Euripides

A tragedian of classical Athens

Euripides was a Greek tragedian of classical Athens, living from about 480 to about 406 BC. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he belongs to the small group of Greek tragic writers whose plays have survived in full. He was the youngest of the three, and his first play was staged thirteen years after Sophocles’s debut and three years after Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Traditional accounts place his birth on Salamis Island around the time of the Greek victory over Persia at the Battle of Salamis, though many details of his life come from sources that scholars treat with caution.

The scale of his work was large, even by ancient report. Some scholars in antiquity attributed ninety-five plays to him, while the Suda gives ninety-two at most. Nineteen plays attributed to Euripides survive more or less complete, though Rhesus is often considered not genuinely his. Many fragments also remain from other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined. By the Hellenistic Age, he had become a foundation of ancient literary education, taught alongside Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.

Drama made more human

Euripides is best known for changing how tragedy could look and sound on the stage. He represented traditional mythical heroes as ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances. That approach influenced later drama and helped open paths that comic writers would also adapt, including features associated with romance. Aristotle called him “the most tragic of poets,” probably because of a perceived taste for unhappy endings. Later readers have also seen in his work a relentless attention to suffering, love, hatred, and the trapped inner life of men and women.

What shaped Euripides is hard to separate from story, parody, and the few clues that can be drawn from his plays. Ancient biographical traditions say his father, Mnesarchus, first pushed him toward athletics after hearing an oracle about “crowns of victory,” but Euripides’s victories came on the stage, five in all, one after his death. The same traditions say his education included painting and philosophy under Prodicus and Anaxagoras. His career also unfolded during the long struggle between Athens and Sparta for power in Greece, though he did not live to see Athens’s final defeat.

His own contemporaries did not always treat him gently. Aristophanes mocked him for intellectualism and made him a character in comedies including The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and The Frogs. Modern views have also varied, with some seeing him as an iconoclastic intellectual and others as a more traditional playwright. His women have drawn special interest, especially the sympathy and sharp perception with which he depicts their hardships in Greek society, as in Medea. A line preserved on this site, “The greatest pleasure of life is love,” fits the Euripidean world: desire can bring joy, but in his drama it can also expose people at their most vulnerable.