*For the reader’s interest I translate these. The first is only an incomplete sentence, ‘now the chariot-driven [noun lacking, probably “night”] … the fair moon’s light’: obviously someone is making explicit that night has fallen. This could be an authentically Euripidean first line, but we can hardly say. The longer passage is the opening of a speech by Hera to Athena. ‘O Pallas, valiant child of all-mighty Zeus, what are we to do? We should no longer delay in giving support to the Argive host. For now they are suffering in battle, sent spinning off course by Hector’s violent spear. There is no burden for me to bear more painful than this, since the time when Alexandros judged the Cyprian goddess superior in beauty to my own looks, and yours, Athena, whom I love most among the gods – if I am not to see the city of Priam demolished, uprooted by force and ground into extinction.’

This does not resemble any Euripidean prologue that survives. The closest parallel would be the dialogues between gods which occur in Alcestis and Trojan Women, but even there the standard procedure is followed whereby one speaker gives an exposition of the situation before engaging in dialogue with the other. The author of the summary in which it is quoted calls the passage ‘prosaic and unworthy of Euripides’.