Cassandra

• 1. Introduction

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  In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Cassandra cries out to Apollo: "God of all ways, but only Death's to me, once and again, O thou, Destroyer named, thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!" She is standing outside a palace, brought there from Troy as a war captive. She can see exactly what will happen next. She also knows she cannot stop it.

  Apollo had given Cassandra genuine foresight, then ensured that every true prophecy she spoke would be dismissed as madness. Her story occupies an uncomfortable position in Greek mythology: a woman who was always right, and never believed. Her name eventually passed into common usage as shorthand for anyone whose accurate disaster warnings go unheeded.

  Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Euripides, and Seneca each told her story differently. What they agree on is the basic shape. A woman who saw the future clearly, lived through a catastrophe she predicted, and died at the hands of people she had warned.

• 2. Portraits in Words

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  Malalas called her "shortish, round-faced, white, mannish figure" with dark pupils and blondish curly hair. He also described her as "calm, noble, priestly, an accurate prophet foreseeing everything, practicing hard, virgin." That degree of physical specificity, offered centuries after any historical Troy, reveals how concrete the ancient imagination made her.

  Dares the Phrygian painted a different picture: "of moderate stature, round-mouthed, and auburn-haired," with eyes that flashed. Homer's Iliad called her the comeliest of King Priam's daughters and a "peer of golden Aphrodite." Euripides gave her light hair, which Greeks called xanthous, and placed a crown of laurels on her head during prophecy. Ibycus used the epithet glaukopida, meaning light-eyed, a word usually reserved for the goddess Athena.

  Hjalmar Frisk's Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, published in Heidelberg between 1960 and 1970, recorded the name's etymology as unexplained. Frisk cited the hypotheses of Wilhelm Schulze, Edgar Howard Sturtevant, J. Davreux, and Albert Carnoy, but settled on none of them. Scholar García Ramón, cited by R. S. P. Beekes, traced the name to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to raise." Watkins proposed a different root, meaning "to shine." A third theory connects the name to the Greek word kekasmai, meaning "to surpass, excel." The second element also resembles the Greek word andros, meaning "of man" or "male human being." What the ancient name-givers intended by that resemblance is not recorded.

  She went by a second name as well: Alexandra, listed in the ancient sources alongside Cassandra without explanation.

• 3. The Cursed Gift

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  Hyginus, in his Fabulae, describes Cassandra falling asleep exhausted in Apollo's temple. When Apollo approached and she refused him, the curse that would define her life was set in motion.

  In Aeschylus' text, Cassandra names herself culpable: "I consented to Loxias but broke my word. Ever since that fault I could persuade no one of anything." Loxias was another name for Apollo.

  Three distinct accounts of the curse survive in ancient sources. In the most common version, Cassandra accepted Apollo's offer of foresight in exchange for becoming his lover, then refused to follow through. Since gods could not revoke a gift once given, Apollo adjusted the terms. Her prophecies would always be true, and no one would believe them.

  Tzetzes recorded a different origin entirely. Cassandra and her brother Helenus were left overnight in Apollo's temple. By morning, serpents had been found licking their ears, and both siblings carried prophetic powers.

  Euripides took a third path: in his version, Apollo simply left Cassandra as a virgin. His anger arrived later, when Agamemnon claimed her as a concubine.

  Her father Priam eventually concluded she was simply mad. He locked her in a chamber and kept her under guard. The one prophecy of hers the Trojans did believe was her identification of Paris as her abandoned brother.

• 4. A Prophet's Catalogue

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  Cassandra's most consequential warning came before the war even started. She predicted that Paris's journey to Sparta, and his return with Helen, would destroy Troy. Paris ignored the warning and returned with Helen. While the Trojans celebrated, Cassandra tore the golden veil from Helen's head and pulled at her hair in fury.

  In Virgil's Aeneid, she prophesies Agamemnon's death and her own murder at the hands of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. She also foresaw her mother Hecuba's fate and Odysseus's ten years of wandering before reaching home. She predicted that the children of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, named Electra and Orestes, would eventually murder their own parents in revenge. She also predicted that her cousin Aeneas would escape the fall of Troy and found a new nation in Rome.

  Quintus Smyrnaeus, in The Fall of Troy, preserves a vivid scene from the night the wooden horse was dragged inside the city walls. Cassandra tried to warn the Trojans that Greek warriors were hidden inside while they were feasting. When they disbelieved her, she grabbed an axe in one hand and a burning torch in the other. She ran toward the horse herself, intending to destroy it. The Trojans stopped her. The Greeks hiding inside were relieved but, as the text records, alarmed by how clearly she had divined their plan.

  Coroebus and Othronus each came to Troy's defense not for political loyalty but for love of Cassandra. Both hoped to win her hand in marriage. Both died in the fighting. Priam also offered Cassandra's hand to Eurypylus, son of Telephus, to induce him to fight for Troy.

• 5. Violence in the Temple

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  When the Greeks broke through Troy's walls, Cassandra ran to the temple of Athena. She wrapped her arms around the wooden cult statue of the goddess, seeking the protection that sanctuary was supposed to guarantee. Ajax the Lesser found her there and dragged her away. He raped her so violently that he pulled the cult statue from its stand.

  Ajax's act was understood in the ancient world as more than an assault on Cassandra. He had violated both Athena's temple and a person sheltering under her protection, which amounted to sacrilege.

  The consequences fell on Ajax rather than on Cassandra. Pseudo-Apollodorus, in his Epitome, describes the punishment in stages. Athena threw a thunderbolt at Ajax's ship and destroyed it. Ajax swam to safety on a rock and declared, loudly, that he had survived despite Athena's intentions. Poseidon responded by splitting the rock with his trident. Ajax was cast into the sea and drowned. His body eventually washed ashore at Myconos, where Thetis buried him.

  Another story about that night involves a chest that Cassandra left behind in Troy. Inside was an image of Dionysus, made by Hephaestus and originally presented to the Trojans by Zeus. The chest eventually came to Eurypylus as part of his share of the war's spoils. When he opened it and saw the divine image, he went mad. Cassandra had left one last trap for Troy's conquerors even as she was carried away.

• 6. Mycenae and After

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  Agamemnon brought Cassandra to Mycenae as his pallake, a term the ancient sources use for a concubine. While he had been away at war, his wife Clytemnestra had taken Aegisthus as her lover. The two of them ambushed Cassandra and Agamemnon on their return.

  In Aeschylus' version, Clytemnestra waited until Agamemnon got into the bath. She entangled him in a net and stabbed him three times with a blade. Cassandra, who had foreseen all of it, walked into her own murder with full knowledge. Clytemnestra claimed afterward that she had murdered Cassandra to avenge her honour as a wife: she had been insulted by Agamemnon taking a concubine.

  In Seneca the Younger's Agamemnon, Cassandra addresses the shades of her dead family: "Why do you call me, the lone survivor of my family, my shades? I follow you, father buried with all of Troy; brother, bulwark of Trojans, terroriser of Greeks." Her acceptance of death has a precise emotional character: she is not submitting to fate so much as choosing to join her dead.

  Various ancient sources record that Cassandra and Agamemnon had twin sons named Teledamus and Pelops. Aegisthus murdered them.

  Amyclae and Mycenae both claim her as a burial site, and the ancient sources cannot agree on which is correct. Statues of Cassandra were erected across the Peloponnese, from Mycenae to Leuctra.

  In Mycenae, the German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann announced a remarkable discovery: the graves of Cassandra and Agamemnon in Grave Circle A. He telegraphed King George I of Greece: "With great joy I announce to Your Majesty that I have discovered the tombs which the tradition proclaimed by Pausanias indicates to be the graves of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Eurymedon and their companions, all slain at a banquet by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthos." Later investigation showed that the graves predated the Trojan War by at least 300 years.