Cassandra:
the curse of seeing true

How does a princess become a prophetess ? By a god, and by a bargain. Apollo, god of light and of oracles, falls for Cassandra. To win her, he offers the rarest of gifts : knowledge of the future. She accepts the gift, then refuses the god.

But a god does not take back what he has given. Apollo cannot strip her of prophecy ; he can only drain it of its force. With a spittle upon her lips, the Latin grammarian Servius reports, he seals her torment : she will always speak true, and never be believed. Aeschylus is the first to make her confess the broken bargain. Apollodorus says it plainly : the god took from her the power to persuade. Hyginus sums it up in four Latin words, fecit ut nemo ei crederet, he made it so that no one would believe her.

There lies the cruelty of her fate : it does not touch what Cassandra sees, but the way others hear it. She is never wrong. She is only alone. Her clarity is taken for madness, and it is that very clarity that makes her seem mad.

We do not even know what her name means. The Greeks heard in it andros, man, as in her other name, Alexandra, she who protects men. But the first syllable stays obscure : the best linguists call it Pre-Greek, older than Greek itself. The name of the woman who knows everything is a word no one can read.

Her life is now nothing but a string of warnings lost. She sees the ruin her brother Paris will bring, before he even sails for Sparta to carry off Helen. She sees the soldiers hidden in the belly of the great wooden horse the Greeks have left before the city. In Book II of the Aeneid, Virgil shows her foretelling the disaster, never believed by the Trojans because a god had willed it so. In Quintus of Smyrna, she rushes at the horse's flank with a torch in her hand ; they hold her back, call her mad, and haul the engine inside the walls.

She is not alone in sensing the trap. The priest Laocoon hurls his spear against the wood as well, and two serpents risen from the sea strangle him with his sons. Heaven silences those who see clearly. It is the rule of the myth : at Troy, the truth never lacks a voice, but that voice never has an echo.

This pain the poets named better than anyone. Schiller holds it in a single line : life lies in error, and knowledge is death. To watch the fire catch and reach into the void : Cassandra's prophecy is no power at all. It is an open wound.

Troy falls by night. In the burning city, Cassandra runs for refuge to the one place that should be inviolable, the sanctuary of Athena, where the Palladion stands, the goddess's ancient wooden image. She clasps it. There Ajax, son of Oileus, called the Lesser Ajax to tell him from the hero of Salamis, tears her from the idol. The act profanes twice over, the suppliant and the goddess. The oldest version, that of the Epic Cycle, says he carries off the statue with her. Apollodorus adds that the wooden image raised its eyes to heaven so as not to see. Virgil, in a few lines of terrible beauty, shows her dragged from the temple, her burning eyes turned to heaven, her gentle hands bound.

The sacrilege does not go unpunished, but it is not punished in time for her. In her fury, Athena looses the storm on the Greek fleet sailing home : Ajax dies at sea, dashed upon the rocks. His land, Locris, must atone for a long time. For a thousand years, Lycophron tells us, it will send two maidens each year to serve Athena at Ilion ; they will enter by night, by hidden paths, and be put to death if caught. A thousand years of maidens for the crime of a single night. The size of the debt is the measure of the offence, and of the indifference shown to the one who, first of all, had seen it coming.

In the division of the spoils, Cassandra falls to Agamemnon, king of kings, who takes her captive to Mycenae. She knows what awaits her there. She has always known.

This is the great scene of Aeschylus, at the centre of the Agamemnon, and the summit of the myth. Before the palace of the Atreidai, long silent, Cassandra suddenly begins to see aloud. She smells the old blood, the slaughtered children of Thyestes' feast. She sees the net, the bath, the blade. She sees Clytemnestra strike her husband, and sees herself fall beside him. Then she breaks her prophet's staff, tears off Apollo's fillets, and crosses the threshold to go to her death knowing everything. There is an absolute dignity in it : not to suffer one's fate, but to walk towards it with open eyes.

Homer had told this death already, but in a low voice, through the ghost of Agamemnon in the underworld. He heard, he says, the cry of Cassandra, daughter of Priam, whom treacherous Clytemnestra killed beside him (Odyssey, XI). Euripides had shown her waving the torch of a false wedding, laughing at a marriage that is a funeral, and foretelling that this forced union would cost the house of Agamemnon more dearly than Helen. To the very end, she sees true. To the very end, it is her curse.

The myth could stop on that threshold. Yet it has a sequel the curse had not foreseen : once dead, Cassandra came at last to be believed.

The Greeks first. At Amyclae, near Sparta, the traveller Pausanias visits a sanctuary of Alexandra. The people there, he writes, hold that Alexandra is none other than Cassandra, daughter of Priam. She is given a cult, honoured as a heroine beside Agamemnon, and the digs have turned up more than a thousand votive plaques. The woman no one would believe alive, men come to pray to once she is dead. The first half of the curse still holds, for she saw true ; but the second comes undone, for she is heard at last.

The artists next, who have never stopped painting her. Evelyn De Morgan sets her alone upon the ramparts, tearing her hair as Troy burns (1898). Solomon J. Solomon dares the scene of Ajax (1886). Berlioz, in Les Troyens, makes her the heroine who sees everything and leads the women of Troy to their death with the cry Italie! And Christa Wolf, in 1983, gives her back her voice : her novel Kassandra tells the war from the side of the one who had been silenced.

Above all, her name has become a common word. A Cassandra is, today, the one who foretells disaster and is not heard. Psychoanalysts have described a Cassandra complex (Laurie Layton Schapira, 1988). A former White House adviser wrote a whole book to learn to tell, among the alarmists, the true Cassandras, the ones to believe (Warnings, 2017). Cassandra was the name given to the economist who called the 2008 crisis when no one believed it, Roubini, Rajan, or Michael Burry, who signed himself, fittingly, Cassandra. Cassandra is the name we give the climate scientist who warned of the warming as early as 1988. The prophetess of Troy has become the name of one precise thing : the true signal that comes too early to be believed.