Euripides

Euripides was one of the three great tragic poets of classical Greece, alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the only one of the three whose surviving output is larger than that of the other two combined. He worked in the second half of the fifth century BC, and his way of writing tragedy changed the genre. His importance lies in bringing mythical heroes onto the stage as ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations, and in his interest in the inner lives of his characters, a path that later drama followed for centuries.

According to tradition, he was born around 480 BC. His parents were Cleito and Mnesarchus, the latter a merchant. The sources do not agree on his birthplace: most place his childhood in Phlya, a village in Attica, while others locate his birth on the island of Salamis. His family moved to Athens, where he received a broad education that included contact with thinkers such as Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Prodicus and Diogenes of Apollonia. Some stories about his youth, such as a supposed destiny in athletic contests, belong more to folklore than to verifiable fact. He is said to have had two wives, Melite and Choerine, although accounts of his domestic life are unreliable.

Euripides began competing at the Dionysia, Athens' great dramatic festival, in 455 BC, but did not win first prize until 441 BC. Around ninety-two plays are attributed to him, though only nineteen survive more or less complete, along with the satyr play The Cyclops. Among the best known are Medea, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, The Trojan Women, Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians and The Bacchae. Rhesus is often considered not to be genuinely his. He took his plots from myth, but used them to speak about war, the condition of women and human cruelty.

His central ideas can be grouped in a few features. Euripides gave his characters complex inner lives, with passions, contradictions and flaws that bring them close to the audience. He reduced the role of the chorus and gave more weight to dialogue and individual conflict. He often showed distant or capricious gods and used the deus ex machina to resolve plots that seemed unsolvable, something critics read as a challenge to traditional religion. His portrayal of women, such as Medea, is especially penetrating and has been debated continually.

In the fourth century BC Aristotle called him "the most tragic of the poets", a phrase that may refer to his unhappy endings as much as to his willingness to push suffering to the edge of what an audience can bear. In the Hellenistic period he became a core author of literary education, alongside Homer, Demosthenes and Menander. His influence reaches modern theatre: the critic Bernard Knox linked him with dramatists such as Racine, Ibsen and Strindberg, and he was also a precursor of comic writers such as Menander and George Bernard Shaw. His contemporary Aristophanes mocked his intellectualism in several comedies.

Euripides died in 406 BC. According to the most widespread version, he had withdrawn to the court of King Archelaus I of Macedonia, at Pella, disappointed by the situation of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Some historians believe he may never have visited Macedonia at all, or that he was drawn there by the same incentives offered to other artists. His plays, however, are still performed and read today.