EURIPIDES, fi•rip'1-dt.z. (Lat., from Gk. Eepor15715) (c.460-406 B.c.). The latest of the three great Greek tragic poets. Ile was born, tradition said, in Salamis on the day of the great :,ea-fight with the Persians. His parents, Mnesarehides and Clito, were of humble station; they lived at one time in banishment in Bu'otia, and on their return to Athens are said to have engaged in petty retail trade. Their son, how ever, had a good education. He produced his first play, The Daughters of Peleus, at the age of twenty-five. From that time he devoted himself to the tragic stage. His first play won hut the third place, and he gained the first prize only after fourteen years of disappointment. This distinction he enjoyed but five (or, as one author ity says, fifteen) times in all. Euripides was of a studious and speculative nature, and was a friend and disciple of Anaxagoras, Prodicus. Protago•as, Socrates, and others, although he attached himself to no particular philosophic school. He possessed a gloomy temperament, was morbidly sensitive, and apparently felt him self misunderstood by his fellow Athenians. He took no part in politics, but lived in his library. The latter part of his life he spent away from Athens, first in Magnesia, then at the Court of Archelaus at Pella in Macedonia. He died in the spring of B.C. 406 at Arethusa, near Amphi polls, and was buried not far from that city. At Athens a cenotaph was erected to him, the epi taph of which declared that all Greece was his monument, and that the earth of Macedon covered only his bones.
In sharp contrast to his two great predecessors, iEschylus and Sophocles, Euripides represents the new moral, social, and political movements which were transforming Athens at the end of the fifth century n.c. He is also distinguished from the earlier tragedians by the fact that his interest lay in the thought and experience of the ordinary individual far more than in the sufferings of legendary beings belonging to the heroic past; so that while he drew characters from the old mythology. he treated them in a thoroughly realistic fashion ; they were no longer ideal personages far removed from every-day life, but contemporary Athenians representing every grade of society to he found in Athens at his time. In fact, Euripides shifted the tragic situ ation from a conflict between man and the divine laws of the universe to man's inner soul, where the struggle is between hie hotter impulses and the evil suggestions of his baser self. He is furthermore the most modern of all the Greek dramatists in his tenderness and sentimentality; in some plays he appears as the precursor of the modern romantic school. In his lost Andromeda,
of which the theme was Perseus's affection for the princess whose life he had saved, he produced the only known example among the' tragedies of antiquity of a plot based on the favorite motive of the modern novel.
Euripides shared in the current skepticism of the day as to the older religions beliefs, and many passages in his tragedies betray his doubts. His attitude not unnaturally brought down upon his head the wrath of the conservatives, of whom Aristophanes was the chief literary representa tive. In Euripides's language the speech of com mon life had a considerable part, and his style shows a remarkable smoothness and dexterity; Aristophanes actually imitated it, Aristotle praised it, so that it was the model for the writers of the later comedy. The structure of his plays. however, is often dramatically defective, as many of them are made up of brilliant detached episodes and do not form coherent units through which the plots are gradually developed. On the other hand, in other plays, as, for example, in the Medea, the plot is steadily developed from be ginning to end. Euripides has been blamed for his use of the explanatory prologue, in which he makes known to the spectators the events which precede the opening of the play and oftentimes outlines coming events. But he deserves cen sure. not for his employment of such prologues, but for the manner in which he managed them, for many of them are mechanical and ten are burdened with long genealogies which deserve the ridicule that Aristophanes heaped upon them. Ile also resorts too often to the 'dens ex machina' (q.v.) to solve his tragic situations, and the choral songs have frequently nothing to do with his play. Yet with all allowances for his defects, Euripides remains a great tragic poet. His greatest strength lay, as was pointed out in antiquity, in the representation of human pas sion and in his recognition scenes. After the beginning of the Peloponnesian War Euripides enjoyed great popularity, and his fame was not confined to Attica alone. In the fourth century he was read and presented almost to the' exclusion of the two older poets. The vases from southern Italy which have representations of scenes from his work attest his fame there in the fourth and third centuries B.C., and in the Roman and Byzantine periods he was highly esteemed and imitated. In modern times he has influenced Eng lish, German, and especially French dramatists.