The Dionysus in Euripides ' tale is a young god, angry that his mortal family, the royal house of Cadmus, has denied him a place of honor as a deity.

Euripides took up the tale in The Bacchae, explaining their madness in Dionysiac terms, as a result of their having initially resisted belief in the god's divinity.

In Iphigeneia in Tauris, Euripides tells the tale somewhat differently.

Extant plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides on the tale of Orestes and Electra do not include her as a character.

There are various other versions of his transgression: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and pseudo-Apollodoran Bibliotheke state that his offense was that he was a rival of Zeus for Semele, his mother's sister, whereas in Euripides ' Bacchae he has boasted that he is a better hunter than Artemis:

According to some versions of the legend, the hunting goddess Artemis replaced her at the very last moment with a deer on the altar, and took Iphigenia to Tauris ( See Iphigenia en Tauris by Euripides ).

As Aeschylus tells it, the punishment ended there, but according to Euripides, in order to escape the persecutions of the Erinyes, Orestes was ordered by Apollo to go to Tauris, carry off the statue of Artemis which had fallen from heaven, and to bring it to Athens.

In Euripides ’ Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon is told by Calchas that in order for the winds to allow him to sail to Troy, Agamemnon must sacrifice Iphigenia to Artemis.

This failure prompted Euripides to revisit the myth in Hippolytos Stephanophoros ( – " Hippolytus who wears a crown "), in reference to the crown of garlands Hippolytus wears as a worshipper of Artemis, this time with a modest Phaedra who fights her sexual appetites.

Pericles learned to love and admire him, and the poet Euripides derived from him an enthusiasm for science and humanity.

He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on Salamis ( The Cave of Euripides ), " where he built an impressive library and pursued daily communion with the sea and sky ", eventually retiring to the " rustic court " of King Archelaus in Macedonia, there dying in 406 BC.

Euripides and other playwrights accordingly composed more and more arias for accomplished actors to sing and this tendency becomes more marked in his later plays: tragedy was a " living and ever-changing genre " ( other changes in his work are touched on in the previous section and in Chronology ; a list of his plays is given in Extant plays below ).

The comic poet, Aristophanes, is the earliest known critic to characterize Euripides as a spokesman for destructive, new ideas, associated with declining standards in both society and tragedy ( see Reception for more ).

The dialogue often contrasts so strongly with the mythical and heroic setting, it looks as if Euripides aimed at parody, as for example in The Trojan Women, where the heroine's rationalized prayer provokes comment from Menelaus:

Like Euripides, both Aeschylus and Sophocles created comic effects contrasting the heroic with the mundane but they employed minor supporting characters for that purpose whereas the younger poet was more insistent, using major characters too.

" Some however consider unpredictable behaviour to be realistic in tragedy: " everywhere in Euripides a preoccupation with individual psychology and its irrational aspects is evident .... In his hands tragedy for the first time probed the inner recesses of the human soul and let passions spin the plot.

Euripides has aroused and continues to arouse strongly contrasting opinions of his work, for and against:

Aeschylus gained thirteen victories as a dramatist, Sophocles at least twenty, Euripides only four in his lifetime, and this has often been taken as an indication of the latter's unpopularity with his contemporaries, and yet a first place might not have been the main criterion for success in those times ( the system of selecting judges appears to have been flawed ) and merely being chosen to compete was in itself a mark of distinction.

However, " his plays continued to be applauded even after those of Aeschylus and Sophocles had come to seem remote and irrelevant ", they became school classics in the Hellenistic period ( as mentioned in the introduction ) and, due to Seneca's adaptation of his work for Roman audiences, " it was Euripides, not Aeschylus or Sophocles, whose tragic muse presided over the rebirth of tragedy in Renaissance Europe.

In the seventeenth century, Racine expressed admiration for Sophocles but was more influenced by Euripides ( e. g. Iphigenia at Aulis and Hippolytus were the models for his plays Iphigénie and Phèdre ).

Today, as in the time of Euripides, traditional assumptions are constantly under challenge and audiences therefore have a natural affinity with the Euripidean outlook which seems nearer to ours for example than the Elizabethan.

Around 200 AD, ten of the plays of Euripides began to be circulated in a select edition, possibly for use in schools, with some commentaries or scholia recorded in the margins.

Some of this work employed infrared technology — previously used for satellite imaging — to detect previously unknown material by Euripides in fragments of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, a collection of ancient manuscripts held by the university.

Both the playwright and his work were travestied by comic poets such as Aristophanes, the known dates of whose own plays thus serve as a terminus ad quem for those of Euripides, though sometimes the gap can be considerable ( e. g. twenty-seven years separate Telephus, known to have been produced in 438 BC, from its parody in Thesmophoriazusae in 411 BC!

Euripides sometimes ' resolved ' the two syllables of the iamb (˘¯) into three syllables (˘˘˘) and this tendency increased so steadily over time that the number of resolved feet in a play can be understood to indicate the approximate date of composition ( see Extant plays below for one scholar's list of resolutions per hundred trimeters ).

In Euripides ' Orestes they are for the first time " equated " with the Eumenides ( Εὐμενίδες, pl.

He also pushed for the study of Greek, housing Barlaam of Calabria, and encouraging his tentative translations of works by Homer, Euripides, and Aristotle.

According to Galen, Ptolemy III requested permission from the Athenians to borrow the original scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for which the Athenians demanded the enormous amount of fifteen talents ( 450 kg of a precious metal ) as guarantee.

Antipater does not tell us what it is about Euripides ' writing that he believes is misogynistic, he simply expresses his belief that even a man thought to hate women ( namely Euripides ) praises wives, so concluding his argument for the importance of marriage.

In 1992, Vangelis wrote the music for the Euripides play, Medea, that featured Irene Papas.

Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all of which are fabula crepidata ( tragedies adapted from Greek originals ); his Phaedra, for example, was based on Euripides ' Hippolytus.

Maenads have been depicted in art as erratic and frenzied women enveloped in a drunken rapture, the most obvious example being that of Euripides ’ play The Bacchae.

476-68 BCE ) expands on the example of Ixion, applicable to Hiero I of Syracuse, the tyrant of whom the poet sings ; and Aeschylus, Euripides and Timasitheos each wrote a tragedy of Ixion: none have survived.

Tragic poets sometimes produced their plays in other cities ( Euripides ' play Andromache for example was possibly performed in Argos just before The Clouds appeared at the City Dionysia ) yet comic poets in Aristophanes ' time wrote specifically for local audiences and their plays were studded with topical jokes that only a local audience could understand.

For example, in Euripides ' play Alcestis, the eponymous heroine agrees to give up her own life to Death in exchange for sparing the life of her husband, Admetus.

A more frequently cited example is Euripides ' Medea in which the deus ex machina, a dragon-drawn chariot sent by the Sun-God, is used to convey his granddaughter Medea, who has just committed murder and infanticide, away from her husband Jason to the safety and civilization of Athens.

Although the genre was popular, only one example has survived in its entirety, Euripides ' Cyclops.

In The Frogs, for example, the agon is between Aeschylus, who values Homer for the warrior ethos he inculcates in his audience, and Euripides who values the intellectual and philosophical quibbling of a legalistic society.

* Exodos: Old Comedy conventionally ends with a celebration of the protagonist's victory and it features a sexual conquest, as represented for example by the flute girl in The Wasps and the Muse of Euripides in The Frogs.

An example of this in early literature is Macaria in Heracleidae by Euripides.

The origin of the one-act play may be traced to the very beginning of drama: in ancient Greece, Cyclops, a satyr play by Euripides, is an early example.

The only example is the Suffering of Christ ( Christus Patiens, Χριστος πασχον ), written in the eleventh or 12th century ; of its 2, 640 verses, about one-third are borrowed from ancient dramas, chiefly from those of Euripides, and Mary, the chief character, sometimes recites verses from the " Medea " of Euripides, again from the " Electra " of Sophocles, or the " Prometheus " of Aeschylus.