Episode Details

Euripides won fewer prizes than Sophocles or Aeschylus, but his plays survived in greater numbers because later audiences preferred them. He gave tragic heroes doubt, gave women voices, and gave war victims a stage. His contemporaries thought he was subversive. They were right.

This episode examines how Euripides broke the conventions of Athenian tragedy and created characters whose psychological complexity still feels modern.

• How Medea gave a mythological figure a fully human interior life
• The Trojan Women and its radical antiwar message
• Why Aristophanes mocked him relentlessly in The Frogs
• His self-imposed exile and death in Macedonia