For the beginning of Cassandra’s story we must go back to the epic theme. The first word which Homer tells of her is in the Thirteenth Book of the Iliad, where she is called “the fairest of Priam’s daughters.” But that is late in the Siege; and there is a legend which gives her an earlier connection with the tale of Troy. Indeed, we find that she was a link in the chain of events which led Helen and the Greek army to her native city. When she was still a young girl she had, in some mysterious way, been beloved by the god Apollo. The god gave her the gift of prophecy; but because she refused his love he angrily confounded the gift that he could not recall by decreeing that her prophetic utterances should never be believed. This is the central point round which our thought about Cassandra must revolve. She is the virgin priestess who holds herself inviolate even from the embraces of a divine lover; and she is an oracle of clear vision and stainless truth, whose divination is cursed with futility.

The events of her career show blacker and more hideous against the clear light of her spirit. All through the long agony of the Trojan war we have a sense of Cassandra at the altar, lifting pure hands in supplication for her dear city. The fighting raged outside the walls like an angry sea, while inside the town and away in the Greek encampment all the passions let loose by war raged no less fiercely than the battle itself. But Cassandra, withdrawn from sight and sound of the conflict, continued to pray and sacrifice. Her life was consecrated. And although the gods themselves seemed sometimes leagued against her; although she had a perception of what the end must be, nothing could weaken her endurance nor shake her will. The Trojan princes wooed her in vain: the love of the great Sun-god himself could not make her swerve. The glory of her beauty: her gift of vision: her lofty impassioned soul, were vowed irrevocably to the service of her country and her home.

Yet this idealist and mystic was destined to suffer the worst brutalities of war in the hour of Troy’s destruction. She was made captive at her own altar; and was carried away by Agamemnon to be his slave-wife and the rival of his queen. The mind revolts at the thought: it is too awful to contemplate, and will not shape itself in cold reflection. The poets seem to have felt this; and we find that Æschylus and Euripides, who have both dwelt upon the story of Cassandra’s downfall, rise to stormy heights of emotion when they tell about it.

Euripides has placed Cassandra in the group of royal women in his Troades. The time of the drama is the morning which follows the overthrow of Troy; and the action represents the carrying-off of the princesses by their captors. It is, one would think, a time and a scene quite unfitted for dramatic presentation. The immense excitement—of victory on the one hand and defeat upon the other—has ebbed away; and all that remains to the Trojan women is misery so profound and hopeless as almost to be beyond the power of expression. The measure of their pain seems to claim a reverent silence; and we feel that the Troades does need the sanction of the ethical purpose which Professor Murray has found in it. But once we realize the deep and humane thought behind it: that the poet has chosen this part of the story expressly to reveal the hideous suffering which war entails upon women, the tragedy is fraught with significance.

The final act of Cassandra’s life is given by Æschylus in the Agamemnon. He, no less than Euripides, feels the appalling tragedy of her story; and both poets have put into her lips lyrics of wild and haunting beauty. But Æschylus, by removing the action to MycenÆ and by bringing Cassandra into conflict with Clytemnestra, has wrought a climax of extraordinary power.

---

If there be any truth in the legend, it was Cassandra who first recognized the shepherd Paris for the son of Priam. The stripling who descended from the glens of Mt. Ida to compete in the games outside the city was unknown and unloved by the Trojans whom he defeated. They were jealous of the handsome stranger who carried off the prizes from them; and he soon found himself embroiled with Priam’s athletic sons. He was hard beset. The odds were heavy against him; and like a hunted animal he flung himself before the altar of Apollo for protection.

It was of course Cassandra. She had never before seen this young suppliant who was clinging to the altar; but as she looked on him now there came upon her a revelation of his identity. She knew of the old ring which had been placed about her baby brother’s neck when he was exposed to death upon the mountain; and taking Paris by the hand, she touched the chain he wore and slowly drew to light the talisman.

Here, then, is the real beginning of the story of Cassandra. For the old king would not be warned against his fate. He welcomed his boy as one returned from death. A great festival was made in his honour; and of all the many sons of Priam there was not one so dearly loved. Joy and merriment filled the city. All the warning oracles which had spoken at the birth of Paris were forgotten. Nothing but thanksgiving was heard for the restoration of the fair young prince; and amid it all, Cassandra knew that when she placed his hand in the hand of Priam, Destiny had wrought for the fall of Troy.

The years passed speedily at first, untouched by care; and then more slowly, big with events. First the sailing of Paris. Then, after Helen came back with him to Troy, an interval when the Trojans waited, wondering how the Greeks would repay the insult. Finally, the arrival of the Greek fleet and the beginning of the Siege.

Priam was not unsupported in his long ordeal. Neighbouring princes joined him against the hostile Greeks, some in the hope of reward and some for the sake of friendship. There was one warrior, Othryoneus, who came because he loved Cassandra. He brought no ‘gifts of wooing,’ but made a promise to the king “of a mighty deed, namely, that he would drive perforce out of Troy-land the sons of the Achaians.” Priam consented to his suit; but we are not told what Cassandra thought of it. Probably she was not consulted. It is conceivable, so tender was her love of home and country, that to reward the hero who would save them, she would even consent to lay aside her holy office; to recall her soaring spirit to dwell beside the hearth. But the eye which saw so far knew that it need not consider the present problem. Before the end, Cassandra saw the valiant man who loved her lying pierced by the spear of Idomeneus.

That was toward the end of the war; and in the penultimate scene of it, the bringing-in of Hector’s body, Cassandra appears again. She had watched all that fearful night, when the old king went out to the Greek camp to beg of Achilles for the body of his great son. And in the cold light of dawn, straining her eyes from Pergamos and weary with her vigil, she was the first to see the mournful procession. “Then beheld she him that lay upon the bier behind the mules, and thereat she wailed and cried aloud throughout all the town.” The people wakened at her terrible cry, and coming out of their houses, they followed her down to the gate to meet the unhappy king.

Hector’s death was the beginning of the end. Troy fell. Its brave men were slaughtered, its palaces burnt, its altars dishonoured; and worst of all, its women and children were carried off as slaves. Of this the Iliad does not speak; but it was an event which seized and held fast the imagination of the Attic dramatists. The glory of war, which throws a glamour over the fighting in the epic, gives place in the later poets to the pain and horror of it. Not because they were less brave: Æschylus fought at the great Greek victory of Marathon; but because an advancing civilization had brought a more reflective mind, a more humane temper, and the birth of sacred pity.

The Troades, to which we come next for the story of Cassandra, breathes throughout the pitiful spirit of the poet Euripides. It relates what befell the women of the royal household after the sack of the city. As grey daylight comes we see the figure of the aged queen, prostrate before the charred walls of the town. She rises feebly, moaning in a bewilderment of grief and physical weakness. To her approach, one after another, furtively, the frightened Trojan women who form the Chorus of the play. Her crying has wakened them, and they steal out to try to discover what fate is in store for them. Even while they ask, a messenger Talthybius, arrives from the Greek ships. In curt phrases he replies to the queen’s anguished inquiries about her daughters. They have been assigned to certain of the Greek chiefs, he says: Andromache to Neoptolemus, she herself to Odysseus, and Polyxena (he speaks ambiguously, to hide a grimmer fact) to serve at the tomb of Achilles. The stricken queen asks about each in turn.

Hecuba is appalled at this fate that is decreed for her child. She whose pure spirit had always ranged beyond the things of time and sense, who was the consecrated priestess of Apollo and set apart for holy service, is condemned to be the slave-wife of the man who has destroyed their city. The poor mother wails in horror at the thought: it is too awful, too sacrilegious a deed even for these proud Greeks, and she cries out in protest. The herald silences her with a brutal comment on the good fortune which makes her daughter the bride of a king; and then orders an attendant to fetch Cassandra from the tents. But there is no need for the man to go. Even while they are speaking there comes a sudden flash of strange fire, and the wild figure of Cassandra appears, robed in white, garlanded with flowers and carrying a blazing torch. The fearful events of the past night have driven her to a frenzy. Arrayed as for a happy bridal, she comes singing a hymn to Hymen; but the terror in her eyes, and the poignancy of the words she utters hold her hearers dumb:

Her frenzy gives place now to a more meditative strain. It is as though the fiery cloud that hung about her brain was pierced for an instant by the sight of her grieving mother. She tries to find words to comfort Hecuba; and as the calmer mood deepens she rises to a perception of the dignity of high failure contrasted with low success. The Trojans dying for their homes she sees as a nobler thing than the triumph of the Greeks.

At this point the herald is suddenly roused to reply. He turns upon her furiously for her ominous forebodings and bids her be silent. If he did not know her for a mad woman, he says, she should suffer for boding thus evil to the Greeks. He orders her roughly to follow him; but at his speech the frenzy rushes over Cassandra again. She turns upon Talthybius in magnificent anger and scorn. “How fierce a slave,” she cries; and then the prophetic gift burns in her as she foretells in language of awful beauty her own doom and that of Agamemnon.

Cassandra is led away to the Greek ships, no blessing to the toiling mariners. For even their own gods are wrath at the crime against her; and many a heart-breaking struggle is in store for them: many a noble ship will be lost, and many a hero’s life will pay the penalty, before their homes are reached. Perhaps to Agamemnon more than most, the Deities of the Elements were kind. But then they knew the fate awaiting him, and in ironic pleasure sped him to it. There is no need to recall the details of his arrival at MycenÆ, or of his welcome by Clytemnestra, almost distraught by conflicting hope and fear. Agamemnon was weary of his voyage; weary, too, of the long steep chariot-drive up from the sea. Yielding to his wife’s entreaty to walk on costly crimson to the palace, he turns for an instant to Cassandra’s chariot.

The moment is crowded with emotion. For the briefest space—merely long enough, in fact, to make the Trojan woman formally known to Clytemnestra—these three strong spirits face each other. Cassandra, wide-eyed and rigid, looks beyond the king and queen, beyond the crowding people, at something that her vision warns her is beyond the palace doors. To Clytemnestra, her presence is an insult, and her purity an intolerable reproach. There is one glance of bitterness and hatred from the queen which Cassandra does not see; and then the insolent king enters the palace, Clytemnestra following him. She returns immediately, however, lashed to a fury in which her dignity goes to shreds.

The speech is cruel; and it has, moreover, an inner meaning which the poor captive perceives only too well. She does not answer. She listens in silence, too, when the Chorus address her; and when Clytemnestra, with that crucial moment imminent, grows wild with impatience. “Sure she is mad,” ejaculates the angry queen; “I’ll not demean myself by throwing more words away.” Only when she has gone does Cassandra break silence; and then by a wail which the sympathetic Elders cannot understand.

The old men pity her, and try to calm her frenzy. She looks round on them, as if awakening from a dream, and asks what house is this. They reply that it is the AtridÆ’s palace, and the word calls up to Cassandra the long black record of the house of Atreus.

In a long recital, Cassandra recounts the ancient crimes of the AtridÆ; and in dark oracular language moans that there is worse behind. The old men are perplexed. They cannot follow her meaning, though over and over again she struggles to make clear the doom that is even now about to fall.

The Elders begin to understand; but still the drift of her message is only partly clear to them. They realize that she is distraught, fearing some dreadful fate for herself; they have, too, a glimmering fear of danger to the king. But they cannot comprehend what it may be; and the thought of succour never dawns upon their dull old wits. They speak gently to Cassandra; but again her message seems to tear her with its force and urgency.

Then, point by point, she goes with studied clarity over all the “trail of long-past crime.” So long as this is her theme, the Elders understand and confirm her words. But when, rising again on the wings of prophecy and therefore to a rapt and obscure utterance, she foretells the fall of Agamemnon and her own death, they are again at sea. She pauses for an instant, baffled; she knows that her end is imminent, and in her despair she casts stinging words at them for their stupidity and inaction. Never has Apollo’s ban wrought so bitterly; and in the extremity of her anguish she declares that she will call upon the god no longer. She strips herself of the sacred emblems and flings them from her.

She takes a few steps toward the palace; but her courage fails for a moment. The reek of blood in her nostrils stifles her, and she recoils. In her last words passion and strength alike fade out, giving place to a pathetic human appeal:

And the old men, as she passes slowly out of sight, wail over her what is perhaps her most fitting epitaph:

---