The identification of Rhesus with Achilles is one of the specular games of the Euripides’s tragedy analysed by professors Minerva Alganza Roldán and José Francisco Maldonado Villena, of the Universidad de Granada, in their study “The goddesses of the Rhesus”, published in the number 16 of the journal “Florentia Iliberritana”, edited by the Universidad de Granada.
The authors of the study maintain that if Dolon was the Trojan equivalent to Diomedes and Odyssey among the night knives, and the paradoxical double of Rhesus as main figure of a truncated aristeia, the Tracian king is the shadow of Achilles. “Just like Achilles, he is the son of a goddess –say the authors of the research work–, who tried to keep him away from Troy; he owns a splendid yoke of horses and intends to ratify through a combat, against Achilles, as a matter of fact, his condition of reckless and authentic hero, an undertaking aborted by fatality incarnated in Diomedes, the heroic antithesis of Peleus’s son.
The work “The goddesses of the Rhesus” discover the two female characters of the Iliad, Athena and the Muse, mother of Rhesus, in the section of the 10th book known as “the Dolon”. The authors, Minerva Alganza Roldán and José Francisco Maldonado Villena, reflect on the two models of aristeia proposed by the poet from the dramatic game with its mythic-religious system of symbols.
The research work has started from an introduction about the authenticity of The Rhesus and analyses the dependence of the Rhesus in relation to the epic model to refer below to the goddesses in the Rhesus: the disguised Virgin: Athena-Aphrodite and the Muse-Mother.
Reference:
Professor Minerva Alganza Roldán. Department of Greek and Slavonic Studies. Universidad de Granada. Phone numbers: 958 243 691.E-mail: malganza@ugr.es
Professor Francisco Maldonado Villena. Department of Greek and Slavonic Studies. Universidad de Granada. Phone numbers: 958 243692. E-mail: jfmv@ugr.es
