Note 310 — Chapter XXI · GRECIAN EPIC.—HOMERIC POEMS. (continued 2)

Subsequent poets, seemingly thinking that the naked story, (of Diomêdês slaughtering Rhêsus and his companions in their sleep,) as it now stands in the Iliad, was too displeasing, adopted different ways of dressing it up. Thus, according to Pindar (ap. Schol. Iliad. x. 435), Rhêsus fought one day as the ally of Troy, and did such terrific damage, that the Greeks had no other means of averting total destruction from his hand on the next day, except by killing him during the night. And the Euripidean drama, called Rhêsus, though representing the latter as a new-comer, yet puts into the mouth of Athênê the like overwhelming predictions of what he would do on the coming day, if suffered to live; so that to kill him in the night is the only way of saving the Greeks (Eurip. Rhês. 602): moreover, Rhêsus himself is there brought forward as talking with such overweening insolence, that the sympathies of man, and the envy of the gods, are turned against him (ib. 458).

But the story is best known in the form and with the addition (equally unknown to the Iliad) which Virgil has adopted. It was decreed by fate that, if the splendid horses of Rhêsus were permitted once either to taste the Trojan provender, or to drink of the river Xanthus, nothing could preserve the Greeks from ruin (Æneid, i. 468, with Servius, ad loc.):—

All these versions are certainly improvements upon the story as it stands in the Iliad.