P. 52, l. 950. These short speeches between Hector and the Leader of the Guard make a jarring note in the midst of the Muse's lament. Perhaps it would not be so if we knew how the play was produced, but at present this seems like one of several marks of comparative crudity in technique which mark the play, amid all its daring and inventiveness.
P. 52, l. 962 ff., My son shall not be laid in any grave.]—Like other Northern barbaric princes, such as Orpheus (l. 972 below) and Zalmoxis (Herodotus, iv. 95) and Holgar the Dane, Rhesus lies in a hidden chamber beneath the earth, watching, apparently, for the day of uttermost need when he must rise to help his people. There is no other passage in Greek tragedy where such a fate is attributed to a hero, though the position of Darius in the Persae and Agamemnon in the Choephori or the Electra is in some ways analogous.
The last lines of the Muse have a very Euripidean ring: cf. Medea, l. 1090 (p. 61, "My thoughts have roamed a cloudy land"), Alcestis, l. 882.
P. 54, ll. 983-end. This curious and moving end—not in death or peace but in a girding of tired men to greater toil—reminds one of the last words of The Trojan Women: "Forth to the long Greek ships And the sea's foaming," and the last words of the Chanson de Roland there quoted.
The Trojans evidently go forth under the shadow of disaster, though with firmness and courage. The stage direction is of course purely conjectural. If Diomedes left some sign of Dolon's death for Hector to see, as he probably must have done, then Hector must at some time or other see it. If so, this seems to be the place.
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