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This chapter provides the original text and translation of Aeschylus' play the Suppliant Women. It describes the beginning of the play with a procession of girls that are accompanied by an older man who is soon named as Danaus, their father. It also talks about how the girls, who were fugitives from Egypt, were brought by sea by Danaus to seek sanctuary in Argos, the homeland of a distant ancestress named Io. The chapter looks at the rhythm changes to the lyric metres of the Suppliant Women, which promise to tell the whole tale of how the daughters' of Danaus side-tracked into self-pity and then into pondering the inscrutability of Zeus. It recounts the scene of how the girls become more and more disturbed at the prospect of being married and start to repeat in ephymnia their more frantic protests.

The rise of print culture in tandem with a resurgent interest in Ptolemy’s Geography prompted a radical transformation of the imagining of Europe’s continental boundaries. Geoffroy Tory, France’s first royal printer and typographer and the first editor of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s De Europa, powerfully seized these new tools to conceptualize Europe’s borders with Asia. His groundbreaking Champ fleury (1529) links diverse spatial imageries to the question of the origin and transformation of European and non-European languages. It investigates Europe’s shifting image from a landmass intimately connected with the oikoumene to an isolated entity detached from its shared heritage with Asia in the context of the formation and circulation of alphabets. The Champ fleury constitutes an astounding cartographic surface, a vibrant map upon which letters, as graphic, somatic, and numeric signs, form a new cartographic language in constant transformation and translation. In Tory’s hand, the “flowery field” of its title becomes a platform for the generation of complex cartographic signs that this chapter, following Ján Pravda, calls “cartographemes.”

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.

This chapter explores the tendency of disciplinary divisions to narrow the views and importance of figures while using Nomura Bōtō as a reference. It mentions how Bōtō's life is illustrative of Bakumatsu's society and culture. The Bakumatsu period saw the weakening of the waka establishment in line with the decentralization of literary activity. Moreover, the Bakumatsu period witnessed the breakdown of class boundaries and gender roles in society. The chapter also addresses the chiliastic atmosphere being solved through class fluidity and the millenarian worldview. It uses the life of Shibue Io as an example of the aforementioned changes. The chapter then explains how liminality could help understand Bōtō's mature vision.

This chapter provides the geographical description of the Ryukyu Islands. The islands form a chain, 1,100 km long, which are composed of the Ryukyu Trench, the main island arc of sea mounts, an inner line of volcanoes, the Okinawa Trough, and the continental shelf. The line of volcanoes extends between the western side of the Ryukyu Islands and the Okinawa Trough, and can be seen in the Tokara Islands and Iō Torishima. Some special features of the islands have played important roles in the development of living patterns in the region. These features are the unique combination of inland broadleaf evergreen forest with Indo-Pacific strand flora and coral reefs, the East Asian monsoon, the Kuroshio (Black Current), and seasonal typhoons.

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.

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.