Euripides created over ninety dramas in his roughly seventy-five-year lifetime, which overlapped those of his mentors and rivals, Aeschylus and Sophocles. For nearly all of his adulthood, Athens was at war with Sparta and its allies in a ferocious and protracted internecine contest known as the Peloponnesian War. Owing to the fact that every adult Athenian citizen, unless disabled, was required to serve in the military until age sixty, Euripides surely knew combat firsthand and often. His works reveal his love of Athens, his disdain for self-serving politicians, his hatred of war, and his compassion for all of its victims, especially women.