Euripides

Euripides was born around 480 BCE, traditionally on the island of Salamis on the day of the Greek naval victory over the Persians — a piece of biographical tidiness that is almost certainly invented but has stuck. His family appears to have been well-off enough to give him a literary education, and he is said to have owned one of the largest private libraries in Athens, an unusual possession at a time when most texts circulated in performance or recitation. He first competed at the City Dionysia in 455 BCE and won the first prize only four times in his lifetime — far fewer than Sophocles or Aeschylus — though he won a posthumous fifth victory after his death.

Of the roughly ninety plays he wrote, nineteen survive, more than for any other Greek tragedian. This is partly an accident of textual transmission: a Byzantine selection preserved ten plays through medieval recopying, and a separate alphabetical run of his works survived by chance in a single manuscript. The result is that we have far more Euripides than Sophocles or Aeschylus, and the range is wider — from the brutal political vision of The Trojan Women to the near-comic intrigue of Helen, from the psychological extremity of Medea and The Bacchae to romance plays that anticipate later Hellenistic and Roman comedy.

Medea (431 BCE) is the play that most directly shaped his modern reputation. Medea, a foreign sorceress who once helped Jason obtain the Golden Fleece and bore him two sons, is abandoned by him when he contracts a more advantageous marriage to the daughter of the king of Corinth. She poisons the bride and her father, and then — in a decision the play stages as deliberate rather than mad — kills her own children to destroy Jason completely. The play is uncomfortable in ways the tradition has not always known what to do with. Medea is given the most articulate speeches in the play; her reasoning about the position of women in Greek society ("Of all creatures that have life and reason, we women are the most miserable") is presented seriously, not as a symptom. The infanticide is not softened. Critics from Aristotle onward have argued about whether the play "endorses" Medea, which is probably the wrong question; what it does is refuse to let the audience look away.

His other major plays — Hippolytus, The Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Electra, The Trojan Women — share an interest in characters whose interior states are made unusually visible. He puts slaves, women, and barbarians at the center of plays in ways his contemporaries generally did not, and his gods are often petty, vindictive, or absent in ways that read as theological critique. Aristophanes mocked him relentlessly in The Frogs for lowering the dignity of tragedy and for the rhetorical sophistication of his characters' speeches; the mockery is also a measure of how dominant his innovations had become.

He left Athens late in life for the court of King Archelaus of Macedon, where he died in 406 BCE under circumstances that ancient gossip embellished into a story about being torn apart by hunting dogs. The fact is plainer: he died at around seventy-four. For new readers, the Richmond Lattimore and David Grene translations (University of Chicago) remain the scholarly standard; the Anne Carson versions (Grief Lessons, An Oresteia) are looser but recover the strangeness of the Greek in a way more literal translations sometimes lose. Start with Medea.