Euripides’ dramatic career lasted from 455 B.C. to his death, aged 70 or so, in 406. Early on, he gained official performances at the Great Dionysiac Festival about every five years, it seems; in mid-career, every two or three; at the end, almost every year–but he won first prize on only 4 out of 22 occasions, the first in 441, the last, posthumously, in 406 (for the known details, see the ‘Table’ below). Twenty-two performances give a total of 66 tragedies, and that many were indeed known in text or at least title (together with some spurious works) to the Alexandrian scholars who edited Euripides in the third century B.C. Antiquity itself, however, lacked sure information about the corresponding 22 satyric or pro-satyric dramas, let alone their texts; and we know only 8 or 9 titles.

From this oeuvre some 16 tragedies survive complete, but all from the second part of the career, the earliest Medea of 431; and we have Alcestis, substituted for the satyr-play in the production of 438 but largely tragic in manner; and the late, purely satyric Cyclops. In our dependence on later plays for assessing Euripides in the round, we seem to be as disadvantaged as for Aeschylus (7 tragedies out of some 70, and from the last third of his career) and for Sophocles (7 out of some 90, and from the latter two-thirds).

Critics sometimes divide the plays into approximate chronological groups according to form, theme, motive, and patterns of action. A single criterion may group plays quite sharply (the so-called ‘tragicomic’ IT, Ion, and Hel. of the late 410s, for example); but a second may produce different groupings, or none at all, like the pervasive motif of ‘deliverance’ (below) or attitude to myth. Some plays are ‘out of period’, like the very late, thematically concentrated and formally strict Bacc. In sum, such groupings allow too little to natural or deliberate change in technique, or to reversion to earlier style.

The Troades of 415 nevertheless seems to mark a major divide, probably by accident – an impression increased by its own singularity of composition among the extant plays (are its own content and form, essentially illustrative episodes on the theme of war’s brutality, a function of its final place in the most connected trilogy Euripides wrote?). Before Tro., most plays are tragic or pathetic in tone; after it, lighter or at least ambiguous. Early plays body out major, dominating figures and their protracted agony more consistently than later; contrast Medea, Phaedra, Andromache (name-play) and Hecuba (name-play), with principal characters later: only Heracles (before 415?), Orestes (name-play), Pentheus, Agamemnon (IA) and perhaps Hypsipyle are shown at comparable length and intensity. Also, later plays fill up with persons who compete for attention, often theatrically, and so diffuse interest.

The supposedly ‘classical’ sequence: prologue (or prologue-scene) –parodos (entry-song of the chorus) – five episodes, each followed by a choral ode (stasimon) – exodos (exit-scene): is found in only four plays, Alc, Med., HF, Bacc. – and only in Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles, nowhere in Aeschylus. In most plays the fifth episode doubles as the exodos; in Tro. and IT the fourth does (as in all Aeschylus’ tragedies except Agamemnon). Such external shaping may suggest that Euripides deliberately has fewer main movements than practice, if not tradition, allowed. That is only crudely true. Rather, he both lengthens his episodes, and tends to multiply their internal scenes (best defined by entrances and exits); some scenes are almost independent, so that ‘episode’ nears ‘act’ in our sense, and more than one significant development occurs within it. A good example is the very long second episode of Or. (356-806, five scenes): Menelaus, Orestes, Tyndareus, and Pylades successively enter, Tyndareus and Menelaus go out in its course; Orestes moves through hope of help from Menelaus, bitter attack from Tyndareus, rejection from Menelaus to a fresh resolution of defiance together with Pylades.

To generalize: in Greek Tragedy, lyric, whether song alone or dance-song, voices emotion and registers a mood, collective or personal; speech explains mood, attitude, reaction, intention, or decision, from reason. So movement in the drama occurs predominantly through spoken episode alternating with song. In that, at the start of visible European drama, Tragedy no more than inherits from Epic, which was both ‘oral’ as a traditional poetry and largely oral in its dramatic narrative: Homer prefers his persons, not himself, to say why and what they did, are doing, and will do.

Within spoken episode, Euripides favours very strongly two forms: the rhesis, or individually substantive speech, at least six or seven lines long (briefer ones are either formal announcements or acknowledgements, or interdependent parts of dialogue); and stichomythia, dialogue between two, rarely three, persons in which each speaks a single line or half-line or couplet, in turn, in sequences up to a hundred or more lines long.

The ‘literary contest’ in Aristophanes’ Frogs has Euripides say that poets should be admired if they show cleverness and give good advice, and make their fellow citizens better men (1008-10). The purpose of that headline to the comic contest is clear, for it concentrates on Euripides’ characters, and his intellectualism, as ‘moral’ influences on his audience; but we might have expected his contemporaries, like ourselves, to want tragic poets rather to illuminate universals from divine and heroic myth. The plays in fact seldom give direct ‘advice’, and only by emphasizing the moral of the stage-action with general imperatives, e.g. And. 622–3 ‘suitors, make sure you marry daughters of good mothers!’, 950, Supp. 917. Instead, Tragedy ‘taught’ by implication. Euripides’ meanings are very hard to see, because of the rich diversity and inconsistency of his work. He is constantly tensed between subscription to the mythic externals like story and ambience, and desire to create setting and persons immediate to the Athenians’ ready experience; he is so clearly uncomfortable with the traditional religious and moral values which tragic myth enshrined; so variable from play to play in dramatic conception and individual ideas; so obviously ‘modern’ in the intellectual experimentation of his poetic style.