EURIPIDES

EURIPIDES

• He was a famous play writer
• He was known for hes tragic plays
• Know for startling hes audience

EURIPIDES

• Nationality-Greece
• Spouse-Choerine, Melite
• Children- Xenofon, Mnisilohos

Euripides was born in Athens, Greece, around 485 B.C. He became one of the best-known and most influential dramatists in classical Greek culture; of his 90 plays, 19 have survived. His most famous tragedies, which reinvent Greek myths and probe the darker side of human nature, include Medea, The Bacchae, Hippolytus, Alcestis and The Trojan Women. He died in Macedonia, Greece, in 406 B.C.

Over his career as a poet and dramatist, Euripides wrote approximately 90 plays, 19 of which have survived through manuscripts. Of the three most famous tragic dramatists to come out of ancient Greece—the others being Aeschylus and Sophocles—Euripides was the last and perhaps the most influential.

Euripides was famous in his lifetime; he was even caricatured by comedic playwright Aristophanes in the satire Frogs and in other plays. Because of his high status in Greek literature, his plays were preserved in manuscripts that were copied and recopied over the centuries.

Euripides was exposed early to the religion he would so stubbornly question as an adult. As a child, he served as cup-bearer to the guild of dancers who performed at the altar of Apollo. The son of an influential family, he was also exposed to the great thinkers of the day--including Anaxagoras, the Ionian philosopher who maintained that the sun was not a golden chariot steered across the sky by some elusive god, but rather a fiery mass of earth or stone. The radical philosopher had a profound effect on the young poet, and left with him a passionate love of truth and a curious, questioning spirit.

Famous Quote

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand friends-Euripides

FAMOUS QUOTE

Friends show their love in time of trouble, not in happiness - Euripides

Euripides was one of the great Athenian playwrights and poets of ancient Greece, known for the many tragedies he wrote, including Medea and The Bacchae.

Euripides's work is also notable for its strong, complex female characters; the women in his tragedies can be victims but also avengers. For example, in Medea, the title character takes revenge on her unfaithful husband by murdering their children as well as his lover. Another play, Hecuba, tells the story of the former queen of Troy, especially her grief over her children's deaths and the retaliation she takes against her son's murderers.

INTRESTING FATCS

• Put beggars in rags on stage
• Was determined to make tragedy less lofty
• Was a decadent, a poetic innovator
• Held unorthodox religious views.

Euripides's dramas would have an influence on later writers as diverse as John Milton, William Morris and T.S. Eliot. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were two more poets who admired him and wrote about him. His play Cyclops was translated by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and American poet Countee Cullen translated Medea. Euripides's plays are still adapted and produced for the theater today.

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