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This chapter discusses the depiction and narrative function of female characters in Tony Harrison's film/poem Prometheus, which uses the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound as its primary literary model. The socio-historical framework of the 1984 strike by the National Union of Mineworkers is outlined, alongside the pervasive issues of social decay experienced within mining communities impacted by industrial contraction. The chapter places the female characters within this context, exploring the ways in which their depiction is representative of the traditional role of women in working class communities, and how Harrison uses them, even as largely silent characters, to depict the destruction of community and familial structures. It is argued that while the miners' strike has been an almost exclusively discussed in the public realm in terms of its male participants, Harrison insists on also depicting the private female suffering caused by the mine closures.

Abraham Fraunce’s Amintas Dale (1591) is a generic hybrid, half mythography and half mythological poetry. The mythographical elements likely date back to a draft mythography that Fraunce had begun at some point before 1588, and which he later drew on to create a work celebrating the fifth anniversary of Sir Philip Sidney’s death. Drawing on symbol theory, France conceives of fables as free-ranging poetic metaphors, which thinly veil their meaning, but are accessible to any intelligent reader. As part of a living tradition of poetry, fables are a form of communication that contemporary writers can draw on and contribute to. In Amintas Dale, Fraunce does just that, by extending Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the late sixteenth century, and weaving Sir Philip Sidney into the mythological narrative.

An exploration of the geographic and hydrographic features of the Bosporus strait, and the ways in which they impacted on the lives of the inhabitants of Byzantium. This chapter investigates how the currents, winds, and dangerous, winding shores of the Bosporus made it possible to tax or to exploit the strait. It also, in this connection, uses Dionysius of Byzantium’s treatise of the region to recreate a vivid tableau of mythological and epichoric traditions which bound the various villages and communities along the shores of the Bosporus together.

In Homeric epic, describing a map of the world, like epic song itself, is a privilege granted by the divine Muses and figured in Hephaestus’ shield-making. In two examples from Aeschylean tragedy, a defiant hero appropriates the map-making prerogative of the gods established in Homeric epic. In each case, in a bid to restructure the existing order, the hero lays claim to the divine ability to map the space of the world without invoking the Muses. In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus’ gift of a map to mortal Io is not just an altruistic favour. It is also a part of his strategy for controlling and directing the future in a way that will ultimately lead to his own liberation. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra uses Hephaestus’ fire to map space instantaneously. Her control of the god’s technology is aligned with her scandalous power over every other aspect of the action of the play.