belovèd and my son!
LEADER.
  1. Goddess, if tears for such as thee may run
  2. In our low eyes, I weep for thy dead son.
MUSE.
  1. I say to thee: Curse Odysseus,
  2. And cursèd be Diomede!
  3. For they made me childless, and forlorn for ever, of
  4. the flower of sons.
  5. Yea, curse Helen, who left the houses of Hellas.
  6. She knew her lover, she feared not the ships and sea.
  7. She called thee, called thee, to die for the sake of Paris,
  8. Belovèd, and a thousand cities
  9. She made empty of good men.
  10. O conquered Thamyris, is this thy bane[*](P. 51, 1. 915. The speech of the Muse seems like the writing of a poet who is, for the moment, tired of mere drama, and wishes to get back into his own element. Such passages are characteristic of Euripides.—The death of Rhesus seems to the Muse like an act of vengeance from the dead Thamyris, the Thracian bard who had blasphemied the Muses and challenged them to a contest of song. They conquered him and left him blind, but still a poet. The story in Homer is more terrible, though more civilised: They in wrath made him a maimed man, they took away his heavenly song and made him forget his harping.Thamyris, the bard who defied Heaven; Orpheus, the bard, saint, lover, whose severed head still cried for his lost Eurydice; Musaeus, the bard of mystic wisdom and initiations—are the three great legendary figures of this Northern mountain minstrelsy.)
  11. Returned from death to pierce my heart again?
  12. Thy pride it was, and bitter challenge cast
  13. ’Gainst all the Muses, did my flesh abase
  14. To bearing of this Child, what time I passed
  15. Through the deep stream and looked on Strymon’s face,
  16. And felt his great arms clasp me, when to old
  17. Pangaion and the earth of hoarded gold