Euripides

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Euripides (480-406 B.C.) was a Greek playwright whom Aristotle called the most tragic of the Greek poets. He is certainly the most revolutionary Greek tragedian known in modern times.

Euripides was the son of Mnesarchus. The family owned property on the island of Salamis, and Euripides was twice married (Melito and Choirile) and had three sons (Mnesarchides, Mnesilochus, and Euripides). Euripides was raised in an atmosphere of culture, was witness to the rebuilding of the Athenian walls after the Persian Wars, but above all belonged to the period of the Peloponnesian War. Influenced by Aeschylus, Euripides has been described as the most intellectual poet of his time and was a product of the Sophistic movement. He has been called the philosopher of the stage. In addition to his literary talents, he is said to have been an excellent athlete and painter.

The first play by Euripides, Daughters of Pelias (455 B.C.; lost), was concerned with the Medea story. His first victory in a literary competition was in 442. Euripides's Cyclopsis the only satyr play to have survived in its entirety. The Rhesus, sometimes assigned to Euripides, may or may not be genuine. The remainder of his plays constitute a partial commentary on Athens's war with Sparta.

Euripides was well ahead of his times, and though popular later (more papyri of Euripides survive than of any other Greek poet except Homer), he irritated people in his own day by his sharp criticism and won only five dramatic prizes during the course of his career. He is reputed to have owned a library and to have spent a great deal of his time in his cave by the sea in Salamis.

We know nothing of Euripides's military or political career, and he may have served as a local priest of Zeus at Phyla and traveled on one occasion to Syracuse. Toward the end of his life he stayed briefly in Thessaly (at Magnesia) and at the court of King Archelaus in Macedonia, where he wrote his masterpiece, the Bacchae. He died in Macedonia and was buried at Arethusa. The Athenians built him a cenotaph in Athens.

Euripides's Style

Euripides was a most remarkable tragedian who had a way of baffling and startling his audiences. He radically humanized and popularized Greek tragedy and was responsible for bringing tragedy closer to the experience of the ordinary citizen. Though he used the traditional form of the drama, he had some very unconventional things to say, and he said them in a language that was much easier to comprehend than that of Aeschylus or even Sophocles. Euripides rejected rare and archaic words. He popularized diction and utilized many everyday expressions. But he was also the lbsen of his day because he was the first to introduce heroes in rags and crutches and in tears. He treated slaves, women, and children as human beings and insisted that nobility was not necessarily an attribute of social status.

Euripides's plays generally are comparatively loose in structure and use the prologue and deus ex machina to simplify plot structure. The prologue has the effect of relieving the author from working into his play the background and information necessary for its understanding. The use of the deus ex machina, or the appearance of a god at the end of the play, indicates that the playwright was unable to bring his play to a close in the proper dramaturgical manner. In Euripides's case this often indicates that he was much more interested in the ideas he was exploring than in the form of the play.

A critic of society, Euripides was a serious questioner of the values of his day. As a realist, he often placed modern ideas and opinions in the mouths of traditional characters. Up to the time of Euripides, the aristocracy were the only ones depicted on stage as worthy of serious consideration. Euripides felt for all classes of people and was particularly sensitive to the humanity of women and slaves. He studied female psychology with an acute eye and with unbelievably powerful perception. Euripides also could and did probe religious ecstasy, dreadful revenge, and all-consuming love. As a rationalist, Euripides was relentlessly attacked by conservative Aristophanes and accused of being an atheist. Euripides treated myths rationally and expected men to use their rational powers.

Influenced by the rhetoric of the Sophists, Euripides engaged in considerable rhetorical argument (agon), hairsplitting, and well-put platitudes. His plots are replete with sensationalism, surprise, and suspense, and Euripides tried to achieve the maximum of tragic effect.

All of Euripides's extant plays are concerned with three basic themes: war, women, and religion. He repudiated and despised aggressive wars. He advocated women's equal rights, and he severely questioned anthropomorphic divinity and its fallible human institutions. Euripides knew both the rational and the irrational aspects of human life and probed deeply into the social, political, religious, and philosophical issues of his day. Despite the verbal flagellation of his fellow Athenians, he truly loved Athens and sympathized genuinely with suffering humanity.

His Plays

Euripides's extant plays (excepting the Cyclops) can be divided into three basic categories. The true tragedies include Medea (431 B.C.), Andromache (early in the Pel ponnesian War, 431 B.C.-404 B.C.), Heraclidae (ca. 430 B.C.), Hippolytus (428 B.C.), Hecuba (ca. 425 B.C.), Suppliants (ca. 420 B.C.-419 B.C.), Heracles (ca. 420 B.C.-418 B.C.), Trojan Women (415 B.C.), and Bacchae (ca. 407 B.C.). The tragicomedies comprise Alcestis (438 B.C.), Ion (ca. 418 B.C.-413 B.C.), Iphigenia at Tauris (414 B.C.-412 B.C.), and Helen (412 B.C.). And the melodramas are Electra (ca. 415 B.C.), Phoenician Women (ca. 409 B.C.), Orestes (408 B.C.), and Iphigenia at Aulis (ca. 407 B.C.).

The Alcestisis the earliest of the Euripidean plays that is preserved and was presented in 438 in place of the satyr play. A tragicomedy, it has a happy ending and has fascinated critics for countless years. Alcestis is willing to die instead of her husband, Admetus. Heracles visits Admetus and, when he learns that Alcestis has died, struggles with Death, recovers Alcestis, and restores her to her husband.

Medea, though it won only third prize, is perhaps Euripides's most famous and most influential play. Medea, a princess, who has left family and country to marry Jason (whom she helped procure the Golden Fleece), lives peacefully in Corinth. However, when Jason suddenly sees the opportunity to gain the Corinthian throne by marrying the daughter of the king of Corinth, he ruthlessly abandons wife and children. Medea, who is also a sorceress, vows revenge and, just before she is about to be banished, sends poisoned gifts to the new bride and slays her own children to vent her hate for Jason.

In Medea, Euripides demonstrates that "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and he berates his fellow men for mistreating women and particularly for treating foreign women as inferiors. But perhaps even more brilliantly, Euripides shows that man is both rational and irrational, that the irrational can bring disaster when it gets out of control, and that a woman is particularly susceptible to passions.

Hippolytus shows clearly Euripides's concern about the claims of religion on the one hand and sexuality on the other. Hippolytus is a chaste young man dedicated to Artemis, goddess of the hunt and of purity. Phaedra, wife of King Theseus, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, and reveals her overpowering "incestuous" love to her nurse. The nurse takes pity on Phaedra and informs Hippolytus of the cause of his stepmother's distress. In a rage Hippolytus denounces her and all women. Phaedra commits suicide, implicating Hippolytus, and Theseus banishes him. As Hippolytus leaves Troezen, he is mortally wounded but survives long enough for Artemis to reveal the truth to his father Theseus, who then becomes remorseful and forgiving.

The Trojan Women is typical of Euripides's war plays. Written during the Peloponnesian War after the brutal subjugation of the island of Melos by the Athenians, this play is perhaps the weakest of all Euripidean plays because of its episodic nature. However, it is a powerful condemnation of war and exhibits universal compassion for suffering mankind by portraying the devastating effect of war on the innocent, particularly women and children.

Euripides's Electra beautifully illustrates Euripidean realism and rationalism. In this play Electra is married off to a peasant who does not consummate the marriage but who is noble in heart and respectful of his princess wife. Clytemnestra, the adulterous wife of Agamemnon who is fighting in the Trojan War, is lured to the mean hut of her daughter Electra on the pretense that Electra is having a baby. Aegisthus, Clytemnestra's lover, is killed first, and Electra prepares for her mother's arrival with his corpse in the hut. Though Clytemnestra is moved to remorse over her past treatment of Electra, it does not save her from being killed by Electra and the brother, Orestes, who are overwhelmed by their actions and are bewildered. A deus ex machina in the form of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) is needed to bridge the dilemma between an excusable murder and a mandatory punishment. Electra is to be punished by exile; Orestes will be pursued by the Furies until his trial in Athens, when he will be acquitted.

Euripides radically changes Electra from a ruthless seeker of vengeance to a tortured human being who suffers intensely as a result of her actions. Matricide is strongly condemned and the gods are vigorously castigated.

The Bacchae, Euripides's masterpiece, is tightly structured and closely follows the pattern of the Dionysiac ritual itself. Pantheus, a young king of Thebes, refuses to acknowledge the divinity of the newly introduced Asiatic god Dionysus, and even though grandfather Cadmus and prophet Tiresias accept him, Pentheus defiantly but unsuccessfully tries to incarcerate him. Pentheus, attracted by descriptions of the orgiastic rites, attempts to participate in one and is caught and decapitated by his own triumphant mother, Agave. She gradually recovers her senses and realizes the terrible deed she has done. The whole family of Pentheus is to be punished, asserts Dionysus, who appears as a deus ex machina.

The Bacchae is a very powerful play, Euripides's swan song. He is again showing how the irrational, when not acknowledged and properly moderated, can get out of control and destroy all those around it. Dionysus is not a god that can be worshiped in the ordinary sense. He symbolizes the bestiality in nature and in man, and the Bacchic rites provide a release, as the Greeks see it.

In his day Euripides managed to call the attention of his countrymen to many flagrant abuses and wrongs in his own society. He subjected all to a merciless rational examination, but he was fundamentally tolerant and understanding and fully sympathized with the troubles and suffering of humanity.

Further Reading

Purely biographical material on Euripides is scant. Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age (1913; 2d ed. 1946; with rev. bibl. 1965), contains a chapter on Euripides's life; the rest of the book deals with the background of the plays and the plays themselves. Some editions of Euripides's plays with the texts in Greek and long introductions and analyses in English by the editors are Euripides' Medea, by Denys L. Page (1938); Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, by Maurice Platnauer (1938); Euripides' Electra, by John D. Denniston (1939); Euripides' Ion, by Arthur S. Owen (1939); Euripides' Bacchae, by E. R. Dodds (1944); and Euripides' Alcestis, by Amy M. Dale (1954).

Other analyses of specific plays include Reginald P. Winninton-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus: An Interpretation of the Bacchae (1948), and John R. Wilson, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Euripides' Alcestis (1968). Paul Decharme, Euripides and the Spirit of His Dramas (1893; trans. 1906), is an older study. Georges M. A. Grube, The Drama of Euripides (1941), focuses on the structure and dramatic technique of the plays. Two works which treat all the extant plays of Euripides are D. J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Themes and Structure (1967), and Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides (1967).

Euripidēs (c.485–406 BC), the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians. We have little reliable information about his life, most of the anecdotes told about him being ultimately derived from the hostile jokes of the comic poets, such as the references to his mother selling herbs in the market. The story that he wrote his plays in a cave on Salamis confirms other reports of his solitary disposition, and he was not prominent in politics. He was associated in people's minds with the sophists, whose influence is discernible in his work, and said to be acquainted with Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Protagoras; it was supposed to have been at his house that Protagoras gave the first public reading of his sceptical work On the Gods. Euripides won the dramatic competitions with the trilogy containing Hippolytus in 428, and posthumously with the trilogy containing Bacchae and Iphigeneia at Aulis, produced probably in 405, and on only two other occasions. In about 408, embittered, it was said, by his unpopularity, he withdrew from Athens to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon. There he died, allegedly torn to pieces by Archelaus' dogs, not long before the Dionysia of 406, at the proagon of which Sophocles commemorated his death by presenting his own tragic chorus ungarlanded.

We possess nineteen of the ninety-two plays Euripides is said to have written, and know the titles of about eighty. The plays we possess are of two classes: (i) a selection of ten plays perhaps made c. AD 200 and transmitted with scholia, consisting of Alcestis (438, second prize), Medea (431, third prize), Hippolytus (428, first prize), Andromache (date not known; c.426), Hecuba (date not known; c.424), Trojan Women (415, second prize), Phoenician Women (see PHOENISSAE; between 412 and 408), Orestes (408), Bacchae (405; the scholia are lost), and Rhesus (perhaps not genuine); (ii) part of an alphabetic arrangement of his work comprising plays whose (Greek) titles begin with the Greek letters E to K, namely, Helen (412), Electra (date not known; c.417), Children of Heracles (Heracleidae) (date not known; c.430), Madness of Heracles (date not known; c.417), Suppliant Women (see SUPPLIANTS 2; date not known; c.422), Iphigeneia at Aulis (405; produced with Bacchae), Iphigeneia in Tauris (date not known; c.414), Ion (date not known; c.410), and Cyclops (a satyric drama, probably late). In this second group we therefore have some plays of Euripides that may be considered a representative selection of his work rather than plays selected for a purpose, such as a school curriculum. Very fragmentary remains of several lost plays have turned up on papyri in the twentieth century.

Euripides' tragedies derive their characteristic tone from the author's departure from the orthodoxies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, his giving prominence to unconventional and untraditional views and to socially insignificant people like women and slaves, as well as his reappraisal of old stories in the light of late-fifth-century scepticism. His mythical heroes and heroines, clothed in garments appropriate to their sufferings—the Athenians never forgot that in the Telephus he depicted the hero dressed in rags—describe their misfortunes in contemporary language and human terms, while a slave may reveal an inherent nobility of mind at odds with his status. Aristotle, in the Poetics, quoted in this connection Sophocles' saying that he, Sophocles, represented people as they should be, Euripides as they are. Euripides was often censured in antiquity for making his characters, and especially his women, unnecessarily bad. He was clearly attracted by stories of violent and bizarre passion—Phaedra falling incestuously in love with her stepson Hippolytus, Medea taking vengeance on her husband by murdering their children, Heracles' madness; but what interested him also was the conflict that arose in the minds of such people. Nineteenth-century critics liked to call him a rationalist because of his sceptical attitudes to traditional religion and morality, but in more recent times he has been called, no less justly, an irrationalist, because he depicts people struggling with powerful irrational forces within themselves. In construction the plays sometimes seem awkward. Characters speak what is rhetorically appropriate, especially in the set debates of which Euripides was so fond, or raise questions relevant to the thought and events of the late fifth century (and in particular to the Peloponnesian War), but the speeches often seem incongruous in the context and the characters themselves less credible therefore. Eleven plays are brought to a conclusion by ‘a god in a machine’ (deus ex machina; see THEATRE 1). Aristophanes parodied Euripides brilliantly in Frogs, and to a lesser extent in Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae. Aristotle called him ‘the most tragic of the poets’ (i.e. best at arousing pity and fear; see POETICS), a description particularly apt to his depiction of the horrors of war. It was said that some Athenian prisoners after the Sicilian Expedition won their liberty by reciting passages from his plays. (See also ELECTRA 2.)

Quotes:

"Know first who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly."

"Much effort, much prosperity."

"When a good man is hurt all who would be called good must suffer with him."

"There is nothing like the sight of an old enemy down on his luck."

"Every man is like the company he is wont to keep."

"Noble fathers have noble children."

See more famous quotes by Euripides

Euripides
Bust of Euripides: Roman marble copy of a 4th-century Greek original (Museo Pio-Clementino, Rome)
Born	c. 480 BC Salamís
Died	c. 406 BC Macedonia
Occupation	Playwright

Euripides (Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης) (ca. 480 BCE–406 BCE) was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles). Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety-five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias. Eighteen or nineteen of Euripides' plays have survived complete. There has been debate about his authorship of Rhesus, largely on stylistic grounds and ignoring classical evidence that the play was his.^[1] Fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays also survive. More of his plays have survived than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, because of the unique nature of the Euripidean manuscript tradition.

Euripides is known primarily for having reshaped the formal structure of Athenian tragedy by portraying strong female characters and intelligent slaves and by satirizing many heroes of Greek mythology. His plays seem modern by comparison with those of his contemporaries, focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown to Greek audiences.

Contents 1 Life 2 Plays 3 Commentary 4 Tragedies 4.1 Fragmentary tragedies 4.2 Satyr play 5 References 6 Sources 7 External links

Life

According to legend, Euripides was born in Salamís on 23 September 480 BCE, the day of the Persian War's greatest naval battle. Other sources estimate that he was born as early as 485 BCE.

His father's name was either Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides and his mother's name Cleito.^[2] Evidence suggests that the family was wealthy and influential. It is recorded that he served as a cup-bearer for Apollo's dancers, but he grew to question the religion he grew up with, exposed as he was to thinkers such as Protagoras, Socrates, and Anaxagoras.

A statue of Euripides.

He was married twice, to Choerile and Melito, though sources disagree as to which woman he married first.^[3] He had three sons and it is rumored that he also had a daughter who was killed after a rabid dog attacked her (some say this was merely a joke made by Aristophanes, who often poked fun at Euripides). The record of Euripides' public life, other than his involvement in dramatic competitions, is almost non-existent. The only reliable story of note is one by Aristotle about Euripides' involvement in a dispute over a liturgy (an account that offers strong evidence that Euripides was a wealthy man). It has been said that he traveled to Syracuse, Sicily; that he engaged in various public or political activities during his lifetime; that he wrote his tragedies in a sanctuary, The Cave of Euripides on Salamis Island; and that he left Athens at the invitation of King Archelaus I of Macedon and stayed with him in Macedonia and allegedly died there in 408 B.C. after being accidentally attacked by the kings hunting dogs while walking in the woods. According to Pausanias, Euripides was buried in Macedonia.

Plays

Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BCE, one year after the death of Aeschylus. He came third, reportedly because he refused to cater to the fancies of the judges. It was not until 441 BCE that he won first prize and over the course of his lifetime Euripides claimed only four victories. He also won a posthumous victory.

He was a frequent target of Aristophanes' humour. He appears as a character in The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and most memorably in The Frogs (where Dionysus travels to Hades to bring Euripides back from the dead; after a competition of poetry, the god opts to bring Aeschylus instead).

Euripides' final competition in Athens was in 408 BCE; there is a story that he left Athens embittered over his defeats. He accepted an invitation by the king of Macedon in 408 or 407 BCE, and once there he wrote Archelaus in honour of his host. He is believed to have died there in winter 407/6 BCE; ancient biographers have told many stories about his death, but the simple truth was that it was probably his first exposure to the harsh Macedonia winter which killed him.^[4] The Bacchae was performed after his death in 405 BCE and won first prize.

In comparison with Aeschylus (who won thirteen times) and Sophocles (who had eighteen victories) Euripides was the least honoured of the three, at least in his lifetime. Later in the 4th century BCE, Euripides' plays became the most popular, largely because of the simplicity of their language.^{[citation needed]} His works influenced New Comedy and Roman drama, and were later idolized by the French classicists; his influence on drama extends to modern times.

Euripides' greatest works include Alcestis, Medea, Trojan Women, and The Bacchae. Also considered notable is Cyclops, the only complete satyr play to have survived.

While the seven plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles that have survived were those considered their best, the manuscript containing Euripides' plays was part of a multiple volume, alphabetically-arranged collection of Euripides' works, rediscovered after lying in a monastic collection for approximately 800 years. The manuscript contains those plays whose (Greek) titles begin with the letters E to K. This accounts for the large number of extant plays of Euripides (among ancient dramatists, only Plautus has more surviving plays), the survival of a satyr play, and the absence of a trilogy. It is a testament to the quality of Euripides' plays that, though their survival was dependent on the letter their title began with and not (as with Aeschylus and Sophocles) their quality, they are ranked alongside and often above the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In June 2005, classicists at Oxford University worked on a joint project with Brigham Young University, using multi-spectral imaging technology to recover previously illegible writing (see References). Some of this work employed infrared technology—previously used for satellite imaging—to detect previously unknown material by Euripides in fragments of the Oxyrhynchus papyri,^[5] a collection of ancient manuscripts held by the university.

Commentary

Euripides focused on the realism of his characters; for example, Euripides’ Medea is a realistic woman with recognizable emotions and is not simply a villain. In Hippolytus, Euripides writes in a particularly modern style, demonstrating how neither language nor sight aids in understanding in a civilization on its last leg. Euripides makes his point about vision both through the plot (Phaedra makes repeated references to her inability to see clearly and her wish to have her eyes covered), and through the sparseness of his staging, which lacked the dazzling elements that other plays often had. The same was true of his commentary on the use of language. The misuse of words played an important role in the storyline (Phaedra's letter, the nurse's betrayal of Phaedra's secret, Hippolytus' refusal to break his oath to save his own life, and his refusal to pay lip-service to Aphrodite), but in addition, the actual language of the play was often purposefully verbose and ungainly, again to show the ineffectual nature of language in comprehension in Euripides' age.^[6] According to Aristotle, Euripides's contemporary Sophocles said that he portrayed men as they ought to be, and Euripides portrayed them as they were.^[7]

Euripides' realistic characterisations were sometimes at the expense of a realistic plot;^{[citation needed]} he sometimes relied upon the deus ex machina to resolve his plays, as in Ion and Electra. In the opinion of Aristotle, writing his Poetics a century later, this is an inadequate way to end a play. Many classicists cite this as a reason why Euripides was less popular in his own time.^{[citation needed]}

Tragedies

1. Alcestis (438 BCE, second prize)
2. Medea (431 BCE, third prize)
3. Heracleidae (c. 430 BCE)
4. Hippolytus (428 BCE, first prize)
5. Andromache (c. 425 BCE)
6. Hecuba (c. 424 BCE)
7. The Suppliants (c. 423 BCE)
8. Electra (c. 420 BCE)
9. Heracles (c. 416 BCE)
10. The Trojan Women (415 BCE, second prize)
11. Iphigenia in Tauris (c. 414 BCE)
12. Ion (c. 414 BCE)
13. Helen (412 BCE)
14. Phoenician Women (c. 410 BCE)
15. Orestes (408 BCE)
16. Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis (405 BCE, posthumous, first prize)
17. Rhesus (uncertain date)

Fragmentary tragedies

The following plays have come down to us today only in fragmentary form; some consist of only a handful of lines, but with some the fragments are extensive enough to allow tentative reconstruction.^[8]

1. Telephus (438 BCE)
2. Cretans (c. 435 BCE)
3. Stheneboea (before 429 BCE)
4. Bellerophon (c. 430 BCE)
5. Cresphontes (ca. 425 BCE)
6. Erechtheus (422 BCE)
7. Phaethon (c. 420 BCE)
8. Wise Melanippe (c. 420 BCE)
9. Alexandros (415 BCE)
10. Palamedes (415 BCE)
11. Sisyphus (415 BCE)
12. Captive Melanippe (412 BCE)
13. Andromeda (412 BCE with Euripides' Helen)
14. Antiope (c. 410 BCE)
15. Archelaus (c. 410 BCE)
16. Hypsipyle (c. 410 BCE)
17. Philoctetes (c. 410 BCE)

Satyr play

1. Cyclops (uncertain date)

References

1. ^ Walton (1997, viii, xix).
2. ^ Halsall, Paul. "Ancient History Sourcebook: 11th Britannica: Euripides". http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/eb11-euripides.html. 
3. ^ See [1] and [2].
4. ^ Rutherford (1996).
5. ^ http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/
6. ^ A Further Note on the Modernity of "Hippolytus" Robert Skloot. The Classical Journal, Vol. 64, No. 5. (Feb., 1969), pp. 226-227. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-8353%28196902%2964%3A5%3C226%3AAFNOTM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B
7. ^ Aristotle, Poetics (1460b33-34).
8. ^ see Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays (Aris and Phillips 1995) ed. C. Collard, M.J. Cropp and K.H. Lee.

Sources

• Barrett, William Spencer, ed. 1964. Hippolytos. By Euripides. Oxford: Clarendon P. and Toronto: Oxford UP.
• ---. 2007. Greek Lyric, Tragedy, and Textual Criticism: Collected Papers. Ed. M. L. West. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0199203571.
• Croally, N. T. 1994. Euripidean Polemic: The Trojan Women and the Function of Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521041120.
• Ippolito, P. 1999. La vita di Euripide. Napoli: Dipartimento di Filologia Classica dell'Universit'a degli Studi di Napoli Federico II.
• Kovacs, David. 1993 Euripidea. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 9004099263.
• Lefkowitz, Mary R.. 1981. The Lives of the Greek Poets. New edition. London: Duckworth, 1998. ISBN 0715617214.
• Rutherford, Richard. 1996. Introduction. Medea and Other Plays. By Euripides. Rev ed. London: Penguin, 2003. ISBN 0140449299.
• Scullion, S. 2003. "Euripides and Macedon, or the silence of the Frogs." The Classical Quarterly 53.2: 389-400.
• Sommerstein, Alan H. 2002. Greek Drama and Dramatists. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415260280.
• Walton, J. Michael. 1997. Introduction. In Plays VI. By Euripides. Methuen Classical Greek Dramatists ser. London: Methuen. vii-xxii. ISBN 0413716503.
• Webster, T. B. L. 1967. The Tragedies of Euripides. London: Methuen.
• Multispectral imaging. Oxyrhynchos online. Retrieved on 28 Oct 2007.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Euripides

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Euripides

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Euripides

• Works by Euripides at Project Gutenberg
• Encarta's entry for Euripides (Archived 2009-10-31)
• Bilingual Loeb editions downloadable at the Internet Archive
• Euripides-related materials at the Perseus Digital Library
• Useful summaries of Euripides' life, works, and other relevant topics of interest at TheatreHistory.com.
• http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/eb11-euripides.html
• http://www.ac-strasbourg.fr/pedago/lettres/Victor%20Hugo/Notes/Euripide.htm
• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/~amahoney/tragedy_dates.html
• http://www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/literature/world_literature/euripides.html
• http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc4.htm
• IMDBs List of movies based on Euripides plays
• Euripides Resources
• Staging of Euripides' fragmentary Hypsipyle
• SORGLL: Euripides, Trojan Women, 740-779; read by Stephen Daitz

v • d • e Plays by Euripides Cyclops · Alcestis · Medea · Herakles' Children · Hippolytus · Andromache · Hecuba · The Suppliants · Electra · Herakles · The Trojan Women · Iphigenia in Tauris · Ion · Helen · Phoenician Women · Orestes · Bacchae · Iphigenia in Aulis · Rhesus · Archelaos (fragmentary)  · Bellerophon (fragmentary)

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