As the last of the three great tragedians of classical Greece, Euripides is perhaps the most renowned and celebrated. His works, in contrast to Aeschylus and Sophocles, focused on showcasing strong female characters in realistic scenarios and giving voice to the slave or servant, who up until Euripides had been largely ornamental in Grecian plays.

Having written over ninety plays in complete form (of these, only eighteen have survived), Euripides was considered one of the greatest social critics of his era, remarking on wealth, gender and many other contentious issues in the global power of the Grecian kingdom.

His birth in 480 BCE into assumptive wealth and influence no doubt afforded him opportunities to reflect on the cultural climate in Ancient Greece, exposed to such free thinkers at Socrates (father of free-thought) and Protagoras would have no doubt influenced his later writings. He was married twice and had three sons and one daughter, content with family life.

As many of his plays were considered too controversial, and at times Euripides refused to cater to the demands of the theatre judges, his works were not revered to such an extent that they are now by modern audiences. Sadly, more contemporary scholars that finally saw Euripides’ work in all its brilliance and scope awarded most of his accolades posthumously.

Together with The Women of Troy, Euripides’s other works include Hecabe, The Bacchae, Cyclops and the infamous Medea, which tells of a manipulative foreigner that takes the ultimate revenge on her husband for passing her over for another woman. Some commentators have observed that much like the character Medea, and likewise Cassandra from The Women of Troy, Euripides’ female characters were too unstructured and their emotions too raw and therefore considered under-developed. But the passionate tempers of the women in Euripides’ plays are what set him apart from his rival playwrights; the complexity of his female leads resonate throughout feminist critical theory and cement him as one of the greatest writers of all time.