Cassandra: Priestess of Troy

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Speaker 1 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Speaker 1 Today, we're returning to ancient Greek mythology and one of the most well-known women from the Trojan War, Cassandra, the beautiful princess and tragic prophetess of Troy.

Speaker 1 Cassandra is remembered for foretelling the fall of Troy, but she was cursed by the god Apollo so that her prophecies would never be believed.

Speaker 1 The Trojan princess Cassandra is almost certainly fictional. However, the context of her character, this Bronze Age princess who was also a priestess, well, that's where things get more interesting.

Speaker 1 Joining me to talk through Cassandra's story and the fascinating archaeological links to it, I was delighted to interview Dr. Emily Hauser from the University of Exeter.

Speaker 1 Emily has just released a brand new book, Mythica, that explores the real women behind the myths of Greek mythology, including the story of Cassandra.

Speaker 14 Emily, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 12 Thank you so much for having me, Tristan. I'm delighted to be here.

Speaker 14 And it's always fun talking about Greek mythology and this particular figure that we're going to be focusing in on, Cassandra from the Trojan War.

Speaker 14 But I mean, Homer and his epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Emily, the characters and the stories of these epics and their names that people come back to again and again, aren't they?

Speaker 14 Not just the men, but the women too.

Speaker 12 They absolutely are. I think this is what is one of the most fascinating things about Homer is that staying power of the myths that they transmit towards us,

Speaker 12 the kind of resonances that they have across time, across history. And you can be reading these epics and it's like opening up a time capsule onto the past.

Speaker 12 And yet at the same time, in a lot of ways, they feel utterly new each time you read them.

Speaker 12 So to me, that's one of the things that is just so exciting about them, that they can speak to an ancient world, an ancient history that sometimes feels so foreign and so different.

Speaker 12 But at the same time, it's talking about things that we've all experienced: loss, grief, love, homecoming, all these kinds of big themes that we as humans experience and go through.

Speaker 14 Because it's interesting, Emily, like all of these characters, they have flaws. They're not people that you'd want to aspire to be.

Speaker 14 But do you think that fact that they're not flawless is one of the reasons that we always go back to them?

Speaker 12 Absolutely. I think it's certainly one of the reasons.

Speaker 12 I think that, particularly when it comes to the women, the Homeric epics do such a brilliant job of kind of meshing complexity into their characterization in a way that, you know, Helen of Troy, just to give kind of the most famous example, has so often been flattened throughout her reception history.

Speaker 12 And when I say reception, that basically just means the afterlife of the character when artists and writers have taken her and done something with her.

Speaker 12 She often gets flattened to this kind of two-dimensional face, right? The face that launched a thousand ships famously in Christopher Marlowe's phrase.

Speaker 12 But what Homer does so brilliantly is is actually he makes these characters so three-dimensional and investigates, even in the cases of the women who get very little airtime, but still investigates how nuanced and complicated they are.

Speaker 12 So Helen is throughout the Iliad, she's discussing whether she's to blame for the war or not. She's pushing back against Aphrodite, who's telling her to go and have sex with Paris.

Speaker 12 And she says, basically, if you want to have sex with Paris so much, go and do it yourself.

Speaker 12 Which I think is such a good comeback. So

Speaker 12 they're really feisty, they're they're really led, and I think that's what makes them really relevant now.

Speaker 14 And with Homer's epics, how many different women feature in Homer's epics, in his version of the Trojan War and the Odyssey?

Speaker 12 Well, this is the interesting thing.

Speaker 12 And I should probably just add a brief qualification here in that when we are saying Homer, we are using this kind of as a placeholder for this big poetic tradition, right?

Speaker 12 Because in fact, while the ancients believed that Homer was a real poet from a particular time, it now seems through kind of decades of research that actually this was a tradition of oral poetry handed down over the centuries and then kind of became crystallized as a fixed text.

Speaker 12 But we'll say Homer for sure as that kind of placeholder.

Speaker 12 But yes, the Homeric epics as kind of we have them now, they have a difference between the two, between the Iliad, which is the epic of war, around the Trojan War, around Achilles, and then the Odyssey, which is the epic of homecoming and Odysseus and his voyage home.

Speaker 12 And in the Iliad, we don't get that many many women, perhaps unsurprisingly, because we're looking at the battlefield, we're looking at Achilles' wrath, we're looking at duels and kind of the final standoff between Hector and Achilles.

Speaker 12 But we get women sort of behind the walls in the margins. In the Odyssey, it's quite different.
Women are foregrounded a lot more. That's for a couple of different reasons.

Speaker 12 One reason is because much of the Odyssey is taken up with Odysseus' voyage, and on his voyage, famously, he meets these kind of sex goddesses, witches, monsters, all of whom are feminized and very interesting.

Speaker 14 From are these figures like Cersei and Calypso, these names? Well, no names.

Speaker 12 They are exactly, exactly. Circe, Calypso, the sirens.
We've got Scylla and Charybdis, this monster and whirlpool, both of them are feminine.

Speaker 12 Everything is feminized on Odysseus' return in both the kind of fantastical and the monstrous. And that's really interesting to do something with.

Speaker 12 And then, of course, we've got Odysseus coming home to Ithaca and Penelope waiting for him there.

Speaker 12 And so we get that insight into Penelope but what's really interesting is that in the 19th century an English critic Samuel Butler actually thought there were so many women in the Odyssey and it was so feminine that it must have been written by a woman and there's interesting ways in which like actually we can unpack that and see that there is actually there are problems with that assumption right there are women in there and therefore it must be by a woman but I just kind of to say that like there are very different ways that the Iliadomy Odyssey are working around women and people have been really interested in that over the years I mean, given almost the timeless nature of the texts, of the poems, and they've endured down to the present day, do you think this has influenced the way that women have been written about throughout history, given the fact that the Iliad and the Odyssey, the story, has always been there?

Speaker 12 Absolutely, that's such a great question, Trustan.

Speaker 12 So, I think this really gets into the heart of why I study and write about Homer and why I think it needs to be done in a kind of public platform, because Homer lies at the heart of so many discussions around gender in ways that perhaps people don't even realize.

Speaker 12 So the Homeric epics stand at the very beginning of Greek literature. They were the first written poetry, the first things to be written down in the Greek alphabet.

Speaker 12 And as such, they stand at the head of the Western canon and have been accepted as such. They trickled through medieval manuscripts, they went into kind of the education system.

Speaker 12 In Victorian education, in Britain in particular, they were at the kind of forefront of what every public school boy was being educated in. And in doing that, they have shaped the norms of gender.

Speaker 12 Now, obviously, I've said already, and we have said that they are preoccupied with what it means to be a man. So they have shaped ideas not just around women, but also around the primacy of men.

Speaker 12 and the fact that histories and stories are to be told about men. So there's this really great phrase that the Homeric epics use to describe their subject matter.

Speaker 12 And in the Greek, in the ancient Greek, it's kleia andrun, which means the glories of men. But klea, glory, literally means the things that are heard.
So I mentioned that this is oral poetry.

Speaker 12 So this is the oral poetry that tells the glorious deeds of men, that transmits them across the generations.

Speaker 12 So that mechanism that has preserved Homer, that has made Homer important, has also, at the the same time, by the same measure, told us that stories and histories and epics and texts and myths need to be about men.

Speaker 14 Hence why I'm guessing for yourself and many other brilliant authors at this time in history now want to kind of balance that out a bit by also promoting the women in the story too.

Speaker 14 Yes, the stories of Achilles and Ajax and Hector are extraordinary and should keep being told. But also the women too, like Cassandra, that their story should also be heard.

Speaker 12 Exactly right. And I'd go further, Matt, because I would also say that looking at the women's stories and

Speaker 12 seeing them anew, giving them voice, enables us also to read the men's stories in different ways. So I'll just give you an example.
The Iliad begins with, as I've mentioned, the wrath of Achilles.

Speaker 12 The word in Greek is menis. It means like divine anger.
He's the son of a goddess, so he is capable of divine anger.

Speaker 12 And the reason he's angry is because his captive enslaved woman, Briseus, has been taken from him by Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks.

Speaker 12 Now, he's angry about this, not just because he's attached to her, although actually he does later say he does have a kind of emotional attachment to her, but he's mostly angry because in this kind of economy of Homeric warfare, women represent honor.

Speaker 12 The more enslaved captive women you have, the more honor you have. So when he loses his enslaved woman, he loses his honor.

Speaker 12 Most scholars, most readers of the epic look at the epic as the arc of Achilles' anger, Achilles' withdrawal from the war because he's annoyed that he has lost this honor.

Speaker 12 But when you turn it on its head and you realize that actually his honor is predicated on the capture, the enslavement and the rape of women, it makes you see his heroism in quotation marks there in a very different light.

Speaker 12 There are costs to this heroism. And I think this is a cost that has not been talked about enough.

Speaker 14 Very much so. And it's really interesting.
It's interesting. You almost like you have those pairs, Achilles, Briseus, Hector, Andromache, Cassandra, maybe, and King Prime.
I don't know.

Speaker 14 Maybe that's a bit too much for stretch. But once again, you can almost link a couple of them together to understand further their characters.

Speaker 12 That's a really great point. I think that Homer does that deliberately and consciously.

Speaker 12 One reason why, and again, I say consciously, I guess I'm talking about the framing of the poetic tradition here, but I think one reason why is that the gender binary is very much at play in the Homeric epics and is exploited for really interesting reasons.

Speaker 12 But, you know, one of the best examples of this kind of binary being played out is again in the Iliad and in the sixth book, where Hector and Andromache meet at the walls of Troy.

Speaker 12 And it's just, it's my favorite moment in either of the epics because you get this clash between two worlds. And these two people, this husband and wife, who just cannot understand each other.

Speaker 12 They just talk past each other because she is trying to say, you know, look at your infant son. She's holding him in her arms.
You know, look at your people. Look at your city.
Defend.

Speaker 12 His name, Hector in Greek, means holder, defender. So she says, do what your name is.
Do defend. And he says, I can't.
He's trapped in the masculine imperative of glory.

Speaker 12 And he says, I would get shame from my people, from the women and the men, if I didn't also go out to war.

Speaker 12 You know, and so it's just such an amazing moment of this clash of these worlds that they just talk past each other. And I think Homer is so interested in that.

Speaker 12 But I'll also pick up what you said about Cassandra, because I wonder if Cassandra is an interesting example of not having a pair. Perhaps if we did give her a pair, it might be Apollo.

Speaker 12 But I feel like Cassandra, she stands alone in a way that other women don't.

Speaker 12 And that is precisely because she is kind of defined by her desire for virginity and her desire to stand outside the mechanisms of war through her connection to prophecy and priesthood.

Speaker 12 She is an other and apart character.

Speaker 14 Well, this then feels the perfect time to now focus in on Cassandra.

Speaker 14 So, Emily, as you've hinted at there, I mean, Homer's epic, the Iliad, it doesn't cover the entire Trojan War, has that particular focus with Achilles versus Hector, Andromache and the likes.

Speaker 14 So how big a role does Cassandra play in the Iliad? I mean, how does she fit into the story?

Speaker 12 Well, it's really interesting because Cassandra has such a big name in the later tradition of the Trojan War.

Speaker 12 So what happens is the Homeric epics, as I said, the kind of font of Western literature and they become canonical even in their own time.

Speaker 12 They get passed down, they get received, and those myths, those stories get readapted, particularly in Greek tragedy. And the tragedians are really interested in Cassandra.

Speaker 12 They are interested in this idea of her as a prophet who was essentially cursed by Apollo because Apollo wanted to have sex with her. She refused him.

Speaker 12 And as such, he then cursed her with the fact that anything that she said, she would tell the truth and she wouldn't be believed.

Speaker 12 And the tragedians, the dramatists of Athens, they are really interested in this. So we have Euripides, Agamemnon telling that kind of story.
Homer is not interested in that.

Speaker 12 So interestingly, in Homer, she's not a prophet. There's no story about her prophecy of the fall of Troy.
There's no story about Apollo's attempt to rape her.

Speaker 12 All we get is a couple of mentions of her. So we get her twice in the Iliad.
She's mentioned as a bride. She's mentioned as being beautiful.
That's kind of all we get.

Speaker 12 She's called the loveliest of all of Priam's daughters. We then get her at the moment where Hector's body is brought back into Troy, right? So this is after the duel between Achilles and Hector.

Speaker 12 Hector has been killed by Achilles and Cassandra stands on the walls of Troy and she is the first one to see Hector come home.

Speaker 12 So there is perhaps a hint of her prophetic kind of ability there, but we don't see more than that. And then in the Odyssey, we only hear about her as having died.

Speaker 12 So what happens in the myth of Cassandra is that after the fall of Troy, she is raped by Ajax of Locris, and that rape kind of initiates a whole series of kind of curses against the Greeks, which is really interesting.

Speaker 14 I know that in your book, you kind of very much big emphasis on exploring the real figures behind these women of Greek myth.

Speaker 14 I know it's difficult, but given that there is always that argument about the Trojan War having a basis of historicity in it, about an actual Trojan war, do you think there's a possibility that Cassandra as this beautiful princess of Troy could have been based on an actual figure.

Speaker 12 Yeah, oh, yeah, this is where I kind of really start getting interested because, yes, is the short answer. So, you mentioned briefly about the kind of debate around the historicity of Troy.

Speaker 12 Essentially, the kind of short version of this story is that in the late 19th century, a city in the location where ancient legendary Troy was meant to have lain, it was discovered by this kind of Homer-obsessed German banker called Heinrich Schliemann.

Speaker 12 And And we do think that that historical city is the same as the legendary city, was the city that was being talked about in these myths. There are these amazing crossovers and overlaps between them.

Speaker 12 And I'll just give you one of the examples that kind of shakes me to my core. So the ancients were amazingly good at kind of astronomy, date calculation.

Speaker 12 And there was a geographer from the Hellenistic period. So this is kind of later on into Greek history, called Eratosthenes.
And he gave a a date for the Trojan War.

Speaker 12 They all believed that this was a historical event and he dated it at 1184 BCE. Now wait for it.

Speaker 12 The archaeologists who had uncovered Troy, so we've got Schliemann, we've then got a series of other archaeologists and they're all excavating, they're all debating about kind of what lair is the lair that we could attribute to like legendary Troy, Homer's Troy.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 Eventually, in the last few decades, pottery experts have looked at the kind of pottery, which is for archaeologists an amazing clue for dating, because you can look at styles, you can match between sites, you can use that to date.

Speaker 12 And pottery experts have dated the fall of Troy that we think is the legendary Troy to 1190 to 1180 BCE. So it is exactly the same decade as Eratosthenes said it was.

Speaker 12 And I feel like it's these kinds of overlaps that make us need to take this seriously as a possibility that this was a real Troy, there was a real Trojan War, perhaps not in the way that Homer talks about it, right?

Speaker 12 This is myth, this is legend, it's been kind of stirred up in the cauldron of myth and turned into fantasy, but there is a historical basis.

Speaker 12 And for women, that is so interesting because for women, that means that then, okay, we have this one line about Cassandra, the loveliest of all of Priam's daughters, but we can find her because there is the history behind it.

Speaker 12 I think what's really interesting is that it's so easy to jump into Cassandra as a Greek figure. It's what Homer does.
In Homer, she speaks Greek.

Speaker 12 The later Greek tragedians are writing about her in Greek, but she is Trojan in the myth.

Speaker 12 So actually, if we're trying to find the historical Cassandra, and this is a lot of what I'm doing in Mythica, I'm saying, let's actually put Homer back a little bit and let's talk about the history first.

Speaker 12 And the historical women who would have been prototypes for a priestess, a princess, like Cassandra, they would have been Anatolian women.

Speaker 12 So Anatolia is, you know, what we now broadly call modern Turkey.

Speaker 12 And that landmass at the time of the kind of what we might call the historical Trojan War, that was largely taken up by the Hittite Empire.

Speaker 12 And the Hittite Empire was this amazing kind of late Bronze Age civilization.

Speaker 12 And we have evidence from them, from tablets that were discovered in their capital city, Hattusha, of real princesses, real female prophets, dream oracles, female interpreters.

Speaker 12 They have an incredibly important role in this civilization in prophecy and in the interpretation of omens. And I think we can see Cassandra there.

Speaker 14 So that influence, the evolution in the story of Cassandra as a prophet may well have been taken from this historical evidence that royal princesses did dabble in prophecy or prophecy was part of their almost job description that you have in this Bronze Age civilization that coexisted alongside the time of the historical Troy.

Speaker 12 Exactly. It's actually a very Hittite idea to combine priesthood and princesshood.
That's not something that you see in Greece.

Speaker 12 And so I think that this is something that is coming through from this other civilization, which is fascinating, right? That all of these elements are trickling down.

Speaker 12 And actually, the women can be a great route back to this real history.

Speaker 14 And so when does that get relayed into the Greek literature following Homer that starts to really highlight Cassandra as a prophet, as a priestess?

Speaker 14 Because I have in my notes the Cypria, but I don't know if that's before or after the tragedians that we've already mentioned.

Speaker 12 So you mentioned the Cypria. Sometimes people will have heard of it maybe as the Cypria.
Sometimes it's said with a soft C. In Greek, it's from Kupros, Kupria, so it would be with that hard K.

Speaker 12 But this is what I like to call, I kind of describe these epics as part of a box set of sung poems. So if you think of like the Marvel universe, that's what epics were.

Speaker 12 So you have the Iliad and the Odyssey, those were two of them, but then you've got loads other.

Speaker 12 You've got the Sack of Troy, the Iliopersis, it's called in Greek, you've got the Kypria, you've got the Little Iliad. So you've got all of these different epics, and we know that they existed.

Speaker 12 They just weren't written down. The Iliad and the Odyssey were the only ones that got written down.

Speaker 12 So it's a tragedy for us because it would have been amazing to have these other epics.

Speaker 12 It also, I think, has had the effect of inflating the Iliad and Odyssey in a way that, interestingly, at their time, they were just one of a pool of traditional epics around the Trojan War legend.

Speaker 12 But the Cypriot, in any case, is a fascinating epic. We know a little bit about it because later historians kind of summarise it for us.
So even though we don't have it, we get a summary.

Speaker 12 And Cassandra is mentioned in there.

Speaker 12 And in that epic, that's where we would have had the sort of the tale that I mentioned of Cassandra being kind of approached by Apollo, the attempted rape, her saying no, his punishment, which is that curse that she will tell the truth and never be believed.

Speaker 12 And that is kind of really what the tragedians then latch onto. And that for us is really important evidence for this myth from this ancient epic.

Speaker 14 But Emily, I didn't realize that. I love that analogy of the box there, by the way.
It really makes it easy.

Speaker 14 And it's like the Iliad and the Odyssey are like Captain America and the Thor, and then you've got Cypria as one division or something like that, as you say. They're all part of that universe.

Speaker 14 But it's interesting. So I'd initially, in my thoughts, I'd thought that the Kypria then came later.
But so what you're saying, actually, it's created at a similar time to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Speaker 14 It's just lesser known because they have stolen the limelight because those are the two that have been written down. But you still have surviving extracts from it to know what was said.

Speaker 14 Or epitome, I guess.

Speaker 12 We have epitomies. We have little extracts, just little bits.
So just sort of fragments that survive, quoted in other authors.

Speaker 12 But yeah, nothing nothing to the extent of the Iliad and Odyssey, which are, for all intents and purposes, complete epics.

Speaker 12 So yeah, the way of thinking about it is to think of these as as songs that were passed down from probably as early as the 14th century BCE. And they were a huge number of these different songs.

Speaker 12 And in fact, it wasn't like the Iliad and the Odyssey existed in the 14th century BCE and then were just being like memorized and passed on. Every bard would have their own version of it.

Speaker 12 So we basically have just like one version of one poem amongst a huge pool of all of these different bardic traditions.

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Speaker 14 And so which particular plays are we talking about that mention Cassandra in them and what are they about?

Speaker 12 Essentially, we've got some main ones and then some that are on the side.

Speaker 12 So the main tragedies that we're probably going to be talking about are Aeschylus's Agamemnon, which tells the story of Agamemnon's homecoming that was first premiered in 458 BCE.

Speaker 12 And then we've got Euripides' Trojan Women, and that is from 415 BCE. And then we've got some other ones.
Again, this is kind of a recurring theme of classical literature, a lot of lost literature.

Speaker 12 So we have a lost Alexander that was also by Euripides, which we don't know much about, but we can kind of piece things together from images that are painted on vases and that kind of thing.

Speaker 12 And who's Alexander meant to be? So Alexander, oh, this is a great one. Okay, this is going to take us back to the historicity of Troy.

Speaker 12 So Alexander is an alternative name in Greek epic, in Homer, for Paris, the prince of Troy, who was the one who abducted Helen.

Speaker 12 And what is so cool about this, I will just digress because because this is like one of my kind of favorite points of overlap between epic and history.

Speaker 12 We have, again, this is from Hattusho from the Hittite capital. Remember, we're back in Anatolia.
This is this late Bronze Age history.

Speaker 12 And we have a tablet of a treaty that was signed between the Hittite king and the king of a city called Willusa.

Speaker 12 Now, the Iliad, you might wonder why it's called the Iliad. It's called that because the Greek name for Troy was Ilios.

Speaker 12 But in front of it, there used to be a letter that later dropped out of Greek called the digamma, which was pronounced w. So it used to be pronounced Wilios.

Speaker 12 So Wilios, we think, was Wilusa. And this treaty between the Achissite king and the king of Wilusa, we think was actually with the historical king of Troy.

Speaker 12 But it gets even cooler because that king has a name. His name is Alexandu.
And we think that might be remembered in Alexandros of Ilios which is Paris of Troy which is Alexandu of Welusa.

Speaker 14 Wow okay there you go that was brilliant and it was getting said I love that kind of historicity and that myth combining to tell stories like this. Well let's go back to the story of Cassandra.

Speaker 14 You've highlighted those key sources we have for that which give more to the character of Cassandra built upon from Homer.

Speaker 14 So what do these sources what do they reveal about how Cassandra fares during the Trojan War? What are her main prophecies, the main acts in which she features before the ultimate fall of Troy?

Speaker 12 It's so interesting because we've got that gap in the Iliad, right?

Speaker 12 We've got that gap of her just being this kind of bride waiting to get married, and then her just kind of spotting Hector from the walls.

Speaker 12 But what the tragedies do is they give us Cassandra embroiled in the Trojan War legend.

Speaker 12 So maybe one of the first places that we see her chronologically in her story is when Hecuba, her mother, queen of Troy, has a dream while she is pregnant with Paris.

Speaker 12 That's Paris we've been talking about, the one who abducts Helen of Sparta. And Hecuba dreams of giving birth to a torch of fire, a firebrand.

Speaker 12 And Cassandra is the one who says, this predicts the fall of Troy in flames. Of course, nobody believes her.
We then get the next kind of step of this unfolding tragedy.

Speaker 12 You can see why the tragedians love this, because it is like that ultimate feeling of inevitable tragedy coming.

Speaker 12 Paris gets exiled because they are afraid that this prophecy might come true, but then he's brought back from exile. And again, Cassandra says, you shouldn't be doing this.

Speaker 12 This will be the destruction of the city.

Speaker 12 And then, kind of, the final bit before Troy is sacked is that as the wooden horse is being dragged into Troy, that is Odysseus's stratagem to get the Greeks in through the gates.

Speaker 12 As it's being dragged into Troy, the Trojans are dancing around it. They're chanting.
They are clothing the temples. They are rejoicing that they've won the war.

Speaker 12 And Cassandra is the only one who is shouting the truth.

Speaker 14 Interesting. So Cassandra is closely entwined with arguably one of the most famous images from the Trojan War today, the Trojan horror story.

Speaker 14 She is that lone voice, like, don't do this, don't bring it in. You are absolute nutters for doing this.
But as you say, part of her fate, no one listens to her.

Speaker 12 Absolutely.

Speaker 12 And I think that, you know, I mean, we can talk about this later, but there is a real kind of broader theme here to be talked about women's voices and the power of women's speech and the danger of kind of not not listening.

Speaker 12 I think this is a real theme in Cassandra and obviously the tragedians are really interested in that too.

Speaker 14 So evidently they bring the Trojan horse in and Troy does fall and Cassandra being a princess what happens to her how is she affected?

Speaker 14 What are the stories surrounding her when Troy ultimately falls and the Greeks start pillaging, looting, searching for basically war booty, which can be in the form of high-ranking women?

Speaker 12 And that's exactly what the Greeks do.

Speaker 12 As I had mentioned, the economy of war in the Iliad is centered around the idea of booty ranging from tripods, which are basically kind of glorified casserole dish stands, all the way to women.

Speaker 12 And those are itemized in the same way in the epic. So there is a single word, geras, which means like a prize of honor, and that can apply to either of those, to objects, to women.

Speaker 12 And, you know, if you're thinking about this in this way of women equals honor, you can see how a higher status woman will mean more honor.

Speaker 12 So the real danger for the women of Troy when Troy is sacked is that all of them, the high-ranking ones particularly, are going to be enslaved by the Greeks and they're going to be taken back to Greece.

Speaker 12 That is their fate. And Cassandra is one of those.
So Cassandra gets picked by Agamemnon. We've got other examples.
So we mentioned Andromache already.

Speaker 12 Andromache, the wife of Hector, she gets taken by Neoptolemus, who is Achilles' son. Hecuba gets taken by Odysseus.
So the Greeks parcel out the Trojan royal family, and Cassandra is one of those.

Speaker 14 So given that the earlier description of Cassandra is the most beautiful of Priam's daughters, I guess you can understand why the leader of the Greek army, Agamemnon, goes for Cassandra compared to another because perhaps she was seen as the most valuable, you know, as kind of the leading princess of the city.

Speaker 12 Absolutely. So the way that Homeric thought kind of articulates value, particularly the value of women, is around two axes.
One is beauty and the other is skill, skill in particularly weaving.

Speaker 12 And you see this again and again. There's one particular example where Agamemnon himself demonstrates that this is how he's thinking about women.

Speaker 12 This is when at the very beginning of the Iliad, he is forced to give up his enslaved woman, Chriseus, which, by the way, is why he takes Achilles' woman Priseus.

Speaker 12 And he says, I don't want to give her up. And he gives a list of her qualities, basically like a shopping list, like she's beautiful, she's tall, and she's good at weaving.

Speaker 12 And he essentially itemizes what he's looking for in an enslaved woman. So you're absolutely right.
Cassandra as a princess, as a beautiful young woman, is definitely in the firing line.

Speaker 14 Now, we must highlight, as horrific as it is, that other part of the story that affects Cassandra at this moment of time, because it feels important to the events of the myth at this particular moment of what happens next.

Speaker 14 What is this infamous fate that befalls Cassandra before she's taken away by Agamemnon?

Speaker 12 During the sack of Troy, Cassandra is clinging for safety to the statue of Athena, who ironically is the patron goddess of Troy in Homer. And that's ironic, obviously, because she's a Greek goddess.

Speaker 12 But she's clinging to Athena's statue in her temple, and nevertheless, she is raped by Ajax.

Speaker 12 Now, I mentioned earlier, this is Ajax of Locris, he's sometimes called, sometimes also called the lesser Ajax. That's because there are actually two Ajaxes in the Greek army.

Speaker 12 The better-known one, who is the one who tries to get Achilles' armor after the war and then eventually ends up killing himself, that's Ajax of Salamis. But we're talking about Ajax of Locris.

Speaker 12 And he rapes Cassandra. It is a terrible moment.
It's sort of one of those climactic moments of horror in the fall of Troy.

Speaker 12 The other climactic moment, I'd say, is when they throw Hector's young son off the walls. Also, kind of just, it shows the Greek hubris, the level of horror that they are descending to.

Speaker 12 And Athena responds to this. The goddess Athena responds to this.
It's important to note that she's not actually responding to the rape of a woman. She is not troubled by that.

Speaker 12 She is troubled by the desecration of her temple. But nevertheless, what Athena does is she gets her own wrath, essentially, like a counterpart to Achilles' wrath.

Speaker 12 And she then stops the Greeks from getting back to Troy. She sends a massive storm, and that is what kind of initiates and moves into the events then of the Odyssey.

Speaker 12 There was again this kind of group of poems that were telling the stories of the returns of the Greeks called the Nostoi. That word means homecoming, return home.
And the Odyssey is one of those.

Speaker 12 So it's Cassandra who moves us essentially from the ruins of Troy into the wrath of Athena and the Greeks' failure to return because of Ajax's impiety.

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Speaker 14 Let's keep going on with the story before kind of exploring the character and the influences and the legacy of Cassandra and her figure.

Speaker 14 So what is that next part of Cassandra's story when she is taken away from Troy by Agamemnon?

Speaker 14 Because this is Cassandra leaving her homeland, as you say, maybe maybe based on an Anatolian priestess/slash prophetess and going to a foreign land, which is mainland Greece.

Speaker 12 Absolutely. And do you know what? I'm going to tangent once more and I'm going to talk about some of the historicity for this because this, I think, is so tantalizing.

Speaker 12 So, as I said, there's a whole group of Trojan women who in the myth get carted off to Greece. Well,

Speaker 12 in the late Bronze Age, we've talked about Late Bronze Age, Hittite Anatolia. In Greece, what was happening at that time was we had a civilization that we now call the Mycenaeans.

Speaker 12 That's the Bronze Age civilization. And that is the civilization broadly that matches up with kind of the heroes that Homer is talking about.
Now, again, we have tablets from their palaces.

Speaker 12 Now we are in Greece. And the tablets are bureaucratic lists of the powers' holdings.
One of the things that to me, as a historian of women, is so interesting, is that women are often mentioned.

Speaker 12 They are often mentioned as probably equivalent to like castle holdings, essentially. They are numbered, they are identified with their children, and they are given rations.

Speaker 12 We think that they were probably enslaved from this evidence. But what's so interesting is that they are given ethnics as well.
That means they are given titles that tell us where they were from.

Speaker 12 And there is one enslaved woman in the tablets of Pelos, one of the palaces of Bronze Age Greece, that is said to be Toroya, a Trojan woman. So we have actual evidence of an enslaved Trojan woman.

Speaker 12 She's been brought from Troy. She's been brought to a Greek palace, exactly like Cassandra.
Cassandra, of course, goes to Mycenae. We also have a Bronze Age palace at Mycenae.

Speaker 12 But I just, I love, again, this is a moment where we've got interweaving between myth and history in women's stories.

Speaker 14 Yes, it's not evidence of a particular woman called Cassandra from Troy going to Greece, but it is evidence of that historical context that Mycenaeans were raiding the Anatolian coast or whatever and bringing people back.

Speaker 12 Exactly. And I'm always emphatic in the book and also just sort of in my work that we're not looking for the real Cassandra.

Speaker 12 I give an analogy which is actually one that Emily Wilson, when I was talking to her about this project, very kindly kind of helped me out with articulating, which is that these women that we're talking about, they're not real women, just like Wonder Woman isn't a real Amazon.

Speaker 12 But like we're talking about constructs when we're talking about the figure of Cassandra in myth.

Speaker 12 But what we can do is we can look at the kind of prototypes, we can look at the real historical women who then trickle down to generate these kinds of myths. And that's the kind of work we're doing.

Speaker 14 So let's then go back to the story of Cassandra. What is the fate that befalls Cassandra in Mycenae?

Speaker 12 Yeah, so this is the kind of most famous part of Cassandra's story, in part because it's told in Aeschylus' play, The Agamemnon, and one of the most famous tragedies of all Greek literature.

Speaker 12 So what happens is Agamemnon and his war prize, Cassandra, arrive back in Mycenae. Agamemnon expects the royal treatment.

Speaker 12 He expects his wife Clytemnestra to be waiting dutifully for him at home, just like Penelope is waiting for Odysseus.

Speaker 12 But in fact, Clytemnestra, while he is away, has, of course, come up with a plan of her own, and she wants to kill Agamemnon as, in part, revenge for his sacrifice of her daughter, Iphigenea.

Speaker 12 So in the Agamemnon, we get Agamemnon arriving. She rolls out this purple carpet for him, and he treads it like a king, like an emperor.

Speaker 12 And Cassandra, behind him, is kind of shrieking that she can already see the blood, she can see the axe falling. They go inside the palace, and then, of course, in the tragedy, they both get killed.

Speaker 12 And so this is this kind of moment where the line for Cassandra, this is the moment where the line ends. She already knew it was coming all along.

Speaker 12 And actually, we see her in some of the tragedies rejoicing because this will bring Agamemnon's house down. So she sees it very much as revenge, as revenge for his plunder and destruction of her city.

Speaker 12 And I think, you know, in the tragedies, we're meant to see her going forward quite willingly to sacrifice and bring him down, essentially.

Speaker 14 I know it's a tragedy and it does end in her death, but it's a kind of a nice ending for Cassandra in that revenge arc story.

Speaker 12 It absolutely is.

Speaker 12 And also, it's quite a nice ending at this point, anyway, for Clytemnestra, because Clytemnestra has also got her revenge against a man who murdered her child and, you know, went off to war and sacked another city on account of, by the way, Clytemnestra's sister, Helen of Troy.

Speaker 12 So for at least the point of the end of the Agamemnon, we are in a good place for women.

Speaker 12 I will add, because you did mention that Mycenae is the kind of historical namesake of this real historical Bronze Age civilization of the Greeks, the Mycenaeans.

Speaker 12 Mycenae as a Bronze Age site was excavated in the late 19th century around the same time as Troy and by the same man, by Schliemann.

Speaker 12 And when Schliemann was excavating, he actually found what he thought was a king buried with a very famous kind of gold mask that he called the mask of Agamemnon.

Speaker 12 But he also found a woman buried with two infants. And in the myth, Cassandra had two infant children with Agamemnon.

Speaker 12 So Schliemann immediately said, this is Agamemnon and Cassandra buried in the site of Mycenae. Now, it's not going to be literally them.
In fact, the date doesn't work out.

Speaker 12 It's a little bit too early. But again, I love this kind of interweaving of history and myth that we're getting here.

Speaker 14 And also, as you mentioned earlier, with that actual evidence that was discovered, it's not too far-fetched to imagine maybe a Trojan captive or an Anatolian captive in the royal palace at Mycenae at some stage in the late Bronze Age.

Speaker 14 If, as you say, they would be brought back. And I'm guessing if they were a highly prized captive, maybe they could have been in the royal palace or close at hand.

Speaker 14 There's almost a show of their prize.

Speaker 12 So the women we have listed at Pelos, they are certainly in the royal palace.

Speaker 12 There are some of them who are sent out to kind of villages around the palace, but most of them are clustered in the palace and they're doing very kind of low-level work like weaving or grinding flour or pouring baths.

Speaker 12 And what's interesting is, again, we see this, these tasks, those are exactly the tasks that in Homer we get told that enslaved captive women are going to be doing.

Speaker 12 So it's matching up very well with the expectations that the Homeric epic sets up for what will happen to an enslaved woman.

Speaker 14 Just before we completely wrap up, going back to Cassandra and her prophecy, so Cassandra prophesizing the destruction of her city, the death of her family, her brother, her father, and so on, and then ultimately her own death.

Speaker 14 Is it quite interesting that all of her prophecies they're never any small prophecies they're all major apocalyptic prophecies of cassandra and do you think this was done on purpose does it reflect a wider trend of other women divine female figures who could prophesize that they prophesize apocalyptic things so I think once we're getting to this point, you know, we've talked about Hittite oracles.

Speaker 12 We've talked about the women who were involved in divining and kind of interpreting dreams in the Hittite Empire. Empire.

Speaker 12 In Greece, we get quite a different model and we get the oracle at Delphi, this really famous figure who inspires in this kind of mantic frenzy, possessed by the god, talking sort of in nonsense.

Speaker 12 And I think Cassandra, by the time we're looking at tragedy, is very much on that level.

Speaker 12 And of course, these oracles became very famous for giving some of the biggest prophecies in history that kind of turned Greek history around, like the prophecy to Croesus.

Speaker 12 So yes, I think Cassandra is very much modelled on these historical women.

Speaker 12 One other thing, and this kind of brings us back nicely to Homer, because I find it really interesting that Homer doesn't mention Cassandra's prophecy.

Speaker 12 And to me, that seems a little bit of the pattern of men kind of appropriating women's

Speaker 12 speech and women's kind of foreknowledge. And what's so interesting is that there was actually an ancient tradition that Homer stole his verses from the first Delphic oracle, Daphne was her name.

Speaker 12 And the ancients believed that at least some of Homer's poetry was stolen from a prophet.

Speaker 12 So it was kind of nice if we were like putting Cassandra in a place of power that these women uttering these prophetic oracles actually had a huge amount of power and that later traditions said that Homer stole from them.

Speaker 14 Lastly, let's briefly talk about the legacy. And this feels like it could be a podcast episode in its own right.
I mean, Cassandra's story is, it endures.

Speaker 14 I think there's a famous fresco showing Cassandra dragged away by Ajax the Lesser.

Speaker 14 I mean, so does Cassandra's story, it hits a chord with the Romans too, and it endures like many of the other key figures in the Iliad and, well, in the Trojan War story?

Speaker 12 It absolutely does. Yeah, and that's that's a good example of that fresco.

Speaker 12 Those frescoes are copied from, I mentioned those Greek vases where Greek vase painters were obsessed with this image of Cassandra clinging to the statue and being dragged away and that artistic legacy goes into the Roman period.

Speaker 12 I think, Cassandra, we can also kind of trace that beyond Rome because what's happening there is, you know, Cassandra is kind of decorative, she's there for kind of the elite to talk about during their dinner parties, like that's operating on a very certain function that's kind of demonstrating this villa owner's knowledge of the Trojan War.

Speaker 12 What happens, particularly as we look into kind of recent history and we look into the 20th and 21st centuries, is that Cassandra becomes appropriated by women writers who are really interested in seeing her as a kind of victim of the patriarchy, as someone who is not afraid to kind of speak out and expose power.

Speaker 12 And women writers, women artists, right? We've got Taylor Swift's song Cassandra that came out and tortured Poets' Department. We've got Florence and the Machine writing Cassandra.

Speaker 12 So women are really interested in how Cassandra's voice speaks out against misogyny and a kind of warning against attempts attempts to take away women's agency, both over their voice and, of course, their bodies as well.

Speaker 14 Well, Emily, this has been a fantastic chat. Is there anything that you'd like listeners to take away? I mean, it's a main message for Cassandra.

Speaker 12 I think it's don't underestimate Cassandra and the women of Homer.

Speaker 12 It is so easy to see them all as these kinds of either a two-dimensional tragic figure like Cassandra or a two-dimensional reason for the Trojan War like Helen.

Speaker 12 And I hope that what what we've just discussed demonstrates that you can dive so much deeper. You can find the threads of the ways that their stories have been sung and reworked and reshaped.

Speaker 12 You can also use it as an invitation to look to the real history of women in the past, which is absolutely what I am trying to do.

Speaker 12 And I guess I would say, if you're interested in learning more about not just Cassandra, but also the other women of the Trojan War and the Homeric epics, Penelope, Briseus, Criseus, Andromache, all of the women we've mentioned, My book, Mythica, a new history of Homer's world through the women written out of it, is coming out April the 17th, and I would love to share it with you all.

Speaker 12 I hope you can tell how excited I am about it. And it would, yeah, just be so interesting to hear what you all think.

Speaker 14 Share away, Mythica coming out in April, in spring 2025. Emily, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 12 Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. There was Dr.
Emily Hauser talking all of things Cassandra, the priestess and prophetess of Troy. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Please do check out Emily's new book, Mythica.

Speaker 1 Thank you once again for listening to this episode. In the meantime, please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor.

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Speaker 19 You'll get the latest phone with a new line on my plan and a brand new smartwatch and tablet.

Speaker 21 No trade-in needed, even on our lowest price plan.

Speaker 22 That's two gifts for your family and one for you.

Speaker 21 Or two for you and one for someone else.

Speaker 20 Or three gifts for you and only you.

Speaker 15 Either way, you save big on three amazing gifts at at Verizon. All on the best 5G network.
Visit Verizon today.

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Speaker 3 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 4 Hey, Dave, here's a tip.

Speaker 10 Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 6 Oh, scratchers? Good idea.

Speaker 7 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 2 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 8 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 5 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 10 Scratchers from the California lottery. A little play can make your day.

Speaker 11 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.