" In the English-speaking world, the pacifist Gilbert Murray played an important role in popularizing Euripides, influenced perhaps by his anti-war plays.

Antigone also plays a role in Euripides extant play The Phoenician Women.

Pylades played a major role in another of Euripides ' plays, Iphigeneia in Tauris.

In 2002, she returned to Croatia after some 11 years to take the lead role in Rade Šerbedžija's Ulysses Theatre Company's production of Euripides ' Medea.

2002: Fiona Shaw plays title role of Euripides ’ Medea, directed by Deborah Warner ; following its BAM run the Abbey Theatre production moves to Broadway

How it fared in that festival's drama competition is unknown but it is now considered one of Aristophanes ' most brilliant parodies of Athenian society, with a particular focus on the subversive role of women in a male-dominated society, the vanity of contemporary poets, such as the tragic playwrights Euripides and Agathon, and the shameless, enterprising vulgarity of an ordinary Athenian, as represented in this play by the protagonist, Mnesilochus.

Fearful of their powers, Euripides seeks out a fellow tragedian, Agathon, in the hope of persuading him to spy for him and to be his advocate at the festival-a role that would require him of course to go disguised as a woman.

There then follows a series of farcical scenes in which Euripides, in a desperate attempt to rescue Mnesilochus, comes and goes in various disguises, first as Menelaus, a character from his own play Helen-to which Mnesilochus responds of course by playing out the role of Helen-and then as Perseus, a character from another Euripidean play, Andromeda, in which role he swoops heroically across the stage on a theatrical crane ( frequently used by Greek playwrights to allow for a deus ex machina )-to which Mnesilochus of course responds by acting out the role of Andromeda.

In fact, Euripides may arguably use Helen as a device through which to discuss several larger themes such as freewill, fate, and the role of the gods in the cosmos.

In Chrysippus, Euripides develops backstory on the curse: Laius ' " sin " was to have kidnapped Chrysippus, Pelops ' son, in order to violate him, and this caused the gods ' revenge on all his family-boy-loving having been so far an exclusive of the gods themselves, unknown to mortals.

Playwrights such as Homer, Sophocles and Euripides described madmen driven insane by the gods, imbalanced humors or circumstances.

* Ion ( play ), a play by Euripides on the relationship between humans and the gods, in which Ion is instead the son of Apollo.

The title is based on a quote often misattributed to Euripides: " Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

In Euripides ' satyr play Cyclops the minor god Silenus claims to have dealt Enceladus ' death blow, but this was perhaps intended by the author as a vain drunken boast, since Silenus also claims to have sent the Gigantes flying with the braying of his ass.

The productions have been: The Invention of Love ( Tom Stoppard, directed by Mary-Kay Gamel, produced by Judith Hallett ), The Heavensgate Deposition ( based on Apocolocyntosis by Seneca the Younger, adapted by Douglass Parker, directed by Amy R. Cohen, produced by Thomas Jenkins ), The Golden Age ( by Thomas Heywood, directed by C. W. Marshall ), Iran Man ( based on Persa by Plautus, directed by Mary-Kay Gamel ), Thespis ( by W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan, with new music by Alan Riley Jones, directed by John Starks, produced by John Given ), The Birds ( by Aristophanes, directed by Thomas Talboy ), Cyclops ( by Euripides, directed by Laura Lippman and Mike Lippman ), Thersites ( perhaps by Nicholas Udall, directed by C. W. Marshall ), Thesmophoriazusae ( by Aristophanes, directed by Bella Vivante ) and The Jurymen ( by Katherine Janson, directed by Amy R. Cohen ).

This form, perhaps best exemplified by the Alcestis of Euripides, ends with a hero or god decisively beating an evil character.

Sophocles and Euripides ( and in more modern times, Corneille ) made the story the subject of tragedies, and its incidents were represented in numerous ancient works of art.

Tragic poets were often mocked by comic poets during the dramatic festivals Dionysia and Lenaia and Euripides was travestied more than most.

After a debate between the two deceased bards, the god brings Aeschylus back to life as more useful to Athens on account of his wisdom, rejecting Euripides as merely clever.

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 difference between Euripides and his older colleagues was one of degree: his characters talked about the present more controversially and more pointedly than did those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, sometimes even challenging the democratic order.

Athenian citizens were familiar with rhetoric in the assembly and law courts, and some scholars believe that Euripides was more interested in his characters as speakers with cases to argue than as characters with lifelike personalities.

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.

However, in Cyclops ( the only complete satyr-play that survives ) Euripides structured the entertainment more like a tragedy and introduced a note of critical irony typical of his other work.

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 ).

Many more errors came from the tendency of actors to interpolate words and sentences, producing so many corruptions and variations that a law was proposed by Lycurgus of Athens in 330 BC "... that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be written down and preserved in a public office ; and that the town clerk should read the text over with the actors ; and that all performances which did not comply with this regulation should be illegal.

" Euripides however was more fortunate than the other tragedians in the survival of a second edition of his work, compiled in alphabetical order as if from a set of his collect works, but without scholia attached.

From its obscure origins in the theaters of Athens 2, 500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, and Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, and Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.

R. P Winnington-Ingram's review in 1948 praises the work of Euripides, he writes: " On its poetical and dramatic beauties he writes with charm and insight ; on more complex themes he shows equal mastery.

Many attempts have been made to reconstruct the plot of the play, but none of them is more than hypothetical, because of the scanty remains that survive from its text and of the total absence of ancient descriptions or résumés-though it has been suggested that a part of Hyginus ' narration of the Oedipus myth might in fact derive from Euripides ' play.

The reason for many discrepancies in the telling of the myth is because playwrights such as Euripides modified the stories about Iphigenia to make them more palatable for the audiences and make sequels using the same characters.

If Euripides ' tragedy, Protesilaos, had survived, his name would be more familiar today.

Euripides reduced the use of the chorus and was more naturalistic in his representation of human drama, making it more reflective of the realities of daily life.

Sophocles and Euripides ( and in more modern times Pierre Corneille ) made the episode of Perseus and Andromeda the subject of tragedies, and its incidents were represented in many ancient works of art.

Gascoigne translated two plays performed in 1566 at Grays Inn, the most aristocratic of the Renaissance London Inns of Court: the prose comedy Supposes based on Ariosto ’ s Suppositi, and Jocasta, a tragedy in blank verse which is said to have derived from Euripides ’ s Phoenissae, but appears more directly as a translation from the Italian of Lodovico Dolce ’ s Giocasta.

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.

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 Euripides ' play and other art forms and works the Dionysiac only needs to be understood as the frenzied dances of the god which are direct manifestations of euphoric possession and that these worshippers, sometimes by eating the flesh of a man or animal who has temporarily incarnated the god, come to partake of his divinity.

Cyrene is also mentioned in the second and third hymns of Callimachus as well as in The Poet and the Women ( written by Aristophanes ) whence Mnesilochus comments that he " can't see a man there at all-only Cyrene " when setting eyes upon the poet Agathon who emerges from his house to greet Euripides and himself dressed in women's clothing.

Euripides, in his play Hekabe ( also known as Hecuba ), has a moving scene ( ll 566 – 575 ) which shows Neoptolemus as a compassionate young man who kills Polyxena, Hekabe's daughter with ambivalent feelings and in the least painful way.

He has come with the alarming news that a man disguised as a woman is spying upon them on behalf of Euripides!

But it is difficult to accept the view that Euripides invented the plan of producing a god out of a machine to justify the action of deity upon man, because it is plain that he himself disliked this interference of the supernatural and did not believe in it.