After receiving his doctorate from Harvard University in 1976, David Kovacs joined the classics faculty at the University of Virginia, where he taught Greek and Latin language and literature for forty years. His principal body of work is the six-volume Loeb edition of Euripides' plays and three companion volumes on the text. In matters of interpretation he claims credit, along with a number of other scholars, for a new view of Euripides, which takes its point of departure not from the biographical tradition, parts of which view him as an advanced thinker who is ill-at-ease with the gods, but from the plays themselves: these show Euripides' first-order engagement with such great tragic themes as the fragility of mortal life in the face of the gods.