The ‘literary contest’ in Aristophanes’ Frogs has Euripides say that poets should be admired if they show cleverness and give good advice, and make their fellow citizens better men (1008-10). The purpose of that headline to the comic contest is clear, for it concentrates on Euripides’ characters, and his intellectualism, as ‘moral’ influences on his audience; but we might have expected his contemporaries, like ourselves, to want tragic poets rather to illuminate universals from divine and heroic myth. The plays in fact seldom give direct ‘advice’, and only by emphasizing the moral of the stage-action with general imperatives, e.g. And. 622–3 ‘suitors, make sure you marry daughters of good mothers!’, 950, Supp. 917. Instead, Tragedy ‘taught’ by implication. Euripides’ meanings are very hard to see, because of the rich diversity and inconsistency of his work. He is constantly tensed between subscription to the mythic externals like story and ambience, and desire to create setting and persons immediate to the Athenians’ ready experience; he is so clearly uncomfortable with the traditional religious and moral values which tragic myth enshrined; so variable from play to play in dramatic conception and individual ideas; so obviously ‘modern’ in the intellectual experimentation of his poetic style.