In the middle of the night, Trojan guards on the lookout for suspicious enemy activity sight bright fires in the Greek camp.

The first since ancient times to fully dispute that the Rhesus had been written by Euripides was L. C. Valckenaer in his Phoenissae (1755) and Diatribe in Euripidis deperditorum dramatum reliquias (1767).

Edith Hall argued in an introduction that modern readers "will be struck in particular by the un-Euripidean lack of interest in women," and noted the fact of Euripides' son having borne the tragedian's name as an argument against the conventional attribution.

[5] A recent theory by Vayos Liapis is that the Rhesus was composed by an unknown author in the court of Philip II or Alexander the Great at the end of the 4th century BC.

[6] Richmond Lattimore asserted in 1958 that the Rhesus had been written by Euripides, probably at some point before 440 BC,[7] and in 1964, William Ritchie defended the play's authenticity in a book-length study, though his conclusions were opposed by Eduard Fraenkel.

Michael Walton has also claimed that modern scholarship agrees with classical authorities in ascribing the play to Euripides,[8] but admitted in a later work that the attribution is still disputed by a number of scholars.