In everyday Greek life, mountains were used in a variety of ways : for pasturage, as a source of raw materials, for hunting and war, as a place for religious sanctuaries. In myths, these usages were both ‘reflected’ and ‘refracted’. Three aspects of mythical mountains are worth special notice : they are ‘outside’, they are ‘before’, and they are a space where transformations occur. Since mythical fantasy varies enormously from context to context, it is essential to look at particular cases. Three tragedies (Bacchae , Oedipus Rex, Trachiniae ) are chosen in order to examine the different ways in which one literary genre explores the polis-oros relationship. In Bacchae, Euripides depicts the dangerous and invasive character of the mountain. In Oedipus, we see two sides of mountain luck, and witness the catastrophic consequences of an attempt to separate mountain from city. In Trachiniae, Sophocles represents the oros (which belongs this time to Zeus) as a place both remote and orderly — even if the nature of this order is hard for mortals to comprehend.