Euripides was one of the great Athenian playwrights and

poets of ancient Greece, known for the many tragedies he

wrote, including Medea and The Bacchae.
QUOTES
I have found power in the mysteries of thought, exaltation in
the changing of the Muses; I have been versed in the
reasonings of men; but Fate is stronger than anything I have
known."[Alcestis (438 B.C.)]
Euripides
Synopsis
Euripides was born in Athens, Greece, around 485 B.C. He
became one of the best-known and most influential
dramatists in classical Greek culture; of his 90 plays, 19 have
survived. His most famous tragedies, which reinvent Greek
myths and probe the darker side of human nature, include
Medea, The Bacchae, Hippolytus, Alcestis and The Trojan
Women. He died in Macedonia, Greece, in 406 B.C.
Life and Times
Very few facts of Euripides's life are known for certain. He
was born in Athens, Greece, around 485 B.C. His family was
most likely a prosperous one; his father was named
Mnesarchus or Mnesarchide, and his mother was named
Cleito. He reportedly married a woman named Melito and had
three sons.
Over his career as a poet and dramatist, Euripides wrote
approximately 90 plays, 19 of which have survived through
manuscripts. Of the three most famous tragic dramatists to
come out of ancient Greecethe others being Aeschylus and
SophoclesEuripides was the last and perhaps the most
influential.

Like all the major playwrights of his time, Euripides competed

in the annual Athenian dramatic festivals held in honor of the
god Dionysus. He first entered the festival in 455, and he
won the first of his four victories in 441. He was acquainted
with many of the important philosophers of the 5th century
B.C., including Socrates, Protagoras and Anaxagoras, and he
owned a large personal library.
Euripides left Athens in 408, when he was invited to live and
write in Macedonia, Greece, by Archelaus, the Macedonian
king. He never returned to Athens; he died in Macedonia in
406 B.C.
Major Works
A few of Euripides's most famous tragedies are Medea, The
Bacchae, Hippolytus and Alcestis. Euripides was known for
taking a new approach to traditional myths: he often
changed elements of their stories or portrayed the more
fallible, human sides of their heroes and gods. His plays
commonly dwelled on the darker side of existence, with plot
elements of suffering, revenge and insanity. Their characters
are often motivated by strong passions and intense
emotions. Euripides often used the plot device known as
"deus ex machina," where a god arrives near the conclusion
of the play to settle scores and provide a resolution to the
plot.

Euripides's work is also notable for its strong, complex female

characters; the women in his tragedies can be victims but
also avengers. For example, in Medea, the title character
takes revenge on her unfaithful husband by murdering their
children as well as his lover. Another play, Hecuba, tells the
story of the former queen of Troy, especially her grief over
her children's deaths and the retaliation she takes against
her son's murderers.

Some of Euripides's works contained indirect commentary on

current events. For example, The Trojan Women, which
portrayed the human cost of war, was written during the
Pelopennesian War (431-404 B.C.). Euripides also made
occasional use of satire and comedy within his plays, and he
frequently wrote debates for his characters in which they
discussed philosophical ideas. For all these reasons, he
became known as a realist and as one of the most
intellectual of the tragedians.
Influence
Euripides was famous in his lifetime; he was even caricatured
by comedic playwright Aristophanes in the satire Frogs and in
other plays. Because of his high status in Greek literature, his
plays were preserved in manuscripts that were copied and
recopied over the centuries.
Euripides's dramas would have an influence on later writers
as diverse as John Milton, William Morris and T.S. Eliot. Robert
Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were two more
poets who admired him and wrote about him. His play
Cyclops was translated by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
American poet Countee Cullen translated Medea. Euripides's
plays are still adapted and produced for the theater today.
Euripides, the son of Mnesarchus was a Greek playwright,
born on Salamis Island around 484 BC. A prediction made at
his birth, that he would receive crowns of victory impelled
his father to provide his son with training of athletics, a
respected field in Greece at that time. Little did he know that
Euripides was in fact destined for another vocation; a career
on the stage. Euripides was quite misunderstood from the
very beginning. He wrote 92 plays but received only five
victories one of which was posthumous. In caliber he
matched Aeschylus and Sophocles but in recognition he did
not win the hearts of the Greek public. The reason was no
doubt his disapproval of their demoralized ways and

hypocrite thinking. Euripides was a free thinker and could not

adapt to the intolerance violence that prevailed commonly in
that period. It is said that he composed his works in a cave
on Salamis Island. Most of his life and career corresponded
with the struggle between Athens and Sparta for control in
Greece but he didnt last to see the final defeat of his city.
Euripides was the greatest tragedian of his times. Though
highly criticized at that time, he is known for his plays that
dealt with personal and social issues of the time. Euripides
portrayed the social evils of the society in his renowned plays
like the Trojan Women and Hecuba that depicted time of
war and its destructive consequences. In another play which
is supposedly his last one Iphigenia at Aulis which was a
story about fallacy and cowardice which lured Agamemnons
ill-fated daughter Iphigenia, to the Greek camp with the
excuse of marrying the hero Achilles only to find that,
instead, she was to be sacrificed by her father in order to
please the gods. After 415 BC, his style changed and he
came more towards the emotional side. Euripides wrote some
less intense plays such as The Cyclops which conveyed the
optimistic approach a young hopeful poet. In The Bacchae
he opened new doors to humor by showing Dionysus, the
character persuading Pentheus to wear womens clothing.
The Alcestic written in 438 BC is another tragic comedy
which enthralled critics for a long time. Medea is probably
Euripides most famous play about preserving womens
dignity.

Euripides was much associated to Aeschylus and Sophocles,

the other two popular tragedians. But those with a clever eye
knew that although the duos ideas were original, Euripides
had a unique versatility that showed in his plays and also
over the course of his career where he could move easily
between tragic, comic, romantic and political effects. His

sharp wit was revealed by his modern characters, in a refined

tone, his informal Greek and in his clever use of plots
centered on themes that later on became a standard in
Menanders New Comedy.
Euripides was the bad boy of Ancient Greek tragedy, a
rebellious upstart who rejected many of the formal
structural elements of drama during his time. Significantly
reducing the emphasis of the chorus in his plays, Euripides
instead shifted the focus to the characters themselves. This
less-rigid approach gave him the freedom to explore
character psychology more deeply, which eventually allowed
to create three-dimensional, rounded figures, especially
women such as the tragic heroine of his play Medea. Though
ahead of their time in golden age Athens, his plays have
since been embraced by modern audiences. And despite the
notable work of his contemporaries Aeschylus and Sophocles,
it is Euripides who gets the credit for giving Greek tragedy
and ultimately all dramaa human face.

Of all of the tragedians who competed in the City Dionysia, a

dramatic festival hosted in ancient Athens, Euripides won the
fewest prizes.
Although Euripides was underappreciated by his
contemporaries, history has been on his side. Of the three
major Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides), the rebellious bad boy has had the largest number
of complete plays to survive.
- Scott Locklear.
Biography
Euripides (Library of Congress) Published by Salem Press, Inc.
Article abstract: Greek playwright{$I[g]Greece;Euripides}
Ranking with Aeschylus and Sophocles as a master of Attic
tragedy, Euripides was the most modern of the great Greek
tragedians, often criticizing traditional mythology and
realistically working out the logical implications of ancient
legends.

Facts and Trivia

Euripides is the author of The Cyclops, the only satyr play to
survive in its entirety. Short, ribald, and comic, satyr plays
were part of a tetralogya set of four plays that also
included three tragedies.
Euripides was frequently lampooned by the comic playwright
Aristophanes. Euripides figured prominently in Aristophanes
The Frogs, in which he and Aeschylus are brought back from
the dead to debate which of them was the better dramatist.
Naturally, Aeschylus won.
Euripides works still appeal to even the avant-garde. His
Alcestis was reimagined as a kind of performance art piece
by theatrical experimenter Robert Wilson in 1986.

Early Life

Little is known of the life of Euripides (yew-RIHP-uh-deez)

because few records were kept in his time. Philochorus, a
careful annalist who lived in the early third century b.c.e.,
wrote a biography of Euripides, fragments of which have
survived; it is long on anecdotes but short on dates. What is
reasonably certain is that Euripides father, Mnesarchos, was
an affluent merchant and that his mother, Cleito, was of
aristocratic descent. When he was four years old, the great
naval Battle of Salamis, in which the Greeks defeated the
Persians, caused Euripides family to flee the small town of

Phlya for Athens. When the boy was eight, the ruined walls of
Athens were rebuilt, after the Greeks had decisively defeated
Persia on land as well as sea. Freedom had triumphed over
despotismonly temporarily, as Euripides was to discover.

Altogether, Euripides wrote 92 plays, of which 88 were

entered in the Dionysian contests, although he won on only
four occasions. Seventeen of his plays survive, compared
with 7 out of 80 for Aeschylus and 7 out of 123 for Sophocles.

In 466, Euripides became officially a youth, whereupon the

state conscripted him for garrison duty in the frontier forts of
Attica. Full military service ensued when he was twenty. He
distinguished himself as an athlete, did some painting and
sculpting, and undoubtedly participated in what may have
constituted the greatest intellectual awakening in Western
history. As the mother-city of the Ionian territories, Athens
had become the harbor for a great influx of artists, poets,
historians, philosophers, and scientists fleeing Persian
repression. Euripides is known to have been involved with the
Sophists, particularly Protagoras, author of the doctrine that
Man is the measure of all things and a skeptic about the
universal validity of science or religion. Euripides may also
have associated with Anaxagoras, a philosopher concerned
with theories of the mind; Archelaus, Anaxagorass pupil;
Diogenes of Apollonia; and Socrates. Sophocles was his
contemporary; undoubtedly, the tragedians knew each
others works, but no evidence exists that they socialized
with each other.

His earliest extant play is a tragicomedy, Alkstis (438 b.c.e.;

Alcestis, 1781), based on a folktale. It was placed fourth in a
set of Euripidean plays, in the position usually accorded a
comic satyr play, but its comic elements are minor. In this
play, Admetus, a Thessalian king, has his young wife Alcestis
agree to die in his place. The visiting Heracles, however,
wrestles with Death and forces him to yield his beautiful
victim. Euripides exposes the underside of this romantic
legend: Admetus behaves as a warmly courteous host to
Heracles and weeps over his dead wife, but essentially he
is a coward. He lacks the courage to die at the time
appointed for him, instead complacently allowing his wife to
replace him. Moreover, he fails to admit his selfishness even
to himself.

Euripides had his first play produced in 455, competing at the

Great Festival of Dionysius one year after the death of
Aeschylus and thirteen years after Sophocles first victory.
Titled Peliades (daughters of Pelias), it was a trial run of his
later Mdeia (431 b.c.e.; Medea, 1781); the manuscript is not
extant.
Lifes Work

Euripides next surviving drama was Medea, his most famous

work. Athenians watching the first performance would have
known the dramas mythic background: Medea, a barbarian
princess and sorceress related to the gods, helped Jason the
Argonaut to steal the Golden Fleece and even murdered her
own brother so that she and Jason could safely escape
pursuit. In the plays action, Medeas beloved Jason has tired
of his dangerous foreign mistress and agreed to marry the
daughter of Creon so that he can succeed to the throne of
Corinth. Desolate and maddened, Medea pretends
reconciliation with Jasons bride and sends her a poisoned
robe that fatally burns both her and Creon. Medea proceeds
to kill her two children by Jason and then sails away on a
magic dragon-chariot sent by her grandfather Helius, god of
the sun. Euripides treatment of Jason and Medea renders

their personalities in a rather modern fashion: He is calm,

self-confident, and rational, but cold; she is devoted and kind,
but her rage at being rejected transforms her into an
elemental incarnation of vengeful hatred. Their arguments
constitute brilliant fireworks of articulated feelings and
clashing temperaments.

Hippolytos (428 b.c.e.; Hippolytus, 1781) is more restrained

and economical. It was his second version of the PhaedraTheseus-Hippolytus plot; the first has been lost. Framing the
drama are a prologue spoken by Aphrodite and an epilogue
spoken by Artemis. The tragedy consists of the conflict
between them, as Phaedra is identified with love and lust,
Hippolytus with chastity and a consequent neglect of
Aphrodites charms. The scorned Aphrodite causes Phaedra,
Theseuss newest wife, to fall hopelessly in love with her
stepson Hippolytus. Refused by him, she writes a letter
falsely accusing him of having raped her; then she commits
suicide. On reading the letter, Theseus curses Hippolytus,
and Poseidon fulfills the malediction by having a monster
fatally wound the young man. It is Artemis who reveals the
truth to Theseus so that father and son can at least be
reconciled before Hippolytuss death. Though Euripides
magnificently celebrates the frustrated passion of his
heroine, he permits the play to end in rhetorical
commonplaces as Hippolytus and Theseus first argue, then
forgive each other.
From a structural perspective, the most innovative
achievement of Hippolytus is the freedom Euripides grants
his characters to change their minds: Phaedra first resolves
not to reveal her love, then does so; the nurse gives her
mistress conflicting advice; and Hippolytus first decides to
reveal his stepmothers lust to his father, then chooses not to
do so. In his focus on the unpredictability of his characters...

Service-service relationships
An example of mutual symbiosis is the relationship between
Ocellaris clownfish that dwell among the tentacles of Ritteri
sea anemones.
Strict service-service interactions are very rare, for reasons
that are far from clear.[4] One example is the relationship
between sea anemones and anemone fish in the family
Pomacentridae: the anemones provide the fish with
protection from predators (which cannot tolerate the stings of
the anemone's tentacles) and the fish defend the anemones
against butterflyfish (family Chaetodontidae), which eat
anemones. However, in common with many mutualisms,
there is more than one aspect to it: in the anemonefishanemone mutualism, waste ammonia from the fish feed the
symbiotic algae that are found in the anemone's tentacles.[8]
[9] Therefore, what appears to be a service-service
mutualism in fact has a service-resource component. A
second example is that of the relationship between some
ants in the genus Pseudomyrmex and trees in the genus
Acacia, such as the whistling thorn and bullhorn acacia. The
ants nest inside the plant's thorns. In exchange for shelter,
the ants protect acacias from attack by herbivores (which
they frequently eat, introducing a resource component to this
service-service relationship) and competition from other
plants by trimming back vegetation that would shade the
acacia. In addition, another service-resource component is
present, as the ants regularly feed on lipid-rich food-bodies
called Beltian bodies that are on the Acacia plant.

In the neotropics, the ant, Myrmelachista schumanni makes

its nest in special cavities in Duroia hirsute. Plants in the
vicinity that belong to other species are killed with formic

acid. This selective gardening can be so aggressive that

small areas of the rainforest are dominated by Duroia hirsute.
These peculiar patches are known by local people as "devil's
gardens".[10]

In some of these relationships, the cost of the ants

protection can be quite expensive. Cordia sp. trees in the
Amazonian rainforest have a kind of partnership with
Allomerus sp. ants, which make their nests in modified
leaves. To increase the amount of living space available, the
ants will destroy the trees flower buds. The flowers die and
leaves develop instead, providing the ants with more
dwellings. Another type of Allomerus sp. ant lives with the
Hirtella sp. tree in the same forests, but in this relationship
the tree has turned the tables on the ants. When the tree is
ready to produce flowers, the ant abodes on certain branches
begin to wither and shrink, forcing the occupants to flee,
leaving the trees flowers to develop free from ant attack.[10]
The term "species group" can be used to describe the
manner in which individual organisms group together. In this
non-taxonomic context one can refer to "same-species
groups" and "mixed-species groups." While same-species
groups are the norm, examples of mixed-species groups
abound. For example, zebra (Equus burchelli) and wildebeest
(Connochaetes taurinus) can remain in association during
periods of long distance migration across the Serengeti as a
strategy for thwarting predators. Cercopithecus mitis and
Cercopithecus ascanius, species of monkey in the Kakamega
Forest of Kenya, can stay in close proximity and travel along
exactly the same routes through the forest for periods of up
to 12 hours. These mixed-species groups cannot be
explained by the coincidence of sharing the same habitat.
Rather, they are created by the active behavioural choice of
at least one of the species in question.[11]

ANEMONE AND CLOWNFISH

RELATIONSHIP: MUTUALISM

Sea
Anemones
are
predators
that attach
themselves
to rocks or
coral.
There, they
sit and wait
until a fish
swims close
enough to
attack with
its
tentacles.
When a fish
swims by
the
anemone,
its tentacles
will shoot

Clownfish
are one of
the only
species
that can
survive the
deadly
sting of the
Sea
Anemone.
By making
the
anemone
their home,
clownfish
become
immune to
its sting.
These fish
will gently
touch every
part of their

bodies to
the
anemones
tentacles
until it no
out a long
longer
poisonous
affects
thread. The
them. A
toxins in this
layer of
thread
mucus then
paralyze the forms on
prey.
the
clownfishs
body to
prevent it
from
getting
stung
again.

"A sea anemone makes an

ideal home for a clownfish. Its
poisonous tentacles provide
protection from predators and
a clownfish makes its meals
from the anemones
leftovers."

"A clownfish can help an

anemone catch its prey by
luring other fish toward over
so that the anemone can
catch them. Clownfish also
eat any dead tentacles
keeping the anemone and the
area around it clean. "