Page "Euripides" Paragraph 31

However, about 80 % of his plays have been lost and even the extant plays don't present a fully consistent picture of his ' spiritual ' development ( for example, Iphigenia at Aulis is dated with the ' despairing ' Bacchae, yet it contains elements that became typical of New Comedy ).

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 Chronology below ).

Believed to have been composed in the wilds of Macedonia, Bacchae also happens to dramatize a primitive side to Greek religion and some modern scholars have therefore interpreted this particular play biographically as: