Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.
— Medea
Euripides was a tragic playwright of classical Athens, and with Aeschylus and Sophocles one of the three Greek tragedians whose plays survive. Nineteen plays credited to him have come down to us more or less complete, more than for the other two combined, partly because his popularity grew as theirs faded.
He brought mythical heroes down to earth, showing them as ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, and looked closely at the inner lives and motives of his characters. Aristotle called him the most tragic of the poets. His sympathy for women and the difficulties they faced, above all in Medea, draws particular interest today, while the comic playwright Aristophanes mocked him for his intellectualism.
He brought mythical heroes down to earth, showing them as ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, and looked closely at the inner lives and motives of his characters. Aristotle called him the most tragic of the poets. His sympathy for women and the difficulties they faced, above all in Medea, draws particular interest today, while the comic playwright Aristophanes mocked him for his intellectualism.
Most quoted works
- Medea 17
- Medea and Other Plays: Medea / Alcestis / The Children of Heracles / Hippolytus 4
- Hippolytus 2
- Suppliant Women 2
- The Bacchae 2
The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable, Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.
— Medea and Other Plays: Medea / Alcestis / The Children of Heracles / Hippolytus
That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.
— Trojan women: The Trojan women by Euripedes, and Helen, and Orestes by Ritsos
There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course a quiet conscience.
— Hippolytus
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.
— The Phoenician Women
When one with honeyed words but evil mind / Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.
— Orestes
For in other ways a woman is full of fear, defenseless, dreads the sight of cold steel; but, when once she is wronged in the matter of love, no other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood.
— Medea
O what will she do, a soul bitten into with wrong?
— Medea
Not yet do you feel it. Wait for the future.
— Medea
Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive
— Medea
O Zeus, why is it you have given men clear ways of testing whether gold is counterfeit but, when it comes to men, the body carries no stamp of nature for distinguishing bad from good.
— Medea and Other Plays: Medea / Alcestis / The Children of Heracles / Hippolytus