Page "Euripides" Paragraph 46

Aeschylus and Sophocles were innovative, but Euripides had arrived at a position in the " ever-changing genre " where he could move easily between tragic, comic, romantic and political effects, a versatility that appears in individual plays and also over the course of his career.

Potential for comedy lay in his use of ' contemporary ' characters, in his sophisticated tone, his relatively informal Greek ( see In Greek below ), and in his ingenious use of plots centred on motifs that later became standard in Menander's New Comedy, such as the ' recognition scene '.

Other tragedians also used recognition scenes but they were heroic in emphasis, as in Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers, which Euripides parodied with his mundane treatment of it in Electra ( Euripides was unique among the tragedians in incorporating theatrical criticism in his plays ).

Traditional myth, with its exotic settings, heroic adventures and epic battles, offered potential for romantic melodrama as well as for political comments on a war theme, so that his plays are an extraordinary mix of elements.

The Trojan Women for example is a powerfully disturbing play on the theme of war's horrors, apparently critical of Athenian imperialism ( it was composed in the aftermath of the Melian massacre and during the preparations for the Sicilian Expedition ) yet it features the comic exchange between Menelaus and Hecuba quoted above and the chorus considers Athens, the " blessed land of Theus ", to be a desirable refugesuch complexity and ambiguity are typical both of his ' patriotic ' and ' anti-war ' plays.