After looking at the Mediterranean as a zone characterized by the movement of goods, people and ideas, this chapter examines the sea as the element from which hybrids arise, such as Skylla, Nereus, the Nereids and monsters of Hesiod’s Theogony. These hybrids give expression to the anxieties of Greek speakers on the move. Contact zones like Sicily stimulated a powerful response from Greek speakers, who were constantly faced with other people, other tongues and other habits. Hybridity emerges as a useful mechanism for envisaging otherness and rendering it manageable, either as monstrous threat or as something in a more muted register: similar, yet at the same time different. It is this polarity of similarity and difference that is the pendulum swinging through Archaic Greek culture. Two places of particularly rich cultural encounters, Naukratis and Samos, illustrate how the categories of exotic and hybrid overlap. Even more complicated is Cyprus, demonstrating the most intense cultural layering in the eastern Mediterranean. Here where EteoCypriots, Mycenaean Greeks, Assyrians and Phoenicians all mingle, hybridity was a recurring feature of the island’s culture.

This chapter analyzes a very different sense in which “demythologization” is sometimes used: referring not to the wholesale abandonment of mythological narratives but to their fragmentation and deformation as individual characters are ripped out of their narrative context in order to function as stand-alone symbols. Prior scholarship has consistently conflated the two phenomena. For critical leverage here I analyze the development of particular genres of sarcophagi, such as those showing frisky sea creatures, while also stepping outside the funerary domain to consider questions of narrative and allegory raised by sculpture in the round and ensembles of domestic wall paintings.

The characterisation of theatrical space as gendered and the roles that female characters are able to play in creating, inhabiting, manipulating, and traversing that space have continued to receive sophisticated analysis. This chapter expands this discussion to encompass the relationship of non-human female characters to theatrical space, and considers how the matrix of gender and topography might have played out across the full span of a tragic production in the case of the conjectured Aeschylean trilogy of Myrmidons, Nereids and Phrygians/The Ransoming of Hector. The chapter argues that the chorus of sea-goddess Nereids provided a contrasting female presence within the trilogy, usurping the roles of the male voices central to the plays’ Iliadic source material, and demonstrates how their presence would have rendered the theatrical space unusually fluid, in both senses of the word. The suggestion is made that other Aeschylean plays with female choruses may have been similarly imaginative in their manipulation of the representation of theatrical space, often involving configurations that move beyond the oikos/polis opposition.