Euripides

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Euripides was born around 480 BC, according to tradition, on the very day the Greeks defeated the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis. That origin story may be apocryphal, but it captures something true about him: he arrived at a hinge moment in history, and he spent the rest of his life working the seam between the old world and the new. He is one of only three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays survive complete, alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles. Yet more of his plays have survived intact than those of his two peers combined. Aristotle called him "the most tragic of poets." His contemporaries lampooned him as a dangerous intellectual. And two and a half millennia after his death, critics still cannot agree on what to make of him. Was he a feminist or a misogynist? A religious sceptic or a believer in divine providence? A realist or a romantic? One modern scholar, Bernard Knox, concluded that not one of these conflicting descriptions is entirely false. What draws listeners in is the puzzle of how one playwright could provoke such wildly divergent reactions across so many centuries. The answers lie in how he lived, what he wrote, and how the ancient world chose to remember him.

• 2. A Life in Three Versions

  ›

  The biography of Euripides comes down to us through three sources, and ancient scholars were candid about how unreliable each one is. The first is folklore, used to colour the lives of celebrated authors. The second is parody by comic poets who mocked him at dramatic festivals. The third is autobiographical clues pulled from his plays, themselves only a fraction of what he wrote. From these uncertain materials, a portrait emerges of a man born to a father named Mnesarchus, described as a retailer from the deme of Phlya, and a mother the comic tradition insisted was a humble vegetable vendor. His father, upon receiving an oracle that his son was fated to win crowns of victory, enrolled the boy in athletic training. The stage had other plans.

  His education broadened far beyond sport. He studied painting and philosophy under Prodicus and Anaxagoras, two leading thinkers of his day. Both his marriages, to women named Melite and Choerine, ended badly; both wives were said to have been unfaithful. The playwright eventually retreated to a cave on Salamis island, where he assembled what ancient sources describe as an impressive library. That image of the solitary intellectual staring at the sea became the defining myth of his character. Aristophanes, in The Acharnians, depicted him living morosely in a precarious house, surrounded by the tattered costumes of his disreputable characters. No records survive of his participation in public life, beyond his work as a dramatist; Sophocles, by contrast, held state offices and was celebrated for his social ease. The contrast in reputations was stark, and it shaped how Athens received his work.

  He died in 406 BC, traditionally in Macedonia at the rustic court of King Archelaus, though some modern scholars doubt he ever visited Macedonia at all. The circumstances of his death are uncertain. One account says he was killed by the Molossian hounds of the king. Another credits the harsh Macedonian winter. His cenotaph near Piraeus was said to have been struck by lightning.

• 3. The Innovations

  ›

  When Euripides first competed at the City Dionysia in 455 BC, one year after the death of Aeschylus, he entered a world in which tragedy was already a mature art form with established conventions. He would spend decades testing those conventions to breaking point. His central move was to take the great mythological heroes and reimagine them as recognizable human beings under contemporary kinds of pressure. Odysseus appears in Hecuba, at lines 131-32, described as "agile-minded, sweet-talking, demos-pleasing" in terms that would have sounded to Athenian ears exactly like the war-time demagogues of the Peloponnesian conflict. The heroic past became a lens for examining the present.

  His female characters drew particular notice. Women make up nearly all the characters in his plays who think and philosophize. His interest in their inner lives was not decorative. He presented slavery, the foundation of Athenian society, as a product of force and therefore fundamentally unjust. His speakers went further than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles on the question of individual worth, arguing that a person's mental state, not their social position, was the true measure of their value. In Hippolytus, a love-sick queen rationalizes her way to a striking conclusion about intrinsic merit: "One thing only, they say, competes in value with life, the possession of a heart blameless and good."

  His theatrical mechanics were equally restless. The performance space of his time included a circular orchestra for the chorus, a backdrop called the skene, a device called the ekkyklema to bring interior scenes outdoors, and a mechane to lift actors into the air for the deus ex machina. Where the gods appear in eight of his extant plays, they appear, in one critic's phrase, "lifeless and mechanical." Some critics have read this as unimaginative stagecraft. Others argue it was deliberate: a theatrical crane delivering a divine verdict may have been designed to provoke scepticism about the gods rather than reverence toward them. His plays often begin in a similarly deflating fashion, with a character in a simple monologue telling the audience everything it needs to know, rather than Sophocles's method of establishing atmosphere through dialogue.

• 4. Comic Attacks and Borrowed Methods

  ›

  Aristophanes put Euripides on stage as a character in at least three of his own plays: The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and The Frogs. This was not mere ribbing. The comic playwright both attacked and absorbed the tragedian's methods. In The Frogs, written after both Euripides and Aeschylus were dead, Aristophanes sends the god Dionysus down to Hades to find a poet worth bringing back to Athens. A debate between the shades of Aeschylus and Euripides ends with Dionysus choosing Aeschylus as more useful to the city, rejecting Euripides as merely clever. The joke carried a real charge: Athenians admired him even as they mistrusted his intellectualism.

  Other comic poets made sharper claims. Teleclides alleged that Euripides co-authored his plays with the philosopher Socrates. Aristophanes went further, naming a celebrated actor named Cephisophon as the actual co-author, adding that Cephisophon also shared the tragedian's house and his wife, while Socrates taught a school of quibblers in his name. None of this was meant as biography; it was the ancient equivalent of character assassination through satirical exaggeration. Yet it confirms something about how Euripides was perceived: as a man whose work smelled too strongly of philosophy and not enough of poetry.

  The deeper irony is that Aristophanes himself was influenced by the tragedian's techniques. The recognition scene, a dramatic device central to several of Euripides's plays, would go on to become a defining feature of Menander's New Comedy. Sophocles, too, was influenced enough to show traces of it in his later plays Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. The playwright Euripides's contemporaries mocked as a corrupter of tragedy turned out to be one of its most generative forces.

• 5. The Survival of the Texts

  ›

  Nineteen plays by Euripides survive more or less complete, with one of them, Rhesus, disputed as to authorship. That is more than from Aeschylus and Sophocles combined. The reason is partly accident and partly a shift in literary fashion: his popularity grew in the Hellenistic Age as theirs declined, and he became a cornerstone of ancient education alongside Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander. But survival was never assured.

  The original manuscripts circulated without word spacing, without consistent punctuation, without marks for breathing or accent, without stage directions, and without any convention to denote a change of speaker. When Athens replaced its old Attic alphabet with the Ionian alphabet in 403-402 BC, an entirely new layer of copying errors entered the tradition. Actors added words and sentences of their own until the problem grew severe enough that Lycurgus of Athens proposed a law around 330 BC requiring the plays to be deposited in a public office and read against an official text before performance. The law was ignored, and actors continued to alter the texts until roughly 200 BC.

  Around that time, a scholar named Aristophanes of Byzantium compiled an edition of all the extant plays, collated from pre-Alexandrian sources and furnished with introductions and a separate commentary. His edition introduced abbreviated names for speaker changes, organized lyrics into lines and stanzas, and added a system of accentuation. It became the standard text. Even so, the plays split into two streams of survival: a select edition of ten plays, probably assembled for school use around 200 AD, and nine further plays in alphabetical order apparently drawn from a set of collected works. A Byzantine scholar combined these two groups, and the nineteen plays we have today descend from that compilation. Only two manuscripts preserve the alphabetical plays; they are stored at the Laurentian Library in Florence and the Bibliotheca Palatina in the Vatican, denoted as L and P.

  In June 2005, classicists at Oxford working with Brigham Young University used multi-spectral imaging, including infrared technology previously used for satellite imaging, to recover previously illegible writing from the Oxyrhynchus papyri, yielding previously unknown Euripidean material. In 2022, a papyrus found at the archaeological site of Philadelphia in the Faiyum region of Egypt contained new fragments of his plays Ino and Polyidus. The first scholarly edition of these fragments, with Greek text and English translation, appeared in the Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik in 2024.

• 6. A Shifting Reputation

  ›

  Euripides won first prize at the dramatic festivals only four times in his lifetime, with a fifth awarded posthumously to The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis in 405 BC. Aeschylus won thirteen; Sophocles at least twenty. This has often been read as evidence of his unpopularity in his own time. The picture is more complicated. Being selected to compete at all was a distinction. The judging system appears to have been flawed. And the sheer volume of comic attention Aristophanes lavished on him is its own form of proof that audiences cared intensely about his work. Plutarch records that after the catastrophic failure of the Sicilian Expedition, Athenian captives were released by their captors simply for being able to recite fragments of his plays from memory.

  In the centuries that followed, Aristotle constructed what one scholar calls an almost biological theory of tragedy's development: it grew under Aeschylus, matured with Sophocles, and then declined with Euripides. Yet his plays went on being performed and admired after those of the other two had come to seem remote. In the seventeenth century, the French playwright Racine expressed admiration for Sophocles but drew his models from Euripides: Iphigenia in Aulis and Hippolytus served as the templates for Iphigenie and Phedre respectively.

  The early nineteenth century brought a more damaging assault. Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel identified Euripides with the moral and artistic degeneration of Athens. August Wilhelm's Vienna lectures went through four editions between 1809 and 1846, arguing that Euripides had not only destroyed the external order of tragedy but missed its entire meaning. Friedrich Nietzsche absorbed this view, though he appears not to have known the plays well. Yet even readers who studied the Schlegels closely, like the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, could still value him as what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called, in Wine of Cyprus, stanza 12, "our Euripides the human." The pacifist scholar Gilbert Murray helped revive him for English-speaking audiences, drawn to his anti-war plays. The Trojan Women, composed in the aftermath of the Melian massacre and during preparations for the Sicilian Expedition, still reads today as a document of what war does to the people it leaves behind.