Euripides

Euripides (?485-?406) - the name is usually pronounced in British academic circles with the stress on the second syllable, and the first syllable like 'you': you-RIP-id-eez' IPA: /jʊ'rɪpɪ,diːz/ - was a citizen of Athens and spent the greater part of his life in that city. Towards the end of his life, however, he left Athens for the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, and it was there that he died. Euripides was of a gloomy and unsociable disposition, and there is little evidence that he took any part in Athenian public life. He seems to have preferred the company of intellectuals and was on familiar terms with some of the leading thinkers of his day, such as the Sophists Prodicus and Protagoras and the philosopher Socrates, who is said to have been a great admirer of his tragedies.

Euripides wrote altogether 92 plays, of which 19 have survived. The best known are Alcestis (produced in 438); Medea (431); Hippolytus (428); Hecabe (or Hecuba (the Latin version of the name)) (about 425); Troades (or Trojan Women) (415); Electra (413); and Bacchae (produced posthumously).

Influenced by the scientific approach to understanding the world adopted by some of his contemporaries, by the many terrible events which befell the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War, and, no doubt, by his own natural sympathies, Euripides seems to have been sceptical about the existence of the gods, and his tragedies, unlike those of Aeschylus, convey no sense that human life and human affairs are ordered in accordance with principles of divine justice.

Euripides has a psychologist's interest in human beings and particularly in the way they behave in difficult circumstances. His tragedies portray, often with great insight, the powerful emotions we may feel in these circumstances and the extreme actions to which they can sometimes give rise. In Medea, for example, Medea, driven by jealousy of her husband Jason's new wife, Glauce, seeks revenge by killing not only Glauce but the two sons she has borne to Jason; in Hippolytus, the strong sexual desire which Phaedra feels for her step-son Hippolytus, and which out of a sense of decency she seeks to repress, leads eventually to her suicide and Hippolytus' death; and in Hecabe Hecabe, overwhelmed with grief at the sacrifice of her daughter Polyxena and the murder of her last surviving son Polydorus, secures the death of her son's killer, Polymestor.

It has often been remarked that, as in these examples, a great many of the protagonists in Euripides' tragedies are women. The way in which Euripides portrays these figures has led to the competing claims, on the one hand, that he was a misogynist and, on the other, that he was a proto-feminist.

See further Greek tragedy, Aeschylus, Sophocles.

For further help with the pronunciation of Greek names see Pronunciation of Greek Proper Names.