Hark! Hark! That voice, as of a thousand strings! The nightingale, where Simois moves along ’Mid corpses stark! Upon the listening air she flings Her grief transfusèd into song. E’en now on Ida graze the sheep. One distant pipe through darkness cries Over the upland lawn. Now layeth velvet-footed sleep Enchantment on my drooping eyes, Sweetest at hush of dawn. Some ancient critics denied that Euripides wrote the _Rhesus_, and the great majority of modern scholars have accepted this view.[778] The evidence for Euripidean authorship is as follows: (i) The play comes down to us in the manuscripts of that poet. (ii) That Euripides wrote a _Rhesus_ is known from the _Didascaliæ_ or Dramatic Records. (iii) Early Alexandrian writers quote passages from our text as from “the _Rhesus_ of Euripides”. On the other side are (i) a statement in the _Argument_:[779] “Some have suspected this drama to be spurious, and not the work of Euripides, for it reveals rather the Sophoclean manner”; (ii) various features of the work which modern critics have regarded as suggesting an inferior playwright: (_a_) the plot is superficial; (_b_) there is no prologue;[780] (_c_) four actors are needed; (_d_) Æneas and Paris have practically nothing to do; (_e_) the chorus is employed in a manner foreign to Euripidean plays; (_f_) there is a lack of force and pathos; (_g_) there is no rhetoric; (_h_) there is no sententiousness; (_i_) we have here the beginning of historical drama, which is later than the fifth century; (_j_) the style is eclectic: imitations of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are to be observed.[781] Several of these objections are plainly unfounded. Four actors are not clearly necessary, as was shown above. Pathos, of a kind quite Euripidean, is to be found in the scene where the Muse laments her glorious son. And how deny rhetorical force to a poet who can write such brilliantly vigorous things as:— Aye, friends in plenty shall I find, now Heaven Stands firm for us, and Fortune guides my sword. I need them not! Where hid they those long years When Troy, a galleon with her canvas rent, Reeled onward through war’s shrieking hurricane?[782]