Euripides, the youngest of the trio of great Greek tragedians was born at
Salamis in 480 B.C., on the day when the Greeks won their momentous naval
victory there over the fleet of the Persians. The precise social status of
his parents is not clear but he received a good education, was early
distinguished as an athlete, and showed talent in painting and oratory. He
was a fellow student of Pericles, and his dramas show the influence of the
philosophical ideas of Anaxagoras and of Socrates, with whom he was
personally intimate. Like Socrates, he was accused of impiety, and this,
along with domestic infelicity, has been supposed to afford a motive for
his withdrawal from Athens, first to Magnesia and later to the court of
Archelaüs in Macedonia where he died in 406 B.C.
The first tragedy of Euripides was produced when he was about twenty-five,
and he was several times a victor in the tragic contests. In spite of the
antagonisms which he aroused and the criticisms which were hurled upon him
in, for example, the comedies of Aristophanes, he attained a very great
popularity; and Plutarch tells that those Athenians who were taken captive
in the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 413 B.C. were offered freedom by
their captors if they could recite from the works of Euripides. Of the
hundred and twenty dramas ascribed to Euripides, there have come down to
us complete eighteen tragedies and one satyric drama, "Cyclops," beside
numerous fragments.
The works of Euripides are generally regarded as showing the beginning of
the decline of Greek tragedy. The idea of Fate hitherto dominant in the
plays of his predecessors, tends to be degraded by him into mere chance;
the characters lose much of their ideal quality; and even gods and heroes
are represented as moved by the petty motives of ordinary humanity. The
chorus is often quite detached from the action; the poetry is florid; and
the action is frequently tinged with sensationalism. In spite of all this,
Euripides remains a great poet; and his picturesqueness and tendencies to
what are now called realism and romanticism, while marking his inferiority
to the chaste classicism of Sophocles, bring him more easily within the
sympathetic interest of the modern reader.