euripides medea hippolytus heracles bacchae

Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw. that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg,' in which 'imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates'. He also became 'the most tragic of poets', focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Įuripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined -he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander. There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays.

Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete ( Rhesus is suspect). Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. 406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens.

Euripides medea hippolytus heracles bacchae