This paper argues that Lycophron's Alexandra follows earlier texts in presenting challenges to Agamemnon's power as metaphorical re-enactments of primordial theogonic conflicts between Zeus and the forces of chaos. The Alexandra figures Agamemnon as Zeus and portrays Achilles, Clytemnestra and Cassandra as chthonic monsters opposed to the Olympian order. Employing intertexts with epic and tragedy, the poem highlights these figures’ symbolic antagonism with Agamemnon–Zeus and their connections to each other. It presents a radically resystematized vision of the cosmos that champions the chthonic, the disordered and the feminine over the Olympian, the ordered and the masculine. Cassandra uses this backdrop to reinterpret her own story, inserting herself into the cosmogonic narrative as a resister of Olympian patriarchy who triumphs over masculine domination.

This study has shown that the retinae of Prototherian (egg-laying) mammals possess two neuronal types that are present in non-mammalian retinae, but absent or morphologically different in the retinae of Eutherian (placental) mammals. First, endogenous serotonin-like immunoreactivity has been localized in a population of presumptive amacrine cells in the platypus retina, the first such report in a mammalian retina. Second, the protein kinase C-immunoreactive (PKC-IR) bipolar cells in the echidna retina appear similar to the PKC-IR bipolars in the chicken retina, in that their dendrites give rise to a Landolt's club and their axons are multistratified. By contrast, the PKC-IR rod bipolar cells in the rabbit and in the brushtail possum, a Metatherian (marsupial) mammal, have no Landolt's clubs and their axons form terminal lobes in the innermost stratum of the inner plexiform layer.