Abstract:A number of individual passages inRhesus, a tragedy whose attribution to Euripides has repeatedly been questioned, evince extensive familiarity with institutions and mentalities prevalent in fourth-century Macedonia. The paper argues thatRhesuswas composed and produced for a Macedonian performance context, probably between the late 350s and the late 330s BC, by an author who, while familiar with Athenian tragedy and conceivably of Athenian origin, may have lived in the court of Philip II or Alexander III.
Heracles' image in antiquity is notoriously kaleidoscopic. Comedy represented him as a gluttonous buffoon, and myth made no secret of the brutal violence of many of his exploits. On the other hand, Pindar exalts him as a superlative figure who enforced the nomos of the gods, while Prodicus in a famous myth makes Heracles a supreme example of commendable conduct, a youth who chooses the path of Virtue over the path of Vice out of his own free will. This image of a moralized Heracles soon took root in the Greek imagination, and a whole host of Greek thinkers (Isocrates, Antisthenes, Diogenes the Cynic, and Plutarch, to name but a few) found in him a perfectly malleable exemplum for their various courses in moral edification. After undergoing a large number of transformations in Roman literature and the Church Fathers, Heracles resurfaces unscathed in the early Renaissance, when we find him again as an already established exemplum virtutis, now a man of letters, now a Christian. It would appear that, despite his multifarious metamorphoses, Heracles remained throughout the centuries essentially what he had been since Prodicus' day: an exemplary figure who undertook extreme toils and gained supreme recompense.
Affinities between ancient Greek novels (or, at least, the more sophisticated among them) and Greek tragedy have often been pointed out. It is well known that novelists have a distinct penchant for metaphors and images evoking the world of the theatre, while parallelisms with the ambience, ethos, and even narrative structure of classical tragedy are not uncommon. 1 Specific verbal or thematic allusions to tragic texts have also been detected, woven into the narrative fabric of the novels. Thus, to take but a few examples, Heliodorus has been thought to preserve echoes of Euripides' first Hippolytus, 2 of his Alcestis, 3 and of Aeschylus' Choephori and Sophocles' Electra. 4 As for Achilles Tatius, commentators have naturally focused on the vivid theatricality of the episode of Leucippe's 'immolation', which turns out to be but a grotesque pantomime, complete with (possibly) allusions to Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris. 5 Tragic echoes may also lurk in less theatrically laden passages, and it has been recently suggested that the Tereus and Procne narrative in the fifth book of Tatius' novel may hark back directly to a tragic antecedent, namely Sophocles' Tereus. 6 The Tereus and Procne narrative may serve as a case in point, permitting us to establish (especially since this does not seem to have been systematically attempted before) whether, and to what extent, a novelist like Achilles Tatius could have had first-hand knowledge of the tragic texts themselves (in this case, of Sophocles' Tereus), or whether he only had access to literary reworkings inspired thereby (for instance, Ovid's Metamorphoses 6), or even to such subliterary material as tragic hypotheses and mythographic accounts. About halfway through Leucippe and Clitophon, the narrator provides an ecphrasis of a painting he once chanced upon, which depicted the myth of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus (5.3.4-6), and he subsequently reports how he recounted the essentials of the myth to a curious Leucippe. He relates in some detail, and in suitably florid style, the central episode of Tereus' rape of Philomela, of his cutting of her tongue, and of 220
A survey of the available evidence for the Thracian cult of Rhesus, mainly on the basis of the pseudo Euripidean Rhesus and of Philostratus' Heroicus, shows that the identification of Rhesus with the so called Heros Equitans, or "Thracian Horseman" (first proposed almost a century ago by G. Seure) rests on firmer ground than is sometimes assumed. The paper also reviews significant portions of the pictorial and epigraphic evidence for the Heros Equitans. It concludes that the parallels between Rhesus and the Heros Equitans are too striking to be ignored.Résumé : Un relevé analytique de la documentation disponible sur le culte thrace de Rhésos, se fondant surtout sur le Rhésos du pseudo Euripide et sur l'Heroikos de Philostrate, montre que l'identification de Rhésos avec le prétendu « Heros Equitans » ou « Cavalier thrace » (d'abord proposée, il y a près d'un siècle, par G. Seure) repose sur des fondements plus assurés qu'on ne le pense parfois. Cet article passe également en revue des parties significatives de la documentation iconographique et épigraphique pour le Heros Equitans. On en conclut que le parallélisme entre ce dernier et Rhésos est trop frappant pour être ignoré.
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