Euripides

Euripides was the youngest of Athens's three great tragedians, after Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the one his city never quite knew what to do with. Born around 480 BC, he wrote roughly ninety plays, yet the Athenian judges gave him only a handful of first prizes because his work unsettled audiences. He put ordinary and flawed people on stage where heroes were expected. He also let women, slaves and foreigners speak with real intelligence and pain. Medea, staged in 431 BC, is the sharpest example: a betrayed foreign wife who reasons her way, step by terrible step, toward killing her own children to punish her husband. The play placed third out of three that year, which shows how far ahead of his audience he was. Euripides also questioned the gods openly, asking whether beings who behave so cruelly deserve worship at all. Late in life he left Athens for the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon in northern Greece, and died there in 406 BC. Later ages loved him more than his own did. More of his plays survive than of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined, because readers kept copying them.