Euripides

Euripides was Greek tragedian whose work, along with that of his predecessors Sophocles and Aeschylus, is widely regarded today as some of the most important art of the Classical Era. Only vague outlines of Euripides’s biography are known today, and many stories of his life are widely considered to be birthed from folklore: it is possible that he was born to a mother and father who believed, thanks to the word of an oracle, that their son was destined for athletic greatness and wasted no time enrolling him in an athletic education. In Euripides’s adult life, he seems to have been married twice—both marriages failed, and Euripides, according to legend, retreated into a cave on his home island of Salamis to read and write. Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, an Athenian drama festival, in 455 B.C.E.—he won prizes for his work, two of which were delivered posthumously. Euripides’s dramas, which include Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae, are notable for their focus on the internality of their characters—an important new development in the presentational tradition of Greek drama. Famed playwrights of later centuries such as Racine, Shakespeare, and Ibsen cited Euripides’s investment in emotion and psychology as enormous influences on their own work.