Bioi paralleloi, c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives, 1579) are not usually accepted as Euripidean. Several lines exist of an epinician, or victory, ode said to have been dedicated by Euripides to the Athenian politician Alcibiades after an Olympic victory, but even in antiquity, this ode was attributed to others as well.

The ancient Bios Euripidou (third century b.c.e.; life of Euripides) by Satyrus assigns to the playwright innovations in the following areas: prologues, scientific dissertations on nature, oratorical pieces, and recognitions. This vague statement requires considerable qualification. Although the extant plays show little of the interest in natural science suggested by the anonymous author of the Life of Euripides and confirmed by several fragments from lost plays, Euripides’ dramatic application of set speeches and rhetorical devices is a common feature of his plays, as in the legal debate between Hecuba and Helen in The Trojan Women. These scientific and rhetorical features reveal Euripides’ place in the intellectual mainstream of late fifth century b.c.e. Athens, a position that it is difficult for a modern reader to appreciate fully because so much of the existing nondramatic evidence is fragmentary. Euripides very well may have been the first tragedian to highlight these contemporary trends in his drama.

Euripides certainly did not invent anagnorisis, or recognition, which existed in Greek literature as early as Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.; English translation, 1616) and in drama as early as Aeschylus’s Chophoroi (458 b.c.e.; Libation Bearers, 1777), but Euripides uses these recognition scenes frequently and with a novelty and skill much admired by Aristotle in his De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705). Indeed, it is Euripides’ focus on recognition and intrigue in his later dramas, such as Ion, Helen, and Iphigenia in Tauris, that has led him to be called a father of the New Greek Comedy of Menander in the late fourth century b.c.e. Although these recognition dramas were technically produced by Euripides as tragedies, they are not necessarily “tragic” in the modern sense, but are more “tragicomic” and have sometimes been labeled as tyche dramas, or dramas of “chance.”

Alcestis deserves special mention. Technically not a tragedy, it is rather a pro-satyr play because it was produced in place of a satyr play. Euripides is known to have experimented with such pro-satyr plays several other times, and the pro-satyr play may have been a Euripidean innovation. Knowledge of the Greek satyr play tradition is generally scanty as Euripides’ Cyclops is the only complete drama of this type to survive, along with significant papyrus fragments of two Sophoclean satyr plays, but two special features of satyr plays were known to have been choruses of satyrs and scenes of buffoonery. While Alcestis lacks the former, its links with the satyr play can be seen in the comic scene with Heracles. Euripides’ Alcestis and his tyche dramas thus serve as a caution against making general statements about the genre of Greek “tragedy” or about “Euripidean tragedy” in particular. The definition of “tragedy” in fifth century b.c.e. Athens was clearly much broader than it is today.

The Life of Euripides notwithstanding, Euripides definitely did not invent the tragic prologue, which, by Aristotelian definition in Poetics was “that part of a tragedy which precedes the parodos or chorus’s entrance song.” Several extant plays of Aeschylus have such prologues, but Euripides, like Sophocles, added his own distinctive feature: a scene, often called expository, in which a character, usually a mortal but sometimes a god, identifies himself and outlines the characters and background of the plot. Every extant Euripidean tragedy has such an expository prologue, which cannot always be dismissed as a mere nondramatic playbill. The expositions spoken by gods (in Alcestis, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Ion, and The Bacchae) are particularly significant in that the dramatic events generally do not evolve exactly as predicted by the gods in the prologues. In each of these five prologues, the playwright makes his deity more or less misleading as to subsequent dramatic events. At the least, such “deceptive” prologues serve to create interest in the story without giving away the plot. At the same time, such prologues may reveal the gods’ inability to control human action and to move it along their preordained plans.

The expository prologue has also been called an archaizing element in Euripidean drama, but too little is known of Greek tragedy in its infancy to say with certainty that such scenes were a common early feature. Euripides’ plays, however, do exhibit several traits that could be labeled archaisms in that they can be traced back to Aeschylean elements. The dramas of Aeschylus, first produced in Euripides’ youth and revived throughout his lifetime, seem to have been a particular source of dramatic inspiration to the younger playwright. Euripidean imitation of Aeschylean techniques can be seen in several areas: Euripides’ altar scenes, such as those in The Suppliants and Ion, may be based on similar scenes in such plays as Aeschylus’s Hiketides (463 b.c.e.?; The Suppliants, 1777) and Eumenides (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777). Luring speeches, such as those in Hecuba and Electra, are probably derived from the carpet scene in Aeschylus’s Agamemnn (458 b.c.e.; Agamemnon, 1777). The pathetic ghost of Polydorus in Hecuba can be traced back to the ghosts in Persai (472 b.c.e.; The Persians, 1777) and Eumenides. The mad scene of Heracles may possibly be modeled on the last scene of Libation Bearers. Aeschylus’s Eumenides and The Suppliants are the probable prototypes for Euripides’ subsidiary choruses in Hippolytus and The Suppliants, and Euripides’ The Suppliants is almost certainly following its predecessor in the use of the chorus as the main character. It has also been suggested that the model for the “bad women” of Euripides, such as Medea and Phaedra, was Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, and that Euripides’ “unhappy women,” such as Hecuba, were modeled on Aeschylus’s Atossa.

Also like Aeschylus, Euripides was a master of stage machinery, including the eccyclema, a device used to show interiors, which Euripides employs in daring ways in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and other plays. For Euripides, however, stage machinery means especially the mechane, a crane used to swing an actor into the orchestra. Euripides has a mechane, which is the origin of the term deus ex machina, at the end of ten of his extant plays, almost always to enable a god to make an appearance and resolve dramatic difficulties. By contrast, the mechane is used in only one of Sophocles’ surviving plays, Philoktts (409 b.c.e.; Philoctetes, 1729), and in none of Aeschylus’s, except perhaps Prometheus desmts (date unknown; Prometheus Bound, 1777). Euripides himself makes brilliant original use of the technique in Medea, in which it is Medea herself who escapes in a crane dramatically transformed into the magic chariot of the sun.

A final Aeschylean dramatic feature that is often linked with Euripides is the connected trilogy. T. B L. Webster is the most prominent proponent of this view, which has had remarkable tenacity despite meager evidence. The most that can be said about the possibility of Euripidean-connected trilogies is that neither of the most likely trilogic candidates, Euripides’ production of 415 b.c.e. (including the lost Alexander and Palamedes, as well as the surviving The Trojan Women), often called his “Trojan Trilogy”; his production of c. 410-409 b.c.e. (Antiope and Hypsipyle, now lost, and The Phoenician Women), a “Theban Trilogy,” appear to have been connected in the closely knit thematic and chronological way that is notable in the Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777), Aeschylus’s only surviving trilogy. It is possible that Euripides may have linked plays within a dramatic group through a sort of meaningful variation, but such connections do not necessarily make a trilogy. Like his contemporary, Sophocles, Euripides was an artistic master of the single play rather than of the connected trilogy.

Euripides was an acknowledged virtuoso of Greek tragic language in all its forms. In the iambic or spoken portions of his plays, his elaborate agons, or debates, and his carefully detailed messenger speeches, such as the famous report of Hippolytus’s death in Hippolytus are particularly noteworthy. In the lyric, or sung, portions of his plays, Euripides was in the vanguard of the late fifth century b.c.e. trend toward more song by actors and less by the chorus alone. Thus, Euripidean plays tend to have more monodies, or solo songs by actors, and kommoi, or duets between the chorus and one or more actors, as well as fewer and shorter choral odes than in earlier tragedy. Kommostic parodoi, or choral entrance songs sung by both chorus and actor(s), are a special favorite of Euripides (as in Medea and The Trojan Women).

Under the influence of the contemporary poet Timotheus of Miletus, Euripides also moved in his later plays toward a New Lyric form marked especially by astrophic, or stanzaless, songs and polymetria, or the use of more than one meter in a single song (as in Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, and The Phoenician Women). Late Euripidean tragedy only sporadically reflects another trend of New Lyric, that toward choral odes that are apparently unconnected to dramatic events. In general, even such a well-known Euripidean ode as the “Demeter Ode” (in Helen), which is difficult to relate to the plot, is not so much detached from the play as it is a more indirect, mythological exemplum of dramatic events.

New Lyric, connected, as it was, with a new school of emotional music, was an ideal medium for Euripides’ dramatic art, which is preeminently a study of human psychology and emotion. The playwright, noted for his studies of the feminine psyche in such diverse characters as Alcestis, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba, created character studies filled with psychological insight. Unlike the Sophoclean hero, who never changes or loses his resolve, the Euripidean character is more unstable. Like Medea or Phaedra, the character may waver at length between several courses of action or, like Ion, who is transformed in the course of the action from a boy into a man, may exhibit significant growth of personality. The persona of Euripides often lacks that nobility of character that Aristotle believed to be essential to real tragedy, and which the seventeenth century French dramatist Jean Racine tried to restore in his imitation of Euripides’ characters. Euripides’ contemporary, Sophocles, demonstrated uncanny insight when he stated that he “made men as they ought to be; Euripides as they are.”

Euripides’ innovations in the mythical background to his plays are often the result of his realistic psychology as well as his desire for dramatic shock effect. His most noteworthy mythical changes are the marriage of Electra, the reversal of the traditional sequence of Heracles’ madness and the hero’s labors, and, probably, the murder of her own children by Medea. Euripides may also have been the inventor of scenes of voluntary self-sacrifice, of which the “Cassandra scene” of The Trojan Women is a noteworthy example. Other such scenes can be found in Iphigenia in Aulis, The Children of Herakles, Hecuba, and The Phoenician Women.

It is the rare Euripidean play that does not include at least one deity among its dramatis personae, but these divine appearances are generally restricted to the prologues and exodoi, or last scenes, and serve as a frame for the central, “human” part of the drama. Much has been read into Euripides’ beliefs from the role of the gods in his plays, but it is also significant to note that the Euripidean gods serve an important dramatic function as causes of events independent of human motivation. In general, the gods place Euripides’ psychological studies in their appropriate mythical background.

Investigate Euripides’ originality in depicting Greek mythical tradition.

In what ways does Aristotle’s theory of tragedy apply less aptly to Euripides’ plays than to those of Aeschylus and Sophocles?

Do enthusiasts of classical drama today better understand Euripides’ tragic outlook than that of Aeschylus and Sophocles?

Is Medea more a victim of external circumstances or of her own emotional responses to them?

Did Euripides court disaster in his time by his uncompromising realism?

Which modern playwrights are most Euripidean?

Allan, William. The “Andromache” and Euripidean Tragedy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000. In-depth treatment of one of Euripides’ more overlooked plays.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Euripides. New York: Chelsea House, 2003. A collection of essays presenting the scope of criticism of Euripides’ work.

Croally, N. T. Euripidean Polemic: The Trojan Women and the Function of Tragedy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Croally argues that the function of Greek tragedy was didactic and that The Trojan Women educated by discussing Athenian ideology. He also looks at Euripides’ relation with the Sophists.

Dunn, Francis M. Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. In this study of closure in Euripides’ works, Dunn argues that the playwright’s innovative endings opened up the form of tragedy although his artificial endings disallowed an authoritative reading of his plays.

Euripides. Euripides: Plays One. Translated by David Thompson and Michael J. Walton. London: Methuen, 2000.

Gounaridou, Kiki. Euripides and “Alcestis”: Speculations, Simulations, and Stories of Love in the Athenian Culture. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. Gounaridou examines the ambiguity and indeterminancy in Alcestis, analyzing about eighty scholarly attempts to interpret the play and adding her own interpretation.

Lloyd, Michael. The Agon in Euripides. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Lloyd examines the works of Euripides, focusing on the concept of agon.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A study of Children of Heracles and Suppliant Women.

Morford, Mark O., Robert J. Lenardon, and James Marwood. Classical Mythology. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Provides background to Euripides’ plays and also illustrates his influence on our contemporary understanding of Greek myth.

Nardo, Don, ed. Readings on “Medea.” New York: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Collects essential critical essays on Euripides’ play.

Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Rabinowitz looks at the prominence of women in Euripides’ plays and concludes that he was neither a misogynist nor a feminist. She sees him establishing male dominance while attributing strength to women.

Segal, Erich, ed. Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1982. Segal reprints eight of the essays from the above-cited text and includes three additional articles of merit, one of which, by Jacqueline de Romilly, compares Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ treatments of fear and suffering.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus. Euripides’ Use of Psychological Terminology. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Uses Euripides’ plays to gain insight into the Greek conception of psychology.

Zimmermann, Bernhard. Greek Tragedy: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.