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. Belovèd, and a thousand cities
  2. She made empty of good men.
  3. 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.)
  4. Returned from death to pierce my heart again?
  5. Thy pride it was, and bitter challenge cast
  6. ’Gainst all the Muses, did my flesh abase
  7. To bearing of this Child, what time I passed
  8. Through the deep stream and looked on Strymon’s face,
  9. And felt his great arms clasp me, when to old
  10. Pangaion and the earth of hoarded gold