Euripides and his Age by Gilbert Murray

It is in one sense impossible to write a life of Euripides, for the simple reason that he lived too long ago. In his time people were only just beginning to write history at all; Herodotus, the "father of history," was his close contemporary. They had begun to record really great events; but it had not occurred to them that the life of any individual was worth all the trouble of tracing out and writing down. Biography of a sort began about two generations afterwards, when the disciples of Aristotle and Epicurus exerted themselves to find out and record the lives of their masters. But biography in our sense -- the complete writing of a life year by year with dates and documents -- was never practised at all in antiquity. Think of the Gospels, of the Acts, even of Tacitus's _Life of Agricola_. They are different one from another, but they are all unlike any modern biography in their resolute indifference to anything like completeness.

Ancient "Lives" as a rule select a few great deeds, a few great sayings or discourses; they concentrate upon the last years of their subject and often especially upon his death.