Euripides (c. 485-c. 406 BC)

Athenian tragic dramatist. He is ranked with Aeschylus and Sophocles as one of the three great tragedians. His plays deal with the emotions and reactions of ordinary people and social issues rather than with deities and the grandiose themes of his contemporaries. He wrote about 90 plays, of which 18 and some long fragments survive. These include Alcestis (438 BC), Medea (431 BC), Andromache (about 430 BC), Hippolytus (428 BC), the satyr-drama Cyclops (about 424-423 BC), Electra (417 BC), Trojan Women (415 BC), Iphigenia in Tauris (413 BC), Iphigenia in Aulis (about 414-412 BC), and The Bacchae (about 405 BC) (the last two were produced shortly after his death).

Euripides' questioning of contemporary mores and shrewd psychological analyses made him unpopular, even notorious, during his lifetime, and he was cruelly mocked by the contemporary comic playwright Aristophanes, but he had more influence on the development of later drama than either Aeschylus or Sophocles. He has been called the most modern of the three dramatists, and the ‘forerunner of rationalism’. Drawing on the sophists, he transformed tragedy with unheroic themes, sympathetic and disturbing portrayals of women's anger, and plots of incident and reunion.

He was essentially a realist whose art reflected the humours and passions of daily life. Plot was almost immaterial to him, and he introduced such innovations as the prologue, which takes the form of a versified programme, and the deus ex machina, or god who comes on at the end to wind up the plot.

Euripides was born at Phyla in Attica. In his youth he was an outstanding athlete, winning prizes both in Athens and Eleusis. He was also a skilled painter, and his plays contain several references to that art. He received a good education, soon coming under the influence of such thinkers as Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates. He began his career as a dramatist 455. In later life his outspoken antagonism to the war party in Athens drove him further and further into isolation until, in about 408, he went into voluntary exile. He died at the court of Archelaus, King of Macedonia.