The elaborate chariot and gold armor of Rhesos also mark him as an important and desirable target. Agamemnon’s armor includes gold (Iliad 11.25), as does the armor Hephaistos makes for Achilles (Iliad 18.475, 549, 612). Gold armor is memorably seen elsewhere in the exchange between Diomedes and Glaukos, in which Glaukos gives Diomedes his gold armor for Diomedes’ bronze as a sign of their inherited guest-friendship (Iliad 6.232–236). Nestor also has an all-gold shield, which Hektor hopes to capture. He says that if he does take Nestor’s shield, along with Diomedes’ breastplate, then the Achaeans will depart that very night (Iliad 8.191–197)—in fact, the night on which this ambush episode occurs. So there may be an association between the taking of gold armor and the outcome of the war, and Rhesos’ gold and silver chariot and gold armor may have a similar significance, relating it to versions of the Rhesos story in which his death prevents a possible Trojan victory (see “Tradition and Reception” for a full discussion of these other versions).
The phrase θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι is used elsewhere in the Iliad for armor (that which Achilles inherits from Peleus but which Hektor is wearing at that point, Iliad 18.83) and other golden objects (Hebe’s chariot, Iliad 5.725, and Hephaistos’ wheeled tripods, Iliad 18.377). Since Achilles’ original armor was a wedding gift to Peleus from the gods, all these examples are also associated with the gods, as Rhesos’ armor is in Dolon’s words. In the Odyssey, θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι is associated with cloth or clothing (Odyssey 6.306, 8.366, 13.108) or buildings (Odyssey 7.45), but always those of divinities or the Phaeacians. From a compositional point of view, then, the following comment that his armor seems like that of the immortals is an expansion of this phrase.