The messenger speeches of Greek tragedy have long been praised for their ‘visual’ impact. Yet the demands that they impose on audiences’ powers of vision are complex: viewers are invited to imagine an off-stage world with their ‘mind’s eye’, while at the same time taking in, with their actual eyes, the on-stage action occurring between the messenger and his internal audience. In my presentation I will take a closer look at the ways in which messenger speeches appeal to the imagination, in part by bringing to bear recent insights from (embodied) cognitive science. My main focus will be on the (four!) messenger speeches of Euripides’ ‘Phoenissae’, with some attention to the question of why this play features such a ‘flood’ of messenger narrative. I will end by presenting some findings from an audience experiment that I conducted in Oxford in 2017, in which participants responded to questions about their reactions to the messenger speeches of ‘Phoenissae’.