Rhesus (play) in the context of Iliad

Euripides (/jʊəˈrɪpɪdiːz/; Ancient Greek: Eὐριπίδης, romanized: Eurīpídēs, pronounced [eu̯.riː.pí.dɛːs]; c. 480 – c. 406 BC) was a Greek tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three authors of Greek tragedy for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Nineteen plays attributed to Euripides have survived more or less complete, although one of these (Rhesus) is often considered not to be genuinely his work. Many fragments (some of them substantial) survive from most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined: he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.

Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He was referred to by Aristotle as "the most tragic of poets", probably in reference to a perceived preference for unhappy endings, but Aristotle's remark is seen by Bernard Knox as having wider relevance, since "in his representation of human suffering Euripides pushes to the limits of what an audience can stand; some of his scenes are almost unbearable." Focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown, Euripides was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.

Euphorion (Ancient Greek: Εὐφορίων, Euphoríōn, fl. 431 BC) was the son of the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, and himself an author of tragedies. He is known solely for his victory over Sophocles and Euripides in the Dionysia of 431 BC. According to the 10th century AD Suda, he won four victories by producing Aeschylus' plays, but it is suggested that this may have been a single victory with four plays.

No work bearing his name survives. He is purported by some to have been the author of Prometheus Bound—previously assumed to be the work of his father, to whom it was attributed at the Library of Alexandria,—for several reasons, chiefly that the portrayal of Zeus in Prometheus Bound is far less reverent than in other works attributed to Aeschylus, and that references to the play appear in the plays of the comic Aristophanes. This has led historians to date it as late as 415 BC, long after Aeschylus's death. If Euphorion wrote Prometheus Bound, then there may be as many as five ancient Greek tragedians with one or more fully surviving plays: Aeschylus, Euphorion, Sophocles, Euripides, and possibly the author of the tragedy Rhesus if its attribution to Euripides is incorrect.

A hypaspist (Greek: Ὑπασπιστής "shield bearer" or "shield covered") is a squire, man at arms, or "shield carrier". In Homer, Deiphobos advances "ὑπασπίδια" (hypaspídia) or under cover of his shield. By the time of Herodotus (426 BC), the word had come to mean a high status soldier as is strongly suggested by Herodotus in one of the earliest known uses:

A similar usage occurs in Euripides's play Rhesus and another in his Phoenissae. Xenophon was deserted by his hypaspist in a particularly sticky situation. A hypaspist would differ from a skeuophoros in most cases because the "shield bearer" is a free warrior and the "baggage carrier" was probably usually a slave.