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Euripides (480-406 B.C.) was a misunderstood genius. He is reported to be the author of around 92 plays, but he only won the massive theatrical competition in the festival Dionysus five times. His final win was for his quintessential classic, The Bacchae. Unfortunately, Euripides didn't get to appreciate this final triumph.

Being dead kind of got in the way. His son ended up directing the play for his deceased father. To add insult to injury, Euripides died by being ripped apart by a pack of wild Macedonian dogs, or at least that is what some people say. It'd be a pretty ironic ending for the playwright, considering each of the dismembering and body ripping that moves on in The Bacchae, one of the last plays that he wrote before he died. Some scholars say that this gruesome story of his death is fictional. Euripides deserved better.

Poor Euripides was constantly getting picked on. Aristophanes lampooned him mercilessly. The comic playwright made fun of Euripides's use of language and his characters' tendency to spout the new fangled philosophies of Socrates. Like his buddy Socrates, Euripides's ideas were hard for mainstream Athens to swallow. This was due in part to his innovative ideas. He was anti-war, sympathetic to people, and thus critical of traditional religion that many believed him to be an atheist. Athens, while being in general much more "educated" than could locations, simply wasn't ready for these "liberal" ideas.

Euripides was known to be sort of a loner. Eventually the lack of appreciation for his work and also his disgust with Athenian politics (particularly the destructive Peloponnesian war) might have been what drove Euripides to leave Athens. He spent the last months of his life in the court of the King of Macedonia, where he proved them all wrong by penning his undisputed classic, The Bacchae, and perhaps met a bunch of dogs with a taste for playwrights.

At Poetics Aristotle rates Euripides as much lower tragedian compared to Sophocles, pointing out Euripides's haphazard plots and un-heroic heroes. Sometimes these criticisms are accurate, but we wonder if Aristotle ever stopped to think that Euripides had another schedule all together. While his rival Sophocles was towing the traditional line, Euripides was busy inventing completely new genres. In retrospect, we can see that it wasn't always that Euripides didn't know how to write a traditional catastrophe; he was only dissatisfied with the kind altogether.

Euripides's loosely plotted plays with happy endings made the genre of love. His focus on the emotional lives of his characters along with his comparatively natural sounding dialog foreshadowed by tens of thousands of years the creation of modern realism. By mixing comic elements with awful, Euripides basically generated tragicomedy. Back in The Bacchae, for example there are all kinds of humorous moments. We're pretty sure Pentheus prancing around in lady's clothes got a few chuckles, even though the audience would have been well aware that he was about to be ripped limb from limb by his own mother. This blending of the humorous and horrific was revolutionary.

When The Bacchae got its Athenian introduction, we bet everybody way back in 405 B.C. was like, "Hey, why didn't we pay more attention to this man?" Sophocles definitely gave Euripides some esteem. In honor of the deceased rival, Sophocles dressed the Chorus of his own play in black. When there is a Hades, we expect Euripides will look up and see that history has vindicated him. Euripides is now known as one of the greatest and most innovative playwrights to ever walk the Earth. We are glad the guy has finally gotten his due -- he was basically a one man striking revolution.

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