| Summary: | "Hellenistic and Byzantine sources place Euripides' birth either in 485/4, also the year of Aeschylus' first victory, or more usually in 480/79, the year of the Greek victory at Salamis; the explicit synchronicity with other significant events in Athenian dramatic and political history enjoins caution, but neither date is inherently implausible and neither is likely to be very far wrong. We are also told that Euripides first competed in the tragic contest in 455 and won his first victory in 442/1. Biographical sources report that, late in life (probably 407), he accepted an invitation to the court of King Archelaos in Macedonia, and he died there after a relatively brief stay; modern scholarship is divided as to the credit to be given to these accounts. At any event, Aristophanes' Frogs, produced at the Lenaian festival in winter 405, suggests that Euripides' death was very recent, as was Sophocles' (406). The Bacchae and the Iphigeneia at Aulis appear to have been staged posthumously in Athens by Euripides' son.The Frogs also attests to Euripides' stature as a tragic poet, as does an ancient anecdote that, after news of Euripides' death, Sophocles appeared at the next ceremonial proagōn (presumably in 406) dressed in a dark cloak of mourning, his actors and choreuts did not wear garlands as was normal, and this scene caused the people to weep. The preserved information, which will go back eventually to the public dramatic records or didaskaliai, that Euripides was granted a chorus, i.e. allowed to compete in the dramatic contests, twenty-two times between 455 and his move to Macedonia, confirms his public stature. It is much harder to know what conclusions to draw from the fact that during his life he won first prize only on four occasions (Sophocles had eighteen victories at the City Dionysia), particularly as dramatists were judged not for single plays but for a group of three tragedies and a satyr-play ('tetralogies'). What we can say, however, is that a great deal of evidence points to the ever-increasing popularity and influence of his dramas after his death, both in reperformances all over the Greek world and as texts to be read; as the very significant number of papyri of otherwise lost plays of Euripides attests, the fourth century and beyond was the real period of his 'victory'."--
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