Euripides (485-406 B.C.) is regarded as one of the greatest of classical tragedians. Creator of more than ninety plays (although less than twenty are available in complete form), Euripides is cited by scholars as a dramatist who cultivated a more realistic tone than most of his contemporaries. His works often featured flawed, unheroic characters.
Medea as an Athenian play. An Athenian citizen, Euripides revolutionized Greek tragedy by treating his mythic characters as if they were people of his own time, subject to the political and social pressures faced by everyday citizens in fifth-century B.C. Athens; although the play is set in Corinth, Euripides has his characters live according to Athenian customs. Medea's characters are drawn from Greek myth, a body of stories and legends that were passed on orally and regarded as historical accounts by the Greeks who eventually wrote them down. Roughly a thousand years separate Euripides from the mythic past in which Medea and Jason were imagined to have lived; however, the dramatist compresses this time so that the earlier characters seem to inhabit the same historical moment as the audience.
