Short answers, pulled from the story.
Euripides was a Greek tragedian of classical Athens, born around 480 BC. He is one of only three ancient Greek tragic playwrights whose works have survived in full, alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles. He died in 406 BC, traditionally at the court of King Archelaus in Macedonia.
Ancient scholars attributed between ninety-two and ninety-five plays to Euripides. Nineteen plays survive more or less complete, though one of these, Rhesus, is frequently considered not to be genuinely his work. More of his plays survive intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined.
Aristotle's description in the Poetics likely referred to Euripides's preference for unhappy endings. Scholar Bernard Knox argued the label has wider relevance, noting that in his representation of human suffering Euripides pushes to the limits of what an audience can stand, with some scenes described as almost unbearable.
Euripides pioneered the recognition scene and the use of contemporary characters in mythological settings, techniques that became central to Menander's New Comedy. The French playwright Racine used Iphigenia in Aulis and Hippolytus as models for Iphigenie and Phedre in the seventeenth century. His work, adapted by Seneca for Roman audiences, shaped the rebirth of tragedy in Renaissance Europe.
According to ancient tradition, Euripides retired to a cave on Salamis island, where he built a library and worked in isolation. A cult of the playwright developed at the site after his death. Modern scholars view the story as probably symbolic, representing the image of an intellectual ahead of his time.
The plays survived through two manuscript streams: a select edition of ten plays assembled around 200 AD, and nine further alphabetical plays drawn from a collected edition. A Byzantine scholar combined them into the nineteen plays known today. The two key manuscripts, denoted L and P, are held at the Laurentian Library in Florence and the Bibliotheca Palatina in the Vatican. In 2022, a papyrus found at Philadelphia in the Faiyum region of Egypt yielded new fragments of his plays Ino and Polyidus, published in 2024.