SOURCE: R. C. Jebb, "The Attic Drama," in The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, Macmillan and Co., 1893, pp. 217-251.

In the essay that follows, Jebb explores the political context within which Euripides wrote and the social commentary and philosophical views expressed in his plays.

The victory at Salamis, in which Aeschylus took part as a soldier, and which Sophocles, as leader of the boy-chorus, helped to celebrate, marks the birth-year of Euripides. Like Aeschylus, he competed for the tragic prize at the age of twenty-five, but had to wait many years before he gained it. His first success was in 441, when he was thirty-nine; and in a career of nearly half a century that success was only four times repeated. To the end of his days he was the butt of Attic Comedy, which, besides ridiculing his plays, propagated all manner of stories concerning his private...