Who is Euripides from The Greek Way and what is their importance?

Euripides was the third of the Athenian tragedians, and the saddest. He is "the poet of the world's grief." He, more than his predecessors, entered into human pain and suffering and discovered in it purpose and beauty. He explores the suffering of the innocent and delves deeply into the notion of inherited sin and the sins of the parents being visited upon the children. He wrote to show "the hideousness of cruelty and men's fierce passions, and the piteousness of suffering, weak, and wicked human beings, and move men thereby to the compassion which they were learning to forget." Writing at the end of the fifth century, Euripides responds to the change Athens has undergone as she turned from the cradle of democracy and human dignity to the tyrant of the ancient world.