The Complete Plays (101 page)

Abraham
biblical patriarch, originally named Abram until God chose him as the progenitor of Israel and gave the land of Canaan to him and his descendants.

Acantha
town in Asia Minor.

Acheron
one of the rivers of the underworld.

Achilles
legendary Greek warrior. His mother Thetis immersed him (all except the heel by which she held him) in the river Styx to render him invulnerable. After killing the Trojan hero Hector, in revenge for the death of his beloved Patroclus, he was slain by Paris, who exploited his only weakness by shooting an arrow through his heel.

Actaeon
the hunter who was torn to pieces by his own hounds after being turned into a stag by Diana, the wood-goddess, when he espied her bathing naked in the forest.

Adonis
legendarily beautiful youth, with whom Venus fell in love; he was killed by a boar while hunting but restored to life by Proserpina, with whom he lived in the underworld for half the year, spending the remaining months with Venus.

Aeacus
grandfather of Achilles; a judge in the underworld.

Aegeus
king of Athens and father of Theseus. He killed himself, thinking his son dead, when Theseus, returning from Crete, failed to signal his escape from the Minotaur. Marlowe confuses him with Diomedes of Thrace, who owned savage horses which he fed on human flesh; Hercules killed him and tamed the horses by feeding him to them.

Aeneas
Trojan warrior and founder of Rome; the hero of Virgil's
Aeneid
, he also features in
Dido, Queen of Carthage
.

Aeolus
god of the winds.

Aesop
legendary Greek author of a collection of fables.

Aetolia
a region of Greece.

Agamemnon
king of Argos in Greece; son of Atreus, hence also called Atrides. He was required to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to secure
a favourable wind for the Greeks' voyage to Troy; on his return he was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover.

Agenor
king of Phoenicia and ancestor of Dido.

Agrippa
Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), Renaissance magician and sceptical philosopher. He was reputed to have raised the spirits of the dead.

Ajax
(i) Greek hero, son of Telamon, who fought at Troy. When he failed to be awarded the armour of the dead Achilles, he went mad and slew a flock of sheep, thinking them Greek warriors, and when he discovered his mistake killed himself, (ii) Another Greek warrior at Troy, son of Oileus. He attempted to rape Cassandra, for which Athene killed him in a shipwreck on his way home.

Albania
in Ortelius's atlas, a province to the west of the Caspian Sea.

Albanus
Pietro d'Abano (
c
. 1250–1316), Italian philosopher and physician who dabbled in the black arts.

Alcibiades
late 5th-century
BC
Athenian general and statesman, who eventually had to seek refuge with the Persians; the beloved of Socrates.

Alcides
see Hercules.

Aldebaran
bright red star in the constellation of Taurus.

Aleppo
city close to the border between Syria and Turkey.

Alexander
(i) the Great of Macedon (356–323
BC
), king and military commander who conquered the Persian empire in 331
BC
; (ii) in Homer, the name of Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam.

Amasia
province in northern Asia Minor.

Amazons
legendary female warriors.

Ancona
Adriatic port with significant Jewish population until expelled by Pope Paul IV in 1556.

Antenor
Trojan elder; in medieval tradition, he betrayed the city to the Greeks.

Antipodes
the southern hemisphere; hence, its inhabitants.

Aonian
Greek.

Apelles
4th-century
BC
painter, favoured with commissions by Alexander the Great.

Apollo
son of Jupiter and Latona (Leto), god of the sun and of the arts; also known as Phoebus. His oracle was at Delphi in Greece.

Aquilon
the north-east wind.

Araris
probably the river Araxes which flowed through Armenia to the Caspian Sea; Herodotus suggested that the army of Xerxes drank it dry.

Archipelago
the Aegean Islands.

Arethusa
a nymph who was turned into a fountain by the goddess
Artemis, having aroused the lust of the river-god Alpheus when she bathed in his stream.

Argier
Algiers.

Argolian
from Argos and its territory (the Argolid) in Greece.

Ariadan
small town on the Red Sea, near Mecca.

Arion
musician from Lesbos, who was rescued by a dolphin when pirates threw him into the sea.

Aristarchus
an Alexandrian scholar of the 2nd century
BC
whose rigorous methodology made his name synonymous with severity.

Asant
Zacynthus, island off the western coast of Greece.

Ascanius
son of Aeneas, he appears in
Dido, Queen of Carthage
.

Asphaltis
invented site of a battle, perhaps identified with Limnasphaltis.

Assyria
middle-eastern empire.

Astraeus
husband of Aurora and father of the stars.

Atlas
a Titan sentenced by Jupiter to bear the vault of the sky on his shoulders as punishment for making war on the gods; sometimes identified with a mountain in North Africa.

Atrides
see Agamemnon.

Aulis
assembly-place of the Greek fleet which sailed to Troy.

Aurora
goddess of the dawn and morning.

Auster
the south wind.

Avernus
lake near Naples, adjacent to the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl through which Aeneas descended to the underworld, and henceforth associated with the realms of the dead.

Sometimes
a synonym for Hell.

Azamor
Azimur, town on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

Bacchus
god of wine and ecstasy, also known as Dionysus.

Bacon
Roger Bacon (
c
. 1212–92), the Franciscan philosopher at Oxford who reputedly practised magic.

Balaam
a Canaanite who was preparing, against God's instructions, to curse the insurgent children of Israel, when God made his ass speak to warn him of his danger, whereupon he blessed them and prophesied a great future for them (Numbers 22–3).

Balioll
comic misnomer for Belial, a devil.

Balsera
probably Passera, a town in Asia Minor.

Barbary
the north coast of Africa.

Baucis
Phrygian woman who, along with her husband Philemon, won the gratitude of Jupiter and Mercury for the hospitality of their poor house when the gods visited them in disguise.

Beelzebub
‘the lord of the flies', high-ranking devil, second in command to Satan.