The first playwright of democracy, Euripides wrote with enduring insight and biting satire about social and political problems of Athenian life.In contrast to his contemporaries, he brought an exciting--and, to the Greeks, a stunning--realism to the pure and noble form of tragedy.For the first time in history, heroes and heroines on the stage were not idealized:as Sophocles himself said, Euripides shows people not as they ought to be, but as they actually are.