EURIPIDES (approximately 485-406 B.C.) was the youngest of the great triad of Greek tragic poets; but so rapid was the efflorescence of tragedy that he was adult when Aeschylus was producing his greatest plays, and was himself survived by the nonagenarian Sophocles. Because the three were so close in time, because Greek literary art like Greek architecture tended to preserve forms once perfected, and most of all because the religious origins and associations of tragedy dictated at least formal adherence to traditional usages, there is a superficial sameness about the productions of all three.Their themes are drawn from the same body of myth, their dramatis personae axe often identical, their stage conventions of actors and chorus, costume and scenery, axe the same, and there is the same pattern of episodes of dialogue in iambic meter separated from one another by elaborate choral stasima in lyric meters. A near-sighted reader leafing through a volume of collected plays could not quickly identify their authors.

The first playwright of democracy, Euripides wrote with enduring insight and biting satire about social and political problems of Athenian life. In contrast to his contemporaries, he brought an exciting--and, to the Greeks, a stunning--realism to the "pure and noble form" of tragedy. For the first time in history, heroes and heroines on the stage were not idealized: as Sophocles himself said, Euripides shows people not as they ought to be, but as they actually are.