Greek gods and those who doubted them Gregory Elder For the Daily Facts It was a bad day in the year 406 B.C. Euripides, an elderly playwright, was wandering around the palace, skulking in his gloom. For decades he had dedicated himself to the theater and written and directed more than 90 plays, performed before thousands of people. Yet for all his pains, he had won prizes for only three of his dramas, a minuscule number compared to his rivals Sophocles and Aeschylus. More than once, he had been held up to public ridicule by the tart-tongued comedian Aristophanes. In...