Euripides

Euripides wrote in classical Athens around 480 to 406 BC, the last of the three Greek tragedians whose plays survived whole. Ancient scholars credited him with ninety-two or ninety-five works; nineteen remain nearly complete, more than Aeschylus and Sophocles combined, partly because his stock rose after death - he became a pillar of Hellenistic schooling alongside Homer. He reinvented tragedy by treating mythic figures as ordinary people caught in extremes, exploring inner life and motive in ways that prefigured Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen, and also fed the DNA of later comedy from Menander to Shaw. His contemporary Aristophanes mocked him as an over-intellectual, and modern scholars still split on whether he was an iconoclast or traditionalist. His women - especially Medea - drew notice for a perceptiveness and sympathy rare in his time.