page_title: Cassandra
section_title: Fall of Troy and aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Cassandra / Mythology / Fall of Troy and aftermath
context_page_description: Cassandra or Kassandra, was a priestess of Apollo in Greek mythology cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate someone whose accurate prophecies are not believed.
  Cassandra was reputed to be a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her older brother was Hector, hero of the Greco-Trojan war. The older and most common versions state that she was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her with the gift to see the future. According to Aeschylus, she promised him her favors, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word and refused the god. The enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, so he added to it the curse that though she would see the future, nobody would believe her prophecies. In other sources, such as Hyginus and Pseudo-Apollodorus, Cassandra broke no promise; the powers were given to her as an enticement. When these failed to make her love him, Apollo cursed Cassandra to always be disbelieved, in spite of the truth of her words.
  Some later versions have her falling asleep in a temple, where the snakes licked her ears so that she could hear the future.
context_section_description: Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy.  In various accounts of the war, she warned the Trojans about the Greeks hiding inside the Trojan Horse, Agamemnon's death, her own demise at the hands of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, her mother Hecuba's fate, Odysseus's ten-year wanderings before returning to his home, and the murder of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra by the latter's children Electra and Orestes. Cassandra predicted that her cousin Aeneas would escape during the fall of Troy and found a new nation in Rome. However, her warnings were all disregarded.
  Coroebus and Othronus came to the aid of Troy during the Trojan War out of love for Cassandra and in exchange for her hand in marriage, but both were killed. According to one account, Priam offered Cassandra to Telephus’s son Eurypylus, in order to induce Eurypylus to fight on the side of the Trojans. Cassandra was also the first to see the body of her brother Hector being brought back to the city.
  In The Fall of Troy, told by Quintus Smyrnaeus, Cassandra had attempted to warn the Trojan people that Greek warriors were hiding in the Trojan Horse while they were celebrating their victory over the Greeks with feasting. They disbelieved her, calling her names and degrading her with insults. She grabbed an axe in one hand and a burning torch in her other, and ran towards the Trojan Horse, intent on destroying the Greeks herself, but the Trojans stopped her. The Greeks hiding inside the Horse were relieved, but alarmed by how clearly she had divined their plan.
  At the fall of Troy, Cassandra sought shelter in the temple of Athena. There she embraced the wooden statue of Athena in supplication for her protection, but was abducted and brutally raped by Ajax the Lesser. Cassandra clung so tightly to the statue of the goddess that Ajax knocked it from its stand as he dragged her away. One account claimed that even Athena, who had worked hard to help the Greeks destroy Troy, was not able to restrain her tears and her cheeks burned with anger. In one account, this caused her image to give forth a sound that shook the floor of the temple at the sight of Cassandra's rape, and her image turned its eyes away as Cassandra was violated, although others found this account too bold. Ajax's actions were a sacrilege because Cassandra was a supplicant at the sanctuary, and thus under the protection of the goddess. He further defiled the temple with sexual intercourse by raping her.
  Odysseus insisted to the other Greek leaders that Ajax should be stoned to death for his sacrilege, which had enraged Athena and the other gods. Ajax avoided their wrath, because none of them dared to punish him after he clung, as a supplicant, to Athena's altar and swore an oath proclaiming his innocence. Athena was furious at the Greeks' failure to punish Ajax, and she avenged herself with the help of Poseidon and Zeus. Poseidon sent storms and strong winds to destroy much of the Greek fleet on their way home from Troy. Athena herself inflicted a terrible death on Ajax, although the sources differ as to the manner of his death. The Locrians had to atone for Ajax's crimes by sending two maidens to Troy every year for a thousand years to serve as slaves in Athena's temple. However, if they were caught by the inhabitants before they reached the temple, they were executed.
  In some versions, Cassandra intentionally left a chest behind in Troy, with a curse on whichever Greek opened it first. Inside the chest was an image of Dionysus, made by Hephaestus and presented to the Trojans by Zeus. It was given to the Greek leader Eurypylus as a part of his share of the victory spoils of Troy. When he opened the chest and saw the image of the god, he went mad.
caption: Ajax and Cassandra by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1806
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2011:12:10 07:43:53", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6515", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2106", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2826"}