If we are to understand the theatre and broader culture of the Bosporan kingdom, it is important to be clear from the outset about the kingdom’s development and physical environment. For, although details are scarce, we may be sure enough that the kingdom’s history and geography were key to its theatre, most obviously in its links to Athens and its ritual and cultural responses to its volcanic landscape. That holds good both for the works created in and for the Bosporus itself and also for the selection of Athenian and other works that might be presented in the Bosporus. Aeschylus’ Persae, for example, gains a new dimension when located on a Bosporan stage (if indeed it ever was) not only by virtue of Bosporan links to Athens, but also on account of the Bosporus’ own emergence from Persian control. Similarly, the apparently distant Women of Etna by the same playwright would have much in common with a Bosporan kingdom in which too autocrats were concerned to found cities in a volcanic landscape, as we shall see.