Euripides

Euripides, youngest of the three great Greek tragedians, was born c.485 BC, possibly on Salamis, and died in Macedonia in 406. Though he was scarcely a generation younger than Sophocles, his world view better reflects the political, social, and intellectual crises of late 5th-century Athens. All but one of his surviving tragedies were written during the Peloponnesian War, which eventually destroyed Athens. Of the 92 plays he wrote, 19 survive intact-more than the combined total for Aeschylus and Sophocles-including the Satyr Play Cyclops and the possibly spurious Rhesus.
Anecdotes about Euripides' life are important in two ancient sources, a recently discovered biography by Satyrus and the comedies of Aristophanes, particularly the Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and Frogs, in which the playwright is frequently satirized. He entered his first competition in 455 and won his first victory in 441. He was friendly with the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates and with Sophists such as Protagoras and Prodicus, and his plays reflect contemporary ethics, rhetoric, and science. He may have been prosecuted for impiety by the demagogue Cleon. Shortly after 408 he left Athens for the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, and there wrote one of his greatest plays, The Bacchae.
Only eight or nine of Euripides' tragedies can be securely dated, but the consistency of meter permits the dates of the others to be approximated. No clear evolution is discernible, but the following groupings can be made: Medea (431), Hippolytus (428), Hecuba (c.425), and Heracles (c.430-423), written early in the Peloponnesian War, for instance, are plays of passion and revenge; The Children of Heracles (c.430), Andromache (c.426), and The Suppliant Women (c.422) are patriotic plays; Iphigeneia in Tauris, Helen, and Ion (all c.414-412) are romantic melodramas in which long-lost loved ones discover each other; the plays of his last period (409-406)-The Phoenician Women, Orestes, Iphigeneia at Aulis, and The Bacchae-exhibit increasingly episodic structure, greater irony, and a mood suggestive of the dissolution of values then taking place.
Of the three great classical writers of Tragedy, Euripides is the least classical. Aristotle, in his Poetics, however, called him "the most tragic" because of his powerful depictions of pathos and suffering. In The Trojan Women, Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Heracles, and The Bacchae, the finest examples of such tragedies, Euripides portrays violent emotion, erotic passion, and insanity with almost clinical insight. Medea's vengeful infanticide, Phaedra's incestuous passion and Hippolytus's vehement prudishness, the madness of Heracles, and the delusions of Pentheus and Agave in The Bacchae show him at his best. He laid bare the sordid side of men's ambitions and analyzed the coexistence of conflicting emotions. He could also depict tenderness and love, as in Alcestis's self-sacrifice for her husband and children and the recognition scenes of Iphigeneia in Tauris and Ion. Sensitive to the events of his own day, he both reflected the confident patriotism of the early years of the war and attacked the cruelty of Athens itself, notably in The Trojan Women (415), produced the year after the Athenians massacred the rebellious Melians.
Less reverent than Aeschylus or Sophocles, Euripides criticized traditional religion and shocked contemporaries by representing mythical figures as everyday, unheroic people or even as abnormal or neurotic personalities. (This is seen clearly in the contrast between his Electra and Sophocles'.) His heroes are often victims of divine cruelty. Considered a misogynist because of his unsparing analysis of feminine passion, he was in fact highly sympathetic to the plight of women in 5th-century Athens.
His plots, which contain surprising twists and reversals, often seem less unified than those of Sophocles. His style is more colloquial but also frequently more intellectual and abstract; his choral odes, though often marked by an exotic and haunting lyricism, are less fully integrated into the action.
Euripides' enormous range spans contradictory tendencies: he was both a rationalist and a romanticist; he both criticized the traditional gods and celebrated religious phenomena like the Maenadism of The Bacchae; he was the author of both patriotic and antiwar plays, and of plays with happy endings and of the bitterest tragedies. He incorporated the new intellectual and scientific movements into his works but also conveyed the irresistible power of the irrational. Original and experimental, he parodied the conventions of tragedy and also used new theories about the illusionistic and deceptive powers of language. He created tragicomic plots (Ion, Helen, Iphigeneia in Tauris) that foreshadowed the so-called New Comedy. His deheroization, psychology, and use of the deus ex machina colored later drama. He was especially popular in the centuries after his death and profoundly influenced Seneca's tragedies.
Euripides has come to be increasingly appreciated in modern times for his intellectual subtlety, bold and original dramatic power, brilliant psychological insight, and ability to elicit unexpected symbolic meaning from ancient myth and cult.