Euripides made mythical heroes feel painfully ordinary
Alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides (c. 480–c. 406 BC) is one of three classical Athenian tragedians with plays still ascribed by name. He cast legendary figures as everyday people under extreme pressure—an approach that reshaped drama long after Athens, though he won first prize only five times.
Ancient scholars credited him with ninety-five plays, the Suda with no more than ninety-two. Nineteen survive more or less whole, one of them, Rhesus, probably not his, which is more than Aeschylus and Sophocles combined. His reputation rose as theirs faded, and in the Hellenistic age he joined Homer, Demosthenes and Menander at the core of Greek education. He first competed at the City Dionysia in 455 BC, won only in 441 BC, and took a last posthumous victory with The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis in 405 BC.
Aristotle called him the most tragic of poets, perhaps for his unhappy endings. Bernard Knox says his scenes of suffering push an audience almost past endurance, and that his focus on characters' inner motives built the cage of love and hatred later seen in Othello, Racine's Phèdre, Ibsen and Strindberg. He was also an ancestor of comedy, from Menander to George Bernard Shaw, and modern readers prize his sympathetic portraits of women, above all Medea.
Comic poets loved to mock him. Aristophanes put him on stage in The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs; in the last, Dionysus fetches Aeschylus back from Hades as wiser and leaves Euripides behind as merely clever. Others joked that Socrates or the actor Cephisophon wrote his plays. Such jibes suggest Athenians admired him while distrusting his intellect.
The traditional life story, born on Salamis on the very day of the great battle, two unfaithful wives, a writing cave on the island, death in Macedonia savaged by King Archelaus's hounds, comes almost entirely from folklore, comic parody and guesses drawn from the plays. Modern scholars treat it as unreliable, and one suggests a harsh Macedonian winter killed him instead.
Source: Euripides
