SOURCE: Bernard Knox, "Euripides: The Poet as Prophet," in Directions in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays, edited by Peter Burian, Duke University Press, 1985, pp. 1-12.

In the following excerpt, Knox describes Euripides's dramas as prophetic pictures of a changing Greek society.

He was a many-sided poet; even in the fraction of his work that has come down to us—about one-fifth—we can hear many different voices: the rhetorician and iconoclast of Aristophanic travesty; the precursor of Menandrian comedy; the realist who brought the myths down to the level of everyday life; the inventor of the romantic adventure play; the lyric poet whose music, Plutarch tells us, was to save Athens from destruction when the surrender came in 404; the producer of patriotic war plays—and also of plays that expose war's ugliness in dramatic images of unbearable intensity; above all, the tragic poet who saw human life...