SOURCE: William Nickerson Bates, "The Life of Euripides," in Euripides: A Student of Human Nature, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930, pp. 1-56.

In the following excerpt, Bates reviews the characteristics of Euripides's tragedies in terms of the biographical and social conditions that helped create them.

The Life of Euripides

In seeking to obtain a true perspective of any great figure in the history of literature and a just appreciation of his works it is important at the beginning to find out as much as possible about his family and the conditions under which he lived. If we can learn something about his parents, what sort of people they were, what their position in the community, under what conditions they lived, how the boy was brought up, what sort of boy he was, what sort of family life he had when he came to manhood, under what conditions he wrote...