So who was Cassandra anyway?
Cassandra by Evelyn DeMorgan
According to legend, the most famous being Homer’s The Iliad, Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. In many versions of her story, she was given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo in exchange for sexual favors, but she turned him down after she got her visionary power, so he punished her by allowing her to keep her abilities but never be believed. She foresaw the fall of Troy through the Greek gift of the giant wooden horse – but really, how prophetic do you have to be to recognize that your enemy is unlikely to leave town suddenly and leave behind a giant wooden horse as a parting gift? It’s this part of the story that fascinates me, the agony of knowing what’s going to happen and have no one listen to you, especially when what’s going to happen should be obvious to everybody. I imagine that a lot of young people feel this way in the US right now and that’s what spurred me to write this in the first place.
She’s usually referred to in the myths as being beautiful, but it seems that women in myths are either (1) totally hot or (2) completely monstrous. She has a twin brother, Helenus, who seems to be left out of most of the stories and I find that fascinating, too. In this depiction from a Greek vase, she’s seen giving her brother Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior, a snack to fortify him for battle.
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By Jastrow – own work, from the Iliade exhibition at the Colosseum, September 2006–February 2007, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1284853
In this Roman painting she is presenting her vision of the fall of Troy and no one is listening. As I was writing the first draft, students from a high school in Florida were fighting to get guns out of schools after seventeen people were shot there. It seems really obvious to me that no one needs a semi-automatic weapon anywhere and certainly not in a school. But these adolescent kids are speaking truth to power and being brushed aside as bratty or naive or “paid” protestors. (If someone is paying people to protest, sign me up.)
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a Roman painting
And this statue depicts Cassandra asking for protection from Athena (or a statue of Athena, the Palladium) when the loutish Greek warrior catches her in the temple. I guess Athena was busy at the time or ignored her just as the Trojans did.
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In the Tuileries Gardens in Paris
In the next post, I’ll talk about Troy, what it was, where it was, and why it’s still worth thinking about.
