It’s the day on which the birthday of Euripides (480ish-406 B.C.), the great Athenian tragic dramatist, is traditionally celebrated, which means no one really knows, which dovetails with the dearth of information on Euripides’ life, which leaves things nicely open for wild speculation.

We do know that Euripides was born in Athens and that his mother’s name was Cleito and his father’s name was Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides or something starting with “Mn.” We also know that Euripides is often mentioned in the same breath as Aeschylus (gesundheit) and Sophocles, the other great tragic dramatists of classical Athens, and that he wrote at least 92 plays, of which 18 or 19 still exist. (There’s a question about the authorship of one play; possibly it was written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, but of course this presupposes de Vere’s access to a time travel machine. I digress.)

We also know that Euripides’ plays won first prize in festivals only a handful of times, which sounds good if you’re counting them as Academy Award wins but less good if you consider that Sophocles’ plays won more than 20 times, but also that Aristophanes, the great comic dramatist, spent a huge amount of his time poking fun at Euripides, which today is understood to be a compliment in the same way that it’s a compliment when that stupid kid who sits behind you in social studies constantly pulls on your hair.

And while we don’t know for sure that Euripides died in self-exile in Macedonia, as is traditionally believed, we do know that he is completely and one hundred percent dead.

Euripides is credited with having a huge influence on drama right down to today, in part because he created very human, ordinary characters dealing with extraordinary situations—as opposed to the superhero types everyone else was writing about. One of his best-known plays is Medea (431 B.C.), about a woman who, when spurned by her husband, the hero Jason, gets revenge by killing Jason’s new wife and Medea and Jason’s own two sons. (Okay, that’s where I draw the line, but I’m conservative that way.) This sort of violence was par for the course for Euripides and evidently still speaks to us today; his plays Electra and Orestes were recently staged together in Paris.

Have a completely non-blood-soaked Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.