Euripides, the latest of the three great Greek tragedians, was born at the time when the Persian attack upon the freedom of Greece was being repelled in a series of glorious victories; and this fact is expressed in the story that he was born 480 B.C. at Salamis, whither the Athenians had fled, and where the Persian fleet was defeated in that year. The first half of his life coincided with the growth of the Athenian empire, the second with its decline. Æschylus, the first of the three tragedians, a man of forty when Euripides was born, probably had died before Euripides produced his first play—at which time Sophocles had already been thirteen years before the public, and Aristophanes, the comedian, who was to be the constant opponent of Euripides, was not yet born. Euripides was the son of wealthy parents, who probably had made their fortune by trade, for Aristophanes (Ach. 478, Ran. 840) banters him on the subject with jests which would have been pointless had they not contained some truth. Tradition says that his father intended him to compete in the national athletic festivals of Greece; and this may account for Euripides' pronounced dislike of athletes (Frag. 284). He then took to painting, but, like Théophile Gantier, abandoned it for literature; and he has indeed the painter's eye for an effective situation. Tradition represents him as the friend of Socrates, and the pupil of Prodicus, Protagoras, and Anaxagoras; and he does more than once reproduce in his plays Anaxagoras' doctrine of the origin of all things from the wedlock of Earth and Air (cf. Frag. 836, 890, 935; Ar. Ran. 892). He is said to have been married twice, and to have had three sons. Scandal has been busy with his wives, but there can be no truth in it, otherwise we should have heard of it from Aristophanes; and his reputation as a woman-hater is not confirmed by an impartial study of his plays. How many dramas he wrote we do not know, but the names and some fragments of about eighty are known to us, and of these eighty we possess eighteen complete. He won the tragic prize only five times, and he died 406 B.C. at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia. His habits were those of the scholar and the recluse. He was one of the first and the few private persons in Greece to possess a library (cf. Hipp. 452, 954; Iph. A. 798; Alc. 962; Frag. 629; Ar. Ran. 943, 1403). He took no such part in public life as did Æschylus and even Sophocles. In politics he was a moderate, approving of democracy (Frag. 628), but not of demagogues (Hec. 132, 254). His views of life on the whole were pessimistic: he did not share Aristophanes' romantic illusions as to the past, and the contemplation of the future could bring no comfort in an age when the doctrine of progress had not as yet been formulated. The immoralities of the accepted mythology shocked him as well as other thinkers; but his philosophy sufficed neither to shake off the old religion nor to reconcile him to it. The names and probable order of the surviving plays are: Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Hecuba, Andromache, Supplices, Heraclidae, Troades, Helena, Phœnissæ, Orestes; the Bacchæ and Iphigenia in Aulis were put on the Athenian stage only after the author's death; and it is uncertain to what period belonged the Ion, Hercules Furens, Iphigenia in Tauris, Electra, and Cyclops, whilst it is doubtful whether the Rhesus is genuine. Whereas the characters in the plays of Æschylus and Sophocles had been heroic in their proportions and greater than life, Euripides set to work to be human. And in this we have the secret both of his success and of his failure: of his failure, because he made the mistake of imagining human life to be the same thing as everyday life; of his success, because in his treatment of everyday motives and emotions he was, 'with his droppings of warm tears,' the 'most tragic of the poets.' His skill as a playwright is of the highest order; he can construct plots which are exciting beyond anything attempted by his predecessors, and he has an unerring instinct for a 'situation.' But he has all the unscrupulousness of the practical playwright: in his consuming desire to get on to the situation as rapidly as possible, and to bring the curtain down sharp on it, he substitutes a bald prologue for a proper exposition, and, instead of working out the dénouement, makes a Deus ex machinâ cut the knot of the situation. For the sake of the same all-important consideration he will sacrifice consistency in character-drawing, and transgress all the bounds of artistic self-restraint. His popularity increased, indeed we might almost say began, after his death; his plays were 'revived' on the stage more frequently than those of Æschylus or Sophocles; they fill a much larger place in the mind of Aristotle, as appears from his Poetics, than those of the other two tragedians; and the number of his plays that have survived is greater than both theirs put together. And Euripides was a favourite with Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Milton, and Browning.
The oldest MSS., those of the 12th century, are very corrupt. Critics of the text were Porson (1797), Elmsley (1813), G. Hermann (1838), C. Badham (1851), and Paley (1860). Many of the plays have been separately translated. A. S. Way published in 1894-98 three volumes of a complete verse translation. Verrall, in Euripides the Rationalist (1895) asserts that Euripides wrote his plays deliberately (though not explicitly) to make the gods ridiculous and undermine popular faith in miracles and the old theology.