The most modern-feeling of the three great Athenian tragedians -- psychologically complex, often sympathetic to women and outsiders, and willing to portray the gods as cruel or capricious.
Euripides was the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians, and the most controversial in his own time -- he won the City Dionysia far less often than Sophocles despite writing roughly ninety plays, in part because his work unsettled Athenian audiences in ways Sophocles's rarely did. His characters, especially his women (Medea foremost among them), are given interior complexity and moral arguments that feel startlingly modern; his gods are frequently petty, arbitrary, or absent when needed most. Eighteen or nineteen of his plays survive complete, more than either of his rivals, partly by chance of transmission -- an accident of manuscript survival that shapes which ancient playwright modern readers know best.