could conveniently be blamed for any military reverses and for all inconveniences occasioned by the war,
as well as the most notable intellectuals and literary artists of the time. These latter included two
Athenians, the philosopher Socrates and the dramatist Euripides, both of whom Aristophanes represents
as utter degenerates who are intent upon destroying the cultural and moral fabric of contemporary society.
Aristophanes is a brilliant and hilarious parodist, and the success of his comedies has contributed, along
with Thucydides’ chronicle of contemporary political events, to the construction of the model that sees the
“decline” of Greek culture as beginning to set in at just this time. In fact, Socrates and Euripides, about
whom we have considerable evidence independent of Aristophanes’ ridicule, are among the most
important figures in the history of Western culture, and we should think of them (and Aristophanes
himself) rather as restless pioneers in the attempt to comprehend the human experience.

Euripides

Of the three figures to be examined in this chapter, Euripides was the oldest, having been born around 485
BC. Throughout his career, Euripides was in competition with his older contemporary Sophocles; both
men produced tragedies and satyr plays at the Dionysia in Athens until their deaths, a year apart, at the
end of the fifth century. While Sophocles was remarkably successful with the judges, Euripides only
rarely won first prize, in part perhaps because of the controversial and in many ways unsettling nature of
his dramas. The tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles had been (and continue to be, whenever they are
produced on stage) emotionally engaging in the extreme, dramatizing highly charged situations like the
murder of near kin and devastating defeat in war. And the emotional effects, as always in Attic drama,
were intensified by the music and dance that accompanied portions of the drama. Euripides, too,
presented on stage these same types of dramatic situations, even dramatizing on many occasions the very
same mythical stories as the older playwrights, but the way in which he constructed his plays and,
apparently, the kind of music that he began to employ had the effect of relocating the focus of dramatic
effect from the stage to the heart of the audience. We have no direct access to the music and dance, and no
way of comparing Euripides with his predecessors in that respect, but we are told that the music and the
musicians used in Euripides’ tragedies were characterized by an increased professionalism and by a
greater capacity for conveying intense emotion.