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