The ancient sources agreed that Euripides was a difficult man. The biographers Philochorus and Satyrus described him as a misanthrope who avoided society by retreating to isolated places. Whether this was accurate biography or dramatic legend attached to a writer of difficult drama is impossible to say with certainty. What is clear is that by the 2nd century AD, at the latest, this cave on Salamis had become firmly associated with him — associated enough that the Roman author Aulus Gellius made a point of visiting it during his time in Athens, recording his impressions in his work *Attic Nights* (XV.20). The association between Euripides and Salamis is not implausible: the playwright was reportedly born on Salamis, and the island was within easy reach of Athens by boat. A retreat to this hillside cave, overlooking the gulf, would have placed him geographically close to home while removing him from the noise of the city he found so frustrating.

The cave might have remained nothing more than an ancient story if excavations in the 1990s had not produced something extraordinary. Yannos G. Lolos, an assistant professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Ioannina, conducted digs in collaboration with the Greek Ministry of Culture's Department of Palaeoanthropology. The finds ran the full length of human habitation: stone implements and arrowheads from the Neolithic period; Mycenaean burials; 5th-century BC Attic black-glaze pottery; Roman-period coins and votive figurines; jewelry from the Frankish period. The site had served, across several thousand years, as a place of refuge and worship. Then Lolos found the cup. A fragmentary black-glaze skyphos — a two-handled drinking vessel — dated to the late 5th century BC carried inscribed letters reading ΕΥΡΙΠΠ: clearly the opening of the name Euripides, inscribed in characters from the Hellenistic or Roman period. Lolos interpreted it as a votive offering made to the memory of Euripides, evidence of the devotion his poetry inspired long after his death.

About 70 meters southwest of the cave entrance, on the trail that descends toward the shore, Lolos also uncovered the foundations of a small rural sanctuary. Among the finds was a marble phallus — a characteristic votive object associated with Dionysus, the patron god of Greek theatre, and the deity in whose honor the great dramatic festivals of Athens were held. The sanctuary would have served the cave's ancient visitors as a place to make offerings before or after their journey to what they understood as a sacred creative site. The proximity of a Dionysian sanctuary to a cave associated with Greece's most formally experimental tragedian — a playwright who pushed the boundaries of what the theatre could say — has a kind of symbolic tidiness to it, though the connection may be entirely coincidental.

The cave sits on the hillside between the settlements of Peristeria and Kolones on Salamis's south coast, about 350 meters northwest of the north end of Euripides Street — a name that leaves little ambiguity about local feelings on the subject. There is no signpost. The path up from the road is clear but unmarked, the kind of approach that rewards visitors who do their research before arriving rather than those who rely on wayfinding signs. The steel door at the entrance was installed for protection. Beyond it, the cave narrows into its ten chambers, 47 meters of rock and darkness where a man who wrote *Medea*, *The Bacchae*, and *Electra* may have sat and worked, looking out over the Saronic Gulf toward Athens.