1 EURIPIDES' TROJAN WOMEN PREFACE, TRANSLATION, and ...

Tragedy and Comedy in Athens were presented in competition at festivals in honour of
the god Dionysus. Playwrights ‘applying for a chorus’ submitted a group of four plays,
three tragedies and a comic satyr play. Euripides won his first victory at the Greater
Dionysia - in 442 BC. Probably as a result of his controversial subject matter, he recorded
only three other victories in his lifetime from an output of some ninety plays. A further
first prize was awarded posthumously for a group which included Iphigenia in Aulis and
Bacchae in 405 BC.
Although in his own lifetime he was not as successful as Aeschylus and Sophocles, he
became more popular than either after his death. Nineteen of his plays survive, more than
those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined, although this may be in part due to an
accident of history. He certainly appealed to later generations: many today find him the
most 'modern' of all the Greeks.
Amongst his surviving works is our only complete satyr play, Cyclops; Alcestis which IS
hard to categorize as tragedy or satyr; and a number of other so-called tragedies, such as
Helen and Ion, which have a comic touch and look forward rather more to the New
Comedy of the following century than back to the savage dignity of Aeschylus. Indeed,
there is more than one play in which Euripides appears to make fun of the work of his
predecessors.
Definite dates of performance for eight of his surviving plays are known (and are shown
in bold below). Others are tentatively proposed, on the basis of evidence provided by
ancient writers, or of his own developing metrical practice:
Alcestis
438 BC
Medea
431 BC
Children of Heracles ca. 430 BC
Hippolytus
428 BC
also additions from the preface written by McDonald with J. Michael Walton to Kenneth
McLeish’s translation of this play (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004).
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