Editing Euripides (section)

===A tragedian's life===
Euripides first competed in the [[Dionysia|City Dionysia]], the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BC, one year after the death of [[Aeschylus]]; and did not win first prize until 441 BC. His final competition in Athens was in 408 BC. ''[[The Bacchae]]'' and ''[[Iphigenia in Aulis]]'' were performed in 405 BC, and first prize was awarded posthumously. He won first prize only five times.

His plays, and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, indicate a difference in outlook between the three{{emdash}}a generation gap probably due to the [[Sophism|Sophistic enlightenment]] in the middle decades of the 5th century: Aeschylus still looked back to the [[Archaic Greece|archaic period]], Sophocles was in transition between periods, and Euripides was fully imbued with the new spirit of the [[Classical Greece|classical age]].<ref>B.M.Knox, 'Euripides' in ''The Cambridge History of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature'', P. Easterling and B. Knox (ed.s), Cambridge University Press (1985), pp. 316–17</ref> When Euripides' plays are sequenced in time, they also reveal that his outlook might have changed, providing a "spiritual biography", along these lines:
* an early period of high tragedy (''[[Medea (play)|Medea]]'', ''[[Hippolytus (play)|Hippolytus]]'')
* a patriotic period at the outset of the Peloponnesian War (''[[Children of Heracles]]'', ''[[The Suppliants (Euripides)|The Suppliants]]'')
* a middle period of disillusionment at the senselessness of war (''[[Hecuba (play)|Hecuba]]'', ''[[The Trojan Women]]'')
* an escapist period with a focus on romantic intrigue (''[[Ion (play)|Ion]]'', ''[[Iphigenia in Tauris]]'', ''[[Helen (play)|Helen]]'')
* a final period of tragic despair (''[[Orestes (play)|Orestes]]'', ''[[Phoenician Women]]'', ''[[The Bacchae]]'')
However, about 80% of his plays have been lost, and even the extant plays do not present a fully consistent picture of his 'spiritual' development (for example, ''Iphigenia in Aulis'' is dated with the 'despairing' ''Bacchae'', yet it contains elements that became typical of New Comedy).<ref>B.M.Knox, 'Euripides' in ''The Cambridge History of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature'', P. Easterling and B. Knox (ed.s), Cambridge University Press (1985), p. 318</ref> In the ''Bacchae'', he restores the chorus and messenger speech to their traditional role in the tragic plot, and the play appears to be the culmination of a regressive or archaizing tendency in his later works (for which see [[Euripides#Chronology|Chronology]] below). Believed to have been composed in the wilds of Macedonia, ''Bacchae'' also dramatizes a primitive side to Greek religion, and some modern scholars have interpreted this particular play biographically, therefore, as:
* a kind of death-bed conversion or renunciation of atheism;
* the poet's attempt to ward off the charge of impiety that was later to overtake his friend Socrates;
* evidence of a new belief that religion cannot be analysed rationally.<ref>E.R.Dodds, ''Euripides: Bacchae'', Oxford University Press (1960), Introduction p. xl</ref>
One of his earliest extant plays, ''Medea'', includes a speech that he seems to have written in defence of himself as an intellectual ahead of his time (spoken by Medea):<ref name="Denys L. Page 1976"/>
{{blockquote|σκαιοῖσι μὲν γὰρ καινὰ προσφέρων σοφὰ<br>δόξεις ἀχρεῖος κοὐ σοφὸς πεφυκέναι·<br>τῶν δ᾿ αὖ δοκούντων εἰδέναι τι ποικίλον<br>κρείσσων νομισθεὶς ἐν πόλει λυπρὸς φανῇ.<br>ἐγὼ δὲ καὐτὴ τῆσδε κοινωνῶ τύχης [298–302].<ref>{{cite book
 |last=Euripides
 |others=Kovacs, D. (ed. and trans.)
 |date=2001
 |title=Medea, in ''Euripides I''
 |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England
 |publisher=Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press
 |page=310
 |isbn=9780674995604
}}</ref><br>If you bring novel wisdom to fools, you will be regarded as useless, not wise; and if the city regards you as greater than those with a reputation for cleverness, you will be thought vexatious. I myself am a sharer in this lot.<ref>{{cite book
 |last=Euripides
 |others=Kovacs, D. (ed. and trans.)
 |date=2001
 |title=Medea, in ''Euripides I''
 |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England
 |publisher=Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press
 |page=311
 |isbn=9780674995604}}</ref>}}