Cassandra

A daughter of Priam before she is a prophetess

Cassandra is one of the daughters born to Priam, king of Troy, and his wife Hecuba. Apollodorus, a later writer who compiled the Greek myths, names her among them with Creusa, Laodice and Polyxena.

The earliest poems know her twice over and give her no prophecy at all. In the Iliad, the poem of Homer about the war at Troy, she is the comeliest of Priam’s daughters, and Othryoneus of Cabesus comes to Priam to ask for her. He brings no bride-gifts. He offers instead to drive the Achaeans, the Greek army outside the walls, out of Troy.

Her one act in that poem is a cry. When Priam brings the body of her brother Hector back from the Greek camp, Cassandra is the only person in the city, man or woman, who sees them coming, and she calls out through the whole town.

Two accounts of one bargain

The gift and the curse come from later writers, and the two fullest accounts do not agree about what Cassandra agreed to.

Apollodorus tells it as a transaction Apollo lost. Apollo, the god of prophecy, promised to teach Cassandra the art in exchange for her favours. She learned the art and then refused him. He could not take back what she now held, so he deprived her prophecy of the power to persuade.

Aeschylus, an Athenian writer of tragedies, has her give her own account on stage in the Agamemnon. Apollo appointed her to the office of prophecy. He struggled to win her, breathing love for her. She consented to him and broke her word, by then already prophesying to her countrymen all their disasters. “Ever since that fault I could persuade no one of anything.”

What the god took was persuasion. Her sight stays exact, and the chorus, the group of singers who comment on the action, says her prophecies seem true enough. Her first words after a long silence on stage call on Apollo as her destroyer, and say he has destroyed her a second time.

The warning about the horse

Homer carries none of the warnings Cassandra is remembered for. They appear in the compilers of the myths. When the Greeks leave the wooden horse outside Troy, Cassandra says there is an armed force inside it, and Laocoon, a Trojan seer, confirms her. The Trojans keep it anyway, as a votive offering, a gift left standing for a god.

The sack of the city follows. Apollodorus has Ajax the Locrian, one of the Greek warriors, find Cassandra clinging to the wooden image of the goddess Athena and violate her there, and reports that the image was afterwards said to look to heaven.

Taken out of the lot

In the Trojan Women of Euripides, another Athenian playwright, the captive women are shared out among the Greek commanders by lot. Cassandra is not in the draw. Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek fleet, has chosen her out for himself.

Her mother Hecuba objects that Cassandra is the virgin priestess of Phoebus, the name the play gives Apollo, and that the god granted her her maidenhood.

Killed at Agamemnon’s side

The earliest surviving account of her death is in the Odyssey. In the underworld the shade of Agamemnon tells Odysseus, one of the Greek commanders, that the most piteous cry he heard was Cassandra’s, whom Clytemnestra, his wife, killed at his side.

Aeschylus keeps that order and gives her the walk into the house. Before she goes in she says it is all one whether or not she is believed, and that what is to come will come. Clytemnestra, standing over the two bodies afterwards, names Cassandra in one line as her husband’s captive, his auguress and his concubine.

Pindar, a Greek lyric poet, makes Clytemnestra the killer of both with her own grey blade of bronze, sending Cassandra to the shadowy bank of Acheron, the river of the dead, together with the soul of Agamemnon.

Three places for one killing

Aeschylus puts the house at Argos: his Agamemnon greets Argos first on arrival, and her local gods with it. Pausanias, a Greek travel writer, was shown the graves at Mycenae instead, among them the grave of Atreus and the graves of the men who came home from Troy with Agamemnon and were killed. Pindar brings Agamemnon home to Amyclae and kills him there, and says that Agamemnon brought about the destruction of the prophetic girl.

Argos and Mycenae are two towns on one plain, the Argolid. Amyclae is in Laconia, a different region.

The sanctuary at Amyclae

Amyclae claimed more than a version of the killing. Pausanias records that the Lacedaemonians living around it disputed Mycenae’s claim to hold the tomb of Cassandra, and at Amyclae itself he found a sanctuary and an image of Alexandra worth seeing. The Amyclaeans told him Alexandra was Cassandra. Beside the image stood a statue of Clytemnestra and what was said to be the tomb of Agamemnon.