Nothing about his education is known: tradition gives him a variety of philosophers as teachers, but the connections are mostly impossible on chronological grounds. None of the notices connecting him personally with Socrates, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and other such figures survives scrutiny. His plays, however, demonstrate his familiarity with contemporary philosophical speculation.
Euripides began to enter his plays in the tragic competitions at Athens in 455 B.C., when he was in his late twenties. At the City Dionysia in the spring of each year, three poets were allowed to compete with three tragedies followed by a mythological burlesque called a satyr play. One of the four plays he produced in 455 B.C. was Daughters of Pelias, the story of Medea's revenge on Jason's wicked uncle. Euripides came in third. He won a first prize for the first time in 442 B.C. (play unknown), one of only five during a career in which he entered some twenty-two times in the tragic competitions.
At some time between 428 B.C. and 408 B.C., as one learns from a glancing reference in Aristotle's Rhetoric (circa 334 B.C.), Euripides was involved in a lawsuit with a man called Hygiainon. At issue was the question whether it was Euripides' or Hygiainon's turn to serve as financial sponsor for some piece of public expenditure, as rich men were required to do in Athens.
