It is over twenty-five years since I first contemplated writing (eventually) a general book on Euripides (at the time I had in mind the somewhat perverse title The Unity of Euripides). It is over ten years since I began trying to write this book, for which I had by then tentatively adopted the title The Art of Euripides, in tribute to the example of my senior colleague Tom Rosenmeyer's The Art of Aeschylus. I wanted to write a book that dealt with topics that span most or all of the extant plays rather than one with a chapter on each play; and I hoped to find a middle ground between the formalist studies that I have admired and the social and political approaches that have been so successful and influential in the past thirty years. As things turned out, Tom Rosenmeyer died not many months before I was finally far enough along in my work to seek the reactions of some readers (had he lived, he would have been one), and I began to doubt whether I should keep the allusive title, being all too aware that I could not match the breadth of his reading in the history of drama and dramatic theory or the elegance of his writing. In the end, I kept the title but added a subtitle, “dramatic technique and social context,” to declare the two types of concerns that I have attempted to combine (with what success or utility it is left to each reader to decide).