The high-hearted defence[783] of Rhesus is full of the same tingling rhetoric. Yet many critics[784] of the highest rank have denied Euripidean authorship to the _Rhesus_. On the other side stands[785] the testimony of the almost contemporary record. One consideration, obvious yet too often ignored, may help us. The earliest work of Euripides to which we can assign a date—the _Alcestis_—belongs to the year 438. The poet was then at least forty-two years old. Is it beyond belief that twenty years before the _Alcestis_ the youthful dramatist composed a stirring tale of war and hair-breadth escape, which owed much to the manner of Æschylus, especially in his handling of the chorus? During the period for which we have evidence, he was constantly testing the possibilities of his art. Need we assume that until the _Alcestis_ he had not advanced? The soundest view appears to be that we have here a very early work of Euripides. This is confirmed by the critic Crates, an Academic philosopher of the second century before Christ, who asserted that Euripides was still young when he wrote the _Rhesus_.[786] To this should be added whatever help may be drawn from contemporary history. It is natural to suppose that when this drama was composed Athenian politics were closely concerned with Thrace. An Athenian colony at Nine Ways, afterwards called Amphipolis, was destroyed by the Thracians in 465 B.C. In 436 the place was resettled under the new name by Hagnon, who brought the bones of Rhesus from the Troad back to Thrace. The later year, as connected with the hero, would seem the more suitable, were it not for the words[787] of his mother who refuses burial for her son and proclaims his strange life after death: “hidden in caverns of the silver-yielding soil he shall lie as a human spirit, still living”. Such language would rather be avoided after the bones themselves had been visibly committed to Thracian earth. On the whole, one thinks the situation more suitable to some period, anterior to Hagnon’s expedition, when Thracian politics were in the air, perhaps quite soon after the disaster of 465 B.C.[788] * * * * * Of the lost plays we have about eleven hundred fragments. Few of these comprise more than three or four lines, but a fair conception of several dramas can be formed from reports of the plot, parodies by Aristophanes, and the remains themselves.