"Whoever neglects learning in his youth - loses the past and is dead to the future."
– Euripides
Euripides (c. 480 BC – c. 406 BC) was a Greek tragedian of classical Athens.
Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full.
Some ancient scholars attributed 92 to 95 plays to him.
Of these, only eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete.
There are many fragments - some substantial - of most of his other plays.
Fragment of a vellum codex from the fourth or fifth centuries AD, showing choral anapaests from Medea, lines 1087–91 - Tiny though it is, the fragment influences modern editions of the play
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.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance.
He also became the most tragic of poets, focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown.
According to scholars, he 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".
Medea About to Murder Her Children - Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862)
But Euripides was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
Known among the writers of classical Athens for his unparalleled sympathy towards all victims of society, including women, slaves or strangers, his contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism.
Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes.
Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence.
Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.
Bust of Euripides
Life
Traditional accounts of the author'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 (mother) and Mnesarchus (father), 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.
Euripides served for a short time as both dancer and torch-bearer at the rites of Apollo Zosterius.
His education was not confined to athletics, studying also painting and philosophy under the masters Prodicus and Anaxagoras.
Euripides had two disastrous marriages, and both his wives — Melite and Choerine (the latter bearing him three sons) — were unfaithful.
He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on the Island of Salamis - the Cave of Euripides - where a cult of the playwright developed after his death.
According to his followers:
"There ... he built an impressive library and pursued daily communion with the sea and sky".
The Cave of Euripides is a narrow cave - approximately 47 meters deep with ten small chambers - on a hillside overlooking the Saronic Gulf in the area of Peristeria on the south coast of Salamis Island, Greece
The details of his death are uncertain.
Traditionally it was held that he retired to the "rustic court" of King Archelaus in Macedonia, where he died in 406 BC.
However, some modern scholars believe that in reality Euripides may have never visited Macedonia at all, or if he did, he might have been drawn there by King Archelaus with incentives that were also offered to other artists.
Such biographical details derive almost entirely from three unreliable sources:
Folklore, employed by the ancients to lend colour to the lives of celebrated authors
Parody, employed by the comic poets to ridicule the tragic poets
Autobiographical clues gleaned from his extant plays.
Statue of Euripides (200 AD) - Louvre, Paris
Ancient Roman wall painting from the House of Vettii in Pompeii - Showing the death of Pentheus, as portrayed in Euripides's Bacchae
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