484?-406 BC
In 405 BC the comic dramatist Aristophanes staged his play `The Frogs'. It was based on the idea that Athens no longer had a great tragic poet.
It was true. Euripides had died in 406. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides was one of the three great tragic poets of ancient Greece. Of his life very little is known.
He was born about 484.
Later in life he married a woman named Melito, and they had three sons.
In 408 he left Athens for Macedonia, probably because of disgust with the seemingly endless Peloponnesian War with Sparta.
Euripides is believed to have written 92 dramas, but only 19 of them are now known.
They show him to have been a tragedian of incomparable merit. He saw the world as a place where chance, order, and reason were constantly thwarted by unreason and passion.
He was aware of so much meaningless suffering and tragedy that his view of life verged on despair.
He was especially troubled by the ferocity and folly of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 BC and outlasted his life.
As with those of the other tragedians, the plays of Euripides deal with legendary and mythological events of a time far removed from 5th-century Athens.
But the points he made were applicable to the time in which he wrote, especially to the cruelties of the war.
During the last 20 years of his life, Euripides wrote a number of plays that might be called romantic tragicomedies.
They were unusual in that they had happy endings. Among these were `Ion', `Iphigenia in Tauris', and `Helen'. In them he turned his back on the tragic real world and dealt purely in dramatic form.
Euripides' Plays:
# Alcestis - written 438 B.C.E
# Andromache - written 428-24
# The Bacchantes - written 410 B.C.E
# The Cyclops - written ca. 408 B.C.E
# Electra - written 420-410 B.C.E
# Hecuba - written 424 B.C.E
# Helen - written 412 B.C.E
# Heracleidae - written ca. 429 B.C.E
# Heracles - written 421-416 B.C.E
# Hippolytus - written 428 B.C.E
# Ion - written 414-412 B.C.E
# Iphigenia At Aulis - written 410 B.C.E
# Iphegenia in Tauris - written 414-412 B.C.E
# Medea - written 431 B.C.E
# Orestes - written 408 B.C.E
# The Phoenissae - written 411-409 B.C.E
# Rhesus - written 450 B.C.E
# The Suppliants - written 422 B.C.E
# The Trojan Women - written 415 B.C.E
