Euripides

Lore & Background

Traditional accounts of Euripides's life are found in many commentaries and include details such as these: He was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC, with parents Cleito and Mnesarchus, a retailer from the deme of Phlya. On receiving an oracle that his son was fated to win 'crowns of victory,' Mnesarchus insisted that the boy should train for a career in athletics, but the boy was destined for a career on the stage. He served briefly as both dancer and torch-bearer at the rites of Apollo Zosterius, and studied painting and philosophy under the masters Prodicus and Anaxagoras. He had two disastrous marriages, and both his wives—Melite and Choerine—were unfaithful. He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on Salamis, where he built an impressive library and pursued daily communion with the sea and sky. The details of his death are uncertain; it was traditionally held that he retired to the rustic court of King Archelaus in Macedonia, where he died in 406 BC, though some modern scholars claim he may have never visited Macedonia at all.

Reader's Guide

Euripides is one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, and more of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined. He became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander. He was referred to by Aristotle as 'the most tragic of poets,' probably in reference to a perceived preference for unhappy endings, but the remark is seen by Bernard Knox as having wider relevance, since in his representation of human suffering Euripides pushes to the limits of what an audience can stand. Focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown, Euripides was 'the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg,' in which imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates. He was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw. In the comedies of his contemporary Aristophanes, Euripides is lampooned for his intellectualism. Modern scholars have varied greatly in their views of Euripides, with some regarding him as an iconoclastic intellectual, and others seeing him as a more traditional playwright. His portrayal of women has attracted particular interest in modern times, on account of the perceptiveness and sympathy with which he depicts women and the difficulties facing them in Greek society, especially in his Medea.

Did You Know?

• Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda states Euripides wrote 92 plays.
• Nineteen plays attributed to Euripides have survived more or less complete, although one of these (Rhesus) is often considered not to be genuinely his work.
• He won first prize at the City Dionysia only five times, one of these posthumously.
• An anecdote, not from Plutarch, recounts that after the catastrophic failure of the Sicilian expedition, Athenians traded renditions of Euripides's lyrics to their enemies in return for food and drink.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Greek text cited from J. Diggle, Euripidis Fabulae, vols. I–III (Oxford, 1984–1994)." — Euripides "ἁγὼ οὔτινι θύω πλὴν ἐμοί, θεοῖσι δ᾿ οὔ, καὶ τῇ μεγίστῃ, γαστρὶ τῇδε, δαιμόνων." — Euripides "I sacrifice to no god save myself — And to my belly, greatest of deities." — Euripides "οὔποτε φήσω γάμον εὐφραίνειν πλέον ἢ λυπεῖν." — Euripides