In 1981, Mary Lefkowitz published an important work on The Lives of the Greek Poets (2nd ed. 2012), arguing that these anonymous works contain virtually no useful information for the historical study of the poets in question. The biographical tradition consists mainly of dubious anecdotes and comic stereotypes and from decontextualized lines of the poems. Euripides is a case in point. Thanks largely to Aristophanes, Euripides’s motives are constructed in the biographical tradition over and against those of his supposedly nobler counterpart Sophocles, and his intellectual inclinations are aligned with Socrates as a radical critic of divine injustice and with Anaxagoras as having radically non-Homeric ideas about the nature of divinity. The comic sendups send biographers into the Euripidean corpus looking for proof texts, which they find in apparently impious remarks on the lips of Euripidean characters. These decontextualized one-liners are then read as if indicative of the poet’s own philosophical position instead of something said by a character in a particular dramatic context. The net result is that Euripides appears in the ancient biographical tradition as a countercultural critic of traditional, Homeric gods. While the general thrust of Lefkowitz’s work in The Lives of the Greek Poets has been well received, the implications for how we talk about Euripides have not taken hold. Euripides and the Gods offers a corrective. Where readers of Euripides have assumed uncritically that the poet must have shared the revolutionary ideas of contemporaries like Socrates and Anaxagoras, Lefkowitz shows that those associations are grounded only in the unreliable biographical tradition. Where Euripides portrays traditional gods acting in ways that modern audiences find objectionable, leading to hypotheses that these must be ironic portraits of the gods, Lefkowitz argues that readers ought to take Euripides’s portrayals at face value. Euripides’s gods, like Homer’s, are individuals who exist to please themselves. Such a view of divinity, Lefkowitz suggests, is difficult for moderns to appreciate, especially monotheists whose notion of divinity involves commitments to universality, omnipotence, and benevolence.