Who was Cassandra in Greek mythology?

Homer’s Cassandra

In the Iliad, Cassandra is not yet a prophet. Homer calls her “the fairest of Priam’s daughters” when a newly arrived ally, Othryoneus, fights for the promise of her hand (Iliad 13.365–369). In the last book she is the first to see her father coming home across the plain with Hector’s body, and she rouses the city with a cry: “Come hither Trojans, men and women, and look on Hector” (24.704). The prophetess comes from other poets.

The gift and the curse

The best-known account of how she became one is in Apollodorus’s handbook of myths:

Wishing to gain Cassandra’s favours, Apollo promised to teach her the art of prophecy; she learned the art but refused her favours; hence Apollo deprived her prophecy of power to persuade.

Aeschylus, in his Agamemnon of 458 BC, lets Cassandra tell it herself: she made the god a promise and broke it. Later commentators added stranger versions. The Latin commentator Servius said Apollo took away her power to persuade by spitting into her mouth. Another tradition held that as children she and her brother Helenus were left overnight in Apollo’s temple and woke with serpents licking their ears, which gave them the gift. In every version she sees truly, and it does her no good.

Warnings nobody heeded

• At Paris’s birth. In Euripides’s Andromache, the chorus recalls her crying out that the ill-omened baby should not be kept.
• When Paris built his ships. The Cypria summary says Cassandra foretold what would follow from his voyage.
• At the horse. Apollodorus says she declared there was an armed force inside it, and the seer Laocoön backed her (Epitome 5.17). Virgil gives her the same moment, lips opened at a god’s command and never believed by Trojans (Aeneid 2.246–247).

Troy dragged the horse inside anyway and feasted. Laocoön’s warning has its own page, where does “beware of Greeks bearing gifts” come from?, and the horse another, was the Trojan horse real?

On stage and on the page

Aeschylus gave her the great scene. Brought to Argos as Agamemnon’s captive, she breaks a long silence by crying out to Apollo, plays on his name, which in Greek sounds like destroyer, and foresees her own death and the king’s. The chorus of old men admires her and cannot follow her. Shakespeare brings her into Troilus and Cressida (about 1602), bursting in to cry that Troy will burn while her brothers argue about keeping Helen. In 1983 the East German writer Christa Wolf retold the whole war through her eyes in the novel Kassandra.

A Cassandra today

Her name became a common noun. A Cassandra is someone whose accurate warnings go unheeded: the engineer who reports the crack before the collapse, the analyst who calls the crash too early to be believed. The word is usually sympathetic and a little sad, because the myth never says she was wrong. To call someone a Cassandra is to admit, in advance, that they may turn out to be right.