Edith Hall, Philippa Perry, Tim Whitmarsh, Tim Parkin, Emma Bridges, Tim Marlow, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Adam Rutherford and Shaun Whiteside all offered their expertise without hesitation. I saw every version of Eurydice I wrote about with Julian Barnes （I’m pretty sure I neglected to mention the one where we skipped out early and had cocktails instead of Act Three）。 A huge gang of nerds – classicists, writers, musicians, historians, scientists – offered their favourite versions of each of these women when I asked for suggestions. I wish I’d had space to include everything; it all informed my thinking around the work I did include. Sometimes they reminded me of things I’d forgotten, often they introduced me to work I didn’t know. It was a wonderful way to broaden the focus of this book and I can’t thank them enough.
Pauline Lord runs my gig diary like an actual machine, and without her I would just be sitting on a bench at a distant railway station wondering where I live. Matilda McMorrow looks after my social-media existence and generally makes sure I don’t get lost in the woods. Christian Hill runs the website beautifully, as he has for （I think） twenty years. I’d be lost without them. Mary Ward-Lowery and I made two series of Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics for Radio 4 while I was writing and editing this book, James Cook told us to make it how we had to when the Radio Theatre was closed. I spend so much time working alone, it is wonderful to have a collaborative project to make with people who care about it so much.
Dan Mersh read every chapter as I finished it. He must surely have thought he’d be off the hook from that by now, but no: thank you, always. Helen Bagnall is a wonderful friend, always full of imagination and ideas. Damian Barr is both magnificent and almost impossibly generous. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is my touchstone each day. Helen Artlett-Coe is the lawless desperado I need. Michelle Flower checks in on me with pictures of cats: this is vital to my wellbeing. So many of my friends reached out and took care of me while I wrote this, and again while I edited it. They were solitary times, during which I very rarely felt alone.
Sam Thorpe, Jenny Antonioni and everyone at TMAP kept me from crumbling under the stress of trying to write a book while doing a seventy-date tour of its predecessor. They didn’t stop doing that when we couldn’t go into the dojo, either, they just took it online instead. Well, warrior women have to learn to fight somewhere.
My lovely family kept me on an even keel too: thanks to my mum （if you’re reading this after a book festival appearance, you have already met my mum）， my dad, Chris, Gem and Kez.
Notes
PANDORA
1. Hesiod, Works and Days, introduction xiv.
2. Louvre Museum.
3. Sir John Soane’s Museum.
4. http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/british-irish-art-l14132/lot.207.html.
5. Hesiod, Theogony 585.
6. Ibid 570.
7. Ibid 585.
8. Ibid 587.
9. Hesiod, Works and Days 57.
10. Ibid 80–3.
11. Ibid 96.
12. Theognis, frag 1. 1135.
13. The Aesop Romance.
14. Aesop Fable 526 （Gibbs）/123 （Chambry）/312 （Perry）。
15. Metropolitan Museum, Drawings and Prints.
16. https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=461830&partId=1.
17. https://www.ashmolean.org/sites/default/files/ashmolean/documents/media/learn_pdf_resources_greece_focus_on_greek_objects_teacher_notes.pdf.
18. Hurwit, Jeffrey M. （1995）， ‘Beautiful Evil: Pandora and the Athena Parthenos’， American Journal of Archaeology 99.
19. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.24.7.
20. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War 2.45.2.
21. The phrase used for women is attike gune – ‘a woman of Attica’， which is a geographical description, but removes the civic context present in the word ‘Athenian’。 Jones, N. F. （1999）， The Associations of Classical Athens: The Response to Democracy （Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press） 128.
22. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entrypulp-fiction-fan-theories_n_5967174.
23. Hesiod, Theogony 585.
JOCASTA
1. Antiphanes, frag 189.3–8, cited Wright, M. （2016）， The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume 1: Neglected Authors （London: Bloomsbury Academic）， p. 214 + Taplin http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=3303.
2. Wright, p. 97.
3. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos 858.
4. Ibid 981–3.
5. Ibid 1071.
6. Ibid 707ff.
7. Ibid 713.
8. Homer, Odyssey 11 271.
9. Ibid 274.
10. Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.5.10–11.