RHAPSODISTS, a class of minstrels who in early times wandered over the Greek cities reciting the poems of Homer, and through whom they became widely known, and came to be translated with such completeness to us.

RHEA, in the Greek mythology a goddess, the daughter of Uranus and Gaia, the wife of Kronos, and mother of the chief Olympian deities, Zeus, Pluto, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia, and identified by the Greeks of Asia Minor with the great earth goddess Cybele, and whose worship as such, like that of all the other earth deities, was accompanied with wild revelry.

RHEA SILVIA, a vestal virgin, the mother of Romulus and Remus, twins, whom she bore to Mars, the god of war, who had violated her.

RHEIMS (104), an important French city in the department of Marne, on the Vesle, 100 m.  NE. of Paris; as the former ecclesiastical metropolis of France it has historical associations of peculiar interest; the French monarchs were crowned in the cathedral (a Gothic structure of unique beauty) from 1179 to 1825; has a beautiful 12th-century Romanesque church, an archiepiscopal palace, a Roman triumphal arch, a Lycee, statues, &c.; situated in a rich wine district, it is one of the chief champagne entrepots, and is also one of the main centres of French textiles, especially woollen goods; is strongly fortified.

RHEINGAU, a fruitful wine district in the Rhine Valley, stretching along the right bank of the river in Hesse-Nassau; has a sunny, sheltered situation, and its wines are famed for their quality.

RHENISH PRUSSIA (4,710), the most westerly and most densely populated of the Prussian provinces, lies within the valleys of the Rhine and the Lower Moselle, and borders on Belgium and the Netherlands; is mountainous and forest-clad, except in the fertile plains of the N. and in the rich river valleys, where vines, cereals, and vegetables are extensively cultivated; large quantities of coal, iron, zinc, and lead are mined; as an industrial and manufacturing province it ranks first in Germany.  Coblenz (capital), Aix-la-Chapelle, Bonn, and Cologne are among its chief towns; was formed in 1815 out of several smaller duchies.

RHEOCHORD, a wire to measure the resistance or variability of an electric current.

RHEOMETRY, measurement of the force or the velocity of an electric current.

RHESUS, a monkey held sacred in several parts of India.

RHETORIC, the science or art of persuasive or effective speech, written as well as spoken, and that both in theory and practice was cultivated to great perfection among the ancient Greeks and Romans, and to some extent in the Middle Ages and later, but is much less cultivated either as a science or an art to-day.