Euripides

philosophical ideas of Anaxagoras and of Socrates,

Like Socrates, he was accused of impiety, and this, along with domestic infelicity, has been supposed to afford a motive for his withdrawal from Athens, first to Magnesia and later to the court of Anchelaüs in Macedonia where he died in 406 B.C.

the hundred and twenty dramas ascribed to Euripides, there have come down to us complete eighteen tragedies and one satyric drama, "Cyclops," beside numerous fragments.

The idea of Fate hitherto dominant in the plays of his predecessors, tends to be degraded by him into mere chance;

even gods and heroes are represented as moved by the petty motives of ordinary humanity. The chorus is often quite detached from the action; the poetry is florid; and the action is frequently tinged with sensationalism.

tendencies to what are now called realism and romanticism, while marking his inferiority to the chaste classicism of Sophocles, bring him more easily within the sympathetic interest of the modern reader.

DIONYSUS, THE GOD; son of Zeus and of the Theban princess Semelê.
CADMUS, formerly King of Thebes, father of Semelê.
PENTHEUS, King of Thebes, grandson of Cadmus.
AGAVE, daughter of Cadmus, mother of Pentheus.
TEIRESIAS, an aged Theban prophet.
A SOLDIER OF PENTHEUS' GUARD.
TWO MESSENGERS.
A CHORUS OF INSPIRED DAMSELS, following Dionysus from the East.

background represents the front of the Castle of PENTHEUS, King of Thebes. At one side is visible the sacred Tomb of Semelê, a little enclosure overgrown with wild vines, with a cleft in the rocky floor of it from which there issues at times steam or smoke. The God DIONYSUS _is discovered alone.

Of heaven's hot splendour lit to life,

, changed in shape from God to man,
I walk again by Dirce's streams and scan
Ismenus' shore.