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 S…