Euripides is rightly lauded as one of the great dramatists of all time.
Much of his life and his whole career coincided with the struggle between Athens and Sparta for hegemony in Greece but he didn\'t live to see the final defeat of his ci.
His lyric skills however are not just confined to individual poems: A play of Euripides is a musical whole....one song echoes motifs from the preceding song, while introducing new ones.
In Medea, for example, he composed for his city, Athens, the noblest of her songs of praise.
Euripides was also a great lyric poet.
Altogether his plays won first prize only five times.
The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were performed after his death in 405 BC and first prize was awarded posthumously.
His final competition in Athens was in 408 BC.
Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, in 455 BC, one year after the death of schylus, and, incredibly, it was not until 441 BC that he won first prize.
The Dionysia, held annually, was the most important festival of theatre and second only to the fore-runner of the Olympic games, the Panathenia, held every four years, in appeal.
Theatre was becoming a very important part of the Greek culture.
His first play was performed some thirteen years after the first of Socrates plays and a mere three years after schylus had written his classic The Oristria.
It was in their footsteps that he was destined to follow.
Euripides had been lucky enough to have been born in the era as the other two masters of Greek Tragedy
Sophocles and schylus.
However, what is clear is that athletics was not to be the way to win crowns of victory.
Upon the receipt of an oracle saying that his son was fated to win crowns of victory, Mnesarchus insisted that the boy should train for a career in athletics.
Most accounts agree that he was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC, to mother Cleito and father Mnesarchus, a retailer who lived in a village near Athens.
Accounts of his life, written down the ages, do exist but whether much is reliable or surmised is open to debate.
As would be expected from a life lived 2,500 years ago, details of it are few and far between.
Euripides is identified with many theatrical innovations that have influenced drama all the way down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
In his lifetime, he wrote over 90 plays and although only 18 have survived they reveal the scope and reach of his genius.
Euripides is rightly lauded as one of the great dramatists of all time
