Euripides

Euripides wrote about ninety plays, of which eighteen or nineteen survive — more than Aeschylus and Sophocles combined — and was the least successful of the three in his lifetime. Born around 480 BC, probably on Salamis, he won only four or five victories at the Dionysia. His unpopularity was a matter of what he did with the form. His characters speak in something closer to ordinary language, his gods behave badly or are absent, and he gave sustained attention to people the tragic tradition had kept at the margins — women, slaves, foreigners and the defeated. Medea, staged in 431 BC, gives its heroine a speech on the condition of women that has no parallel in Greek literature, and then has her kill her own children and escape unpunished in a chariot sent by the sun. The Trojan Women, produced in 415 BC shortly after Athens massacred the men of Melos, presents the aftermath of a sack entirely from the perspective of the enslaved widows. The Bacchae, written in Macedonia at the end of his life, shows a king who refuses to acknowledge Dionysus torn apart by his own mother in a religious frenzy. He was mocked relentlessly by Aristophanes as a decadent whose mother sold vegetables and who taught Athenians to argue. His reputation reversed after his death. He became the most read and most performed of the three, and the surviving plays include a set that appears to have come down by accident from an alphabetical collection, which is why so many survive. He left Athens for the court of Archelaus of Macedon and died there around 406 BC.

• Lived: 480 BCE – 406 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: writer, painter