“I know well what I am about to do, but passion overrules my resolution.”
Medea
Euripides wrote roughly ninety plays and won first prize only four times in his lifetime, yet his reputation grew after his death until he became the most performed of the tragedians. Nineteen survive — more than Aeschylus and Sophocles together.
He specialised in the myths other poets left alone: Medea killing her children, a mother driven mad in the Bacchae, Hecuba and the women of Troy after the sack. His gods are often cruel, absent or frankly unbelievable, and his characters argue with them in the language of the law courts.
Legacy
Seneca, Racine and the European tragic tradition all work from Euripides — especially the Medea.