Euripides

Ancient tradition says Euripides was born on the island of Salamis on the very day of the great naval battle of 480 BC, which is probably too neat to be true; around 480 is as close as we can get. His parents were Mnesarchus and Cleito; the comic poets joked that his mother sold vegetables in the market, which tells us more about Athenian comedy than about her. He seems to have been well educated and to have owned a large library, a rarity at the time, and later writers linked him with the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates.

He first competed at the City Dionysia in 455 BC and won his first victory only in 441. Over almost fifty years he wrote about ninety plays and won just four times while alive; a fifth prize came after his death, for Βάκχαι and Ιφιγένεια εν Αυλίδι (Iphigenia at Aulis), produced by his son in 405 BC. Μήδεια, now his most famous play, came last in 431. Aristophanes mocked him in play after play, in Αχαρνής, Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι and Βάτραχοι, as a clever, chatty poet who put kings in rags and women in love on the stage.

Around 408 BC he left Athens, worn out by the war and perhaps by his audience, for the court of King Archelaus of Macedonia in Pella, where he wrote Βάκχαι. He died there in 406 BC. When the news reached Athens, Sophocles is said to have brought his chorus on stage in mourning. A cave on Salamis where, tradition says, he went to write alone was identified by archaeologists in the 1990s.

Eighteen tragedies survive, plus Ρήσος (Rhesus), which may not be his, and Κύκλωψ (Cyclops), the only complete satyr play we have. Among them: Άλκηστις (Alcestis, 438 BC), about a wife who agrees to die in her husband's place; Μήδεια (431 BC), in which a betrayed foreign wife kills her own children to punish Jason; Ιππόλυτος (428 BC), in which Phaedra's hidden love for her stepson destroys them both; Εκάβη (Hecuba) and Τρωάδες (The Trojan Women, 415 BC), the bleakest pictures of what war does to the defeated; Ηλέκτρα, Ελένη (Helen, 412 BC), Ιφιγένεια εν Ταύροις (Iphigenia among the Taurians) and Ορέστης (408 BC); and finally Βάκχαι, in which the god Dionysus takes a terrible revenge on the king of Thebes who refuses to worship him.

Euripides brought the heroes of myth down to human size. His characters argue like Athenians in the law courts, doubt the gods, change their minds, and are shown from the inside; Medea's long speech about the lot of women is the first of its kind in European literature. He gave great parts to women, slaves and foreigners, and he liked to end a play by lowering a god on the stage crane to sort out the mess, the «από μηχανής θεός» (deus ex machina). Aristotle called him «the most tragic of the poets».

Many of his plays survive by luck: one volume of a complete alphabetical edition, containing the plays from Ελένη to Κύκλωψ, came through the Middle Ages intact, while from Aeschylus and Sophocles only selected school texts remain. That accident is why we can read Euripides at his most varied: tragedy, melodrama, near-comedy and romance.

Greek pupils meet Euripides at fourteen: Ελένη (Helen) is the set tragedy of the third year of Gymnasium, read in translation. Every summer Μήδεια, Βάκχαι or Τρωάδες are staged at Epidaurus; Theodoros Terzopoulos's Bacchae of 1986 became the most travelled Greek production of its time. The expression «από μηχανής θεός» is used in everyday Greek for any solution that arrives out of nowhere, and newspapers still call a mother who harms her children «μια Μήδεια». Medea has been an opera, a ballet and several films, including Pasolini's with Maria Callas. On Salamis you can visit the Cave of Euripides above the bay of Peristeria, and streets named Ευριπίδου run through Athens, Thessaloniki and most Greek towns.

• Of about ninety plays he won only four first prizes while alive; Μήδεια, his most performed work today, came last in 431 BC.
• Eighteen or nineteen of his plays survive, more than Aeschylus (seven) and Sophocles (seven) combined, partly because one volume of an alphabetical edition survived by chance.
• He invented nothing less than the stage god: the «από μηχανής θεός» lowered by crane at the end of a play is a Euripidean habit.
• Archaeologists excavating a cave on Salamis in the 1990s found a pottery fragment inscribed with his name, supporting the ancient story that he wrote there.