EURIPIDES was born at the island of Salamis, whither his parents had fled for refuge at the time of the Persian invasion. He died in 406 B.C., the same year as his senior Sophocles, just before the close of the Peloponnesian war. He lived the life of a student and studied philosophy, as a youth, under Anaxagoras; and, in later life, with Socrates. He is the latest of the Greek tragedians, both the most Attic and the most modern. He is saturated with the new skeptical spirit which was beginning to question old faiths, old traditions, and old customs.

His intellectual activity, his subtle speculations, his wide democratic sympathies give a special interest to his writings, though they have in the past often diverted attention from the high artistic value of his work. He has lately, in our own somewhat similar days, been restudied with new results. He abandoned the principle of the older tragedians, that all the interest and action should be concentrated in one character and theme, as in the Prometheus, Agamemnon, or Oedipus; and in many other respects he seems to break away from the canons of Greek tragic art. He is carried away by political feeling against Sparta or Argos; and he digresses into philosophical discussions. But the tenderness and pathos of his best work, the overmastering passion in which the rules of art are lost, the deep sympathy with every down-trodden or injured thing, give him a title to Aristotle's description-- "the most tragic of the poets."

He is said to have been deserted by his wife, with whom he was deeply in love. This, perhaps, explains the contrast between his frequent invective against women on the one hand, and, on the other, the marvellous beauty and strength of his female characters.

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