Euripides

Any Euripides biography must begin with a caution: almost everything reported about his private life comes from ancient anecdote, much of it hostile or comic in origin. Ancient tradition places his birth around 480 BCE, and one popular story timed it to the very day of the Greek naval victory at Salamis, a coincidence too neat for most modern scholars to accept at face value ^[1]. His father was named Mnesarchus (or Mnesarchides) and his mother Cleito, and the family appears to have belonged to the deme of Phlya in Attica ^[2].

The comic poets of his own day, especially Aristophanes, claimed that his mother sold vegetables in the market, a jibe repeated so often that it entered the biographical tradition. Other evidence suggests the family was reasonably prosperous: as a boy Euripides is said to have served in religious roles at Athenian cults that were typically reserved for boys of good standing, which would be unlikely for a family of low status ^[1][2].

He grew up during the decades when Athens rose from the Persian Wars to imperial power, and when the city became a magnet for the itinerant teachers later called sophists. Later sources associate him with the philosophers Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Socrates, and while the details of these friendships cannot be verified, the intellectual currents of the period run visibly through his plays ^[3]. One persistent tradition holds that he owned a substantial library and composed in a cave on the island of Salamis facing the sea, an image of the solitary writer that appealed to ancient biographers and has some archaeological support in a cave site excavated there ^[2].

Euripides first competed at the City Dionysia, the great Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BCE, when he was in his mid twenties ^[1]. Each competing tragedian presented three tragedies and a satyr play, judged against two rivals. His first victory did not come until 441 BCE, a long apprenticeship for a poet who had begun with high ambitions ^[2].

Victory remained rare for him throughout his career. Ancient sources record only four first prizes during his lifetime, with a fifth awarded after his death for the trilogy that included The Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis, staged by his son or nephew of the same name ^[1][3]. By comparison Sophocles won about twenty times. The Athenian judges evidently found Euripides difficult, yet the archons who selected which poets could compete kept granting him a chorus year after year, a sign that his work commanded attention even when it did not win.

The earliest of his surviving plays, Alcestis, was performed in 438 BCE in the position normally occupied by a satyr play, and its mixture of grief and near comic rescue already shows his willingness to bend the rules of genre ^[2]. Medea followed in 431 BCE, the year the Peloponnesian War began. It placed third out of three, yet it became one of the most read and most performed tragedies ever written, the story of a foreign woman who answers betrayal by killing her own children ^[1][4].

Ancient scholars credited Euripides with roughly ninety plays. Eighteen or nineteen tragedies survive complete, depending on whether the disputed Rhesus is counted as his, along with the satyr play Cyclops, the only complete example of that genre from antiquity ^[1][3]. The survival rate is itself a measure of his standing: seven plays each of Aeschylus and Sophocles were preserved through deliberate school selection, but Euripides also survives in an additional alphabetic batch of plays copied by chance, evidence of how widely his complete works were still being read centuries after his death ^[3].

Among Euripides achievements, the most consequential was his redirection of tragedy toward inner life. Hippolytus (428 BCE), which won first prize, examines Phaedra's struggle against a desire she never chose to feel ^[2]. The Trojan Women (415 BCE), produced months after Athens destroyed the island city of Melos, follows the enslaved women of a conquered Troy and is often read as a response to the cruelty of his own city's empire, though the play never names contemporary events ^[1][4]. Electra and Orestes strip heroic legend down to family resentment and mental collapse.

He was also a formal innovator. His plays open with explanatory prologues, often end with a god appearing above the stage to impose a resolution (the device later called deus ex machina), and give unprecedented voice to women, slaves, and children ^[2][3]. His choral odes loosened their connection to the plot, and his later music absorbed the elaborate new style of the late fifth century, a development Aristophanes mocked at length in Frogs. Aristotle, writing in the next century, criticized his plotting but called him the most tragic of the poets, a judgment that has followed him ever since ^[5].

The biographical tradition gives Euripides two wives, named in the sources as Melito and Choerine, and three sons, one of whom staged his final plays posthumously ^[2]. Ancient writers repeated stories that both marriages ended unhappily and that these experiences soured him on women, an inference drawn crudely from characters like Medea and Phaedra. Modern scholars treat such claims as fiction spun from the plays themselves, part of a genre of ancient biography that mined an author's work for supposed facts about his life ^[3][6].

The comic stage fixed a public image of him: bookish, unsociable, brooding by the sea, married to disappointment. Aristophanes made him a character in three surviving comedies, Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and Frogs, where the women of Athens put him on trial for slandering their sex and where Dionysus descends to the underworld to judge him against Aeschylus ^[1][6]. That so much comedy was built around him confirms at least one fact: every theatregoer in Athens knew exactly who Euripides was.

Unlike Sophocles, who held generalships and civic offices, Euripides seems to have taken little part in public life. The one documented exception is a commission to compose the victory ode for the Athenian statesman Alcibiades after his chariot triumph at Olympia in 416 BCE, fragments of which survive ^[2]. His detachment from politics did not mean indifference: the plays written during the Peloponnesian War return again and again to the costs of victory and the treatment of the defenceless ^[4].

Near the end of his life, probably in 408 BCE, Euripides left Athens and accepted the invitation of King Archelaus of Macedon, who was gathering poets and artists at his court in Pella ^[1][2]. His reasons are not recorded. Ancient writers guessed at bitterness over his poor record in the competitions or weariness with mockery; the simple attraction of royal patronage in his old age is explanation enough. The tragedian Agathon and the painter Zeuxis made similar journeys north.

In Macedonia he wrote Archelaus, a lost play honouring his host's dynasty, and completed The Bacchae, the drama of King Pentheus destroyed by the god Dionysus that many readers consider his masterpiece ^[2][3]. He died there around 406 BCE, in his mid seventies. A lurid story that he was torn apart by hunting dogs is almost certainly legend, one more invention of the biographical tradition ^[6].

News of his death reached Athens before the City Dionysia of that year, and Sophocles, himself only months from death, is said to have brought his chorus into the theatre dressed in mourning at the preliminary ceremony ^[1]. In 405 BCE Aristophanes staged Frogs, in which the god of theatre goes to Hades to bring a tragedian back because none worth watching remains alive. Soon afterward The Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis were produced in Athens and won Euripides his final first prize ^[2][3].

Whoever asks who was Euripides in the centuries after his death would have received a different answer than his Athenian judges gave. In the Hellenistic period he became the most popular of the three tragedians, quoted by philosophers, adapted by the comic poet Menander's generation, and copied so often that fragments of his plays outnumber those of any other Greek dramatist on surviving papyri from Egypt ^[3]. The Roman tragedian Seneca reworked his plots, and through Seneca they reached Renaissance Europe and writers including Racine, whose Phèdre descends directly from Hippolytus ^[4].

His rationalizing treatment of the gods, his sympathy for foreigners and women, and his interest in abnormal states of mind made him a favourite of later ages that saw themselves in him. The nineteenth century sometimes dismissed him as a decadent who ruined tragedy, a view sharpened by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. The twentieth century reversed the verdict: The Trojan Women became a standard anti war text after 1914, and Medea has been restaged around the world as a drama of gender, migration, and rage, in productions from Japanese kabuki adaptations to Broadway ^[4][5].

Among basic Euripides facts, one carries the most weight for the history of literature: because so many of his plays survive, he is the tragedian through whom the modern world chiefly knows Greek tragedy. Playwrights from Goethe to Sartre rewrote his plots, and classical scholars continue to edit new fragments of his lost works from papyrus finds ^[3][5]. The dramatist who placed last with Medea in 431 BCE turned out to be writing for audiences he would never see.