Euripides may not have been a darling of the ‘gallery’ during his lifetime, but once he was dead he became a classic, to be read, performed—and imitated. Aristophanes' half-serious attempts to show up the ‘depravity’ of Euripidean tragedy had no lasting effect: the many revivals of his plays from the fourth century onwards suggest that later audiences appreciated the purely sensuous appeal in Euripides' verbal dexterity, his rhetorical flourishes, his distraught characters on the brink of madness and self-destruction, no less than the iridescent beauty of his lyric imagery. In particular, the far-fetched melodramatic outpourings in his solo arias must have had a special appeal, their kaleidoscopic rhythms and lush phraseology blending in with the Euripidean monodist's stock in trade, self-pity. At the Athenian theatre of Dionysus, solo arias were felt to be so quintessentially ‘Euripidean’ that Aristophanes included monody in the ‘diet’ with which his ‘Euripides’ claims to have educated the audience's taste (Ran. 944). We have no way of knowing if Athenian theatre-goers really became the sophisticated connoisseurs of fine poetry whom Aristophanes' Euripides wished for. We may surmise, however, that by the early fourth century, as long as Helen and Iphigenia sang an aria which sounded loosely ‘Euripidean’, it did not matter that the said aria had not actually been written by Euripides.