LINEAGE AND LIFE OF EURIPIDES.

Euripides the poet was the son of Mnesarchides, a shopkeeper, and Cleito, a green-grocer. Though an Athenian, he was born in Salamis during the archonship of Callias, at the time of the seventy-fifth Olympiad, when the Greeks fought the Persians at sea.
5 At first he practiced wrestling or boxing, his father having received an oracle that he would win crowned contests. They say he won at Athens. Having finished his reading, he turned to tragedy and invented many things, including prologues, physical philosophy, rhetoric, and recognitions, having been a student of Anax-
10 agoras, Prodicus, and Protagoras, and an associate of Socrates. It is believed that Socrates the philosopher and Mnesilochus collaborated with him on some works, as Telecleides says:

That Mnesilochus is cooking up some new drama
Of Euripides, and Socrates is providing the firewood.

15 Some say that Iophon or Timocrates the Argive wrote his songs. They say he was also a painter and that his small paintings are shown in Megara. He also served as the torch-bearer for Apollo Zosterius. He was born on the same
19 day that the Greeks won the sea battle at Salamis. He began to compete when he was twenty-six years old. He moved to Magnesia and was honored with the position of representative and tax exemption. From there he went to Macedonia and spent time with Archelaus; to please him, he wrote a drama of the same name and performed it quite successfully in his presence, at which time he also participated in administrative duties. It is said he grew a long beard and had freckles on his face. He married first Melito, and second Choerine. He left behind three sons: Mnesarchides the elder, a merchant; the second, Mnesilochus, an actor; and the youngest, Euripides, who produced some of his father's
30 dramas. He began to produce during the archonship of Callias, in the first year of the eighty-first Olympiad. He first produced the Peliades Daughters of Pelias, when he also placed third. In total he had 102 dramas, and 78 survive. Of these, three are considered spurious: Tennes, Rhadamanthys, Pirithous. He died, as says...