Ten Plays by Euripides
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.