Euripides, one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles, died around 406 BC while living at the court of King Archelaus of Macedon. Ancient biographers, not always reliable, claimed he was killed by the king's hounds. His plays, including Medea, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae, questioned the gods, elevated women's and slaves' voices, and influenced Western drama for millennia.
Euripides spent his final years away from Athens, at the court of King Archelaus in Macedonia, a self-imposed exile from a city that had grown weary of his relentless questioning of its myths and morals. He had spent decades writing tragedies that put words of astonishing psychological complexity into the mouths of women, foreigners, and slaves, characters Athenian tragedy had traditionally treated as scenery.
Ancient sources, written centuries after his death and prone to gossip, claim he met his end when the king's hunting dogs attacked and killed him, a grimly ironic fate for a playwright famous for depicting violence rather than committing it. Modern historians treat the story with skepticism, suspecting later biographers invented a suitably dramatic death for a dramatist.
What's certain is his influence: The Bacchae, likely finished around this time and staged posthumously in Athens, remains one of the most performed Greek tragedies today, its portrait of religious ecstasy and civic order still unsettling audiences twenty-five centuries later.
Key people: Euripides, Archelaus of Macedon