The Curse of Not Being Listened To — Cassandra · by Aeschylus
Cassandra, a Trojan princess, is gifted by Apollo with the power of prophecy in exchange for her love. However, when she reneges on her promise, Apollo curses her so that no one will believe her prophecies. Despite her warnings of Troy’s destruction, no one listens to her, including her family and the Trojan leaders. Her unheard words tragically come true.
Aeschylus: Agamemnon
Verses 1072–1331. Translated by Sophie Grace Chappell & Timothy Chappell.
Like a statue coming to life, Cassandra finally descends. When, after a long silence, she eventually speaks her accent and words are markedly foreign, at first unintelligibly so. (It must be the difficulty of making out what she is saying that in part explains the CHORUS's difficulty in making out what she means.)
CASSANDRA
Ototoi popoi da. Apollo, Apollo!
CHORUS
You name Apollo in your mourning? Why?
Is he the god to hear a sorrow's cry?
CASSANDRA:
Ototoi popoi da. Apollo, Apollo!
CHORUS
Again ill-omenedly she names Apollo—
the last of gods to listen to her sorrow.
CASSANDRA:
Apollo, Apollo!
She-abolisher, my abolisher!
The wandering god
destroyed me once
by deserting me;
to destroy me again
is no difficulty.
CHORUS
She seems to prophesy her own future pain.
Slavery's come, but the god's spark's still there in her brain.
CASSANDRA
Apollo, Apollo!
She-abolisher, my abolisher!
You wandering god,
where is it this time
I am left by you?
What is this house
that you've brought me to?
CHORUS
This is the Atreids' house. But once told, do you know?
If you understand speech, can you hear us say that it's so?
CASSANDRA
A house the gods hate, a history that connives
at in-clan massacres, heads hacked off with knives,
floors that swim with kin-blood, chopped-down lives.
CHORUS
The blood-hound snuffs and paws obsession's track.
She thinks to bring a tale of murders back.
CASSANDRA
This is the evidence I am persuaded by:
Thyestes the Atreid's dismembered infants cry
out of the pan where their limbs and their entrails fry.
CHORUS
We've heard about your second-sightedness;
but for that news, we need no prophetess.
CASSANDRA
Ah, what lie cries mastery?
What most claw-light miseries,
extraneous evil climbing into nest here,
no wrath of kin nor healing can arrest here,
the clan’s men scattered?
CHORUS
Her first speech our whole city understood;
but this I can't get, even if I would.
CASSANDRA
Woman of ill fortune, will
you really do this? With good will
ply lustral water on that classic head and then—
I cannot speak it, but it comes: an end
in stretched cloth shuttered.
CHORUS
No clearer yet; her words riddle and blind,
confused predictions to my confused mind.
CASSANDRA
Eh, eh, papai, papai, what sight is this?
The fish-mesh trap, the fish-mesh trap of death.
The bed-partner, the co-slaughterer, is the net.
Let limitless disorder howl its glee,
gloat 'gainst the clan this offering’s infamy.
CHORUS
What’s the dark angel you so long to see
raising her triumph-cry over this family?
Your words bring night, as sinking warriors
let the saffron blood of fear at every breath.
How swift in onset all disaster is.
CASSANDRA
Ah ah, look look, watch watch, keep back the bull!
His herd-cow traps him, caught in his own robe,
robe that the hidden sword horns with black device;
strikes so he falls down where the waters fill.
I tell you of a death-snare bath that kills.
CHORUS
I do not have the prophet-interpreter's skills
but from this even I can shape some ill.
What else do we ever hear from prophecies?
From every seer’s words, pure ill englobes
the anxious hearers, fear’s flame blown to full.
CASSANDRA
Fate—chance—world—what have you done to me?
My own destruction’s mixed into what I lament.
Why then do you bring me here in misery?
To die together with him: is that what’s meant?
CHORUS
A mindless mind, borne off by some divinity;
a museless music, shapeless, strings unbent;
and always tuned, like the mourning-bird’s, to me:
grief unending, gripped like a child life-spent.
CASSANDRA
The mourning-bird, sweetly singing her own dreadful doom!
And yet the girl changed to bird found a kind of rest.
Her new small brain gave her own sorrows no room;
but I'll still be awake when the splitting blade shatters my crest.
CHORUS
Goaded by gods, by spirits vainly driven,
frantic and out of tune, resounding fear,
you sing your song, yet still no meaning's given.
How did ill prophecy's pathway get you here?
CASSANDRA
I remember the wedding of Paris,
the doom of his friends.
I remember the banks of Scamander,
my family's spring.
On those green happy banks
was this prophet's nurturing;
but the river of hell—on its black and smoking banks—
is where she ends.
CHORUS
Why spell it out so starkly and so plain?
A child could see your meaning. I'm struck down,
lifeblood-bitten by your fate of pain,
by the terror-sorrow melody you sound.
CASSANDRA
I remember my city's long struggles,
the offerings made
by my father against disaster,
slain beasts in a ring
outside our walls—than all which,
nothing vainer against destined suffering.
Now into this soil, just like those helpless bulls',
my warm blood fades.
CHORUS
Still you sing hapless dread with every breath.
Some power on high views you maliciously,
poisons and overwhelms with this sense of death.
Yet where your fates will end you I can't see.
CASSANDRA
My wedding hour arrives, when the veil will lift.
Then in the harsh red wind of your dawning day
you'll see how my words smash down on you in a wave,
you'll see how Argos is ten times more crushed than me.
The hour arrives when I speak no more riddles.
Then you will be the witnesses how close I trod,
how well I smelt, the trail of your old guilt.
Can you not hear the choir that never leave,
that never bless, whose discords edge, this house?
Can you not smell the blood they feed upon,
the coiling blood that’s kept them squatting here?
How will you drive your inborn Furies out
when they scream incest, dynasty-defilement,
when the crimes that found this palace drool from their mouths?
So tell me that I lie, that I shoot as wild
as a gypsy psychic peddling at the gate.
Tell me I’ve diagnosed wrong, then, if you dare.
If you can swear there’s nothing here, then swear.
CHORUS
And how could it help if I swore, even honourably?
What would that heal? And yet I must wonder at you,
here in a distant city, you born overseas—
yet just as if you had been present you speak what is true.
CASSANDRA
God-prophet Apollo made me his prophetess.
CHORUS
What! A god, in a fit of tenderness?
CASSANDRA
Until now, it always mattered to hide this shame.
CHORUS
But now that you're a slave—it's all the same?
CASSANDRA
He wrestled at his work over me, sweet breath hot.
CHORUS
You mean you and he—did the deed whereby children are got?
CASSANDRA
First my consent, then his gift, then my favours withdrawn.
CHORUS
Once he'd filled you with his gift, you repelled him with scorn?
CASSANDRA
By then, by that gift, I'd forewarned Troy of all that would follow.
CHORUS
And did you manage to do this unharmed by Apollo?
CASSANDRA
He cursed me: I speak always truths, never grasped as true.
CHORUS
Yet we've understood and grasped every word from you.
CASSANDRA
Ah God! Ah God! Evil, malice, pain!
barely they're started and my reason drifts,
a useless cork upon the maddened ocean.
Can you not see the nightmare children there,
the revenants, the blood-spectres in the house,
butchered by their own families, holding out
succulent cuts and joints—from their own limbs,
delicate sweetbreads and offal—their own insides,
offering these to their father—and watching him eat?
There is the first cause that led to this vengeance-plot,
to the helion skulking behind her who stains his bed,
who lies in wait—ah God!—for my new master's fall
which I must stand and watch as his new slave.
And he, the admiral, king, the taker of Troy,
he Atreus' and Tantalus's heir—
sees only the hand-lick tongue, he does not see
how a fawning bitch can stretch out her ears—or a speech— 1231 and yet within be a ravening destruction.
I tell you she means to do it: she will kill.
What’s the right name to give to a monster like her?
Two-headed serpent, vampire of the coasts
coaxing the ships she’s hexed onto wrecking reefs,
the raging mother of hell exhaling war
on all her kin, the bitch whose triumph-howl—
all-daring as the male-most warrior’s—
showed her ambiguous joy at his return...
Yet does it matter whether I’m believed?
What’s coming, comes. And you who’ll witness it
will have your pain to tell how much truth I hit.
CHORUS
I got the bit about Thyestes’ feast,
the cannibal father; that bit made me shrink,
knowing—as I do—that it’s not made up.
The rest of what you said—I can’t keep up.
CASSANDRA
“The rest” was: you’ll see Agamemnon’s death.
CHORUS
Poor girl, you’re mad. Save your blaspheming breath.
CASSANDRA
You think a bandage smothering this will heal it?
CHORUS
I won't bewail a blow until the Fates deal it.
CASSANDRA
Trust in your Fates, then. They trust in their blades. 1250
CHORUS
“They”? By what man do you say this crime is made?
CASSANDRA
What man? And you claim you grasped every word from me?
CHORUS
It's only what trick he could use that I can't see.
CASSANDRA
Didn't I say it in Greek? It was not Greek enough to me!
CHORUS
Apollo's prophets speak Greek; but still delphically.
CASSANDRA
Aaah! Oh the fire, the fire that comes over me!
O Apollo, devouring wolf, O the pain you send on me!
(to the CHORUS)
She is the lioness, she is the savagery,
when the lion's away she's the bed-company
kept by the skulking jackal... does nobody see?
Her potion's made: one ingredient's death for me.
And hear this She boast, as she whets the knife for her He,
that death is the price of his triumph's including me.
So why stand to be laughed at in clothes of prophecy,
in Apollo's necklace, with staff of augury?
(Tearing and smashing them)
So these meet their end, before my end arrives for me.
To hell with you all: thus your fall pre-avenges me.
Apollo's power now can hoard ruin for some other she.
I am divested, defrocked, disrobed; and he does this to me,
as he just watched while these robes brought me mockery,
as he just watched while his truths in my prophecies
destroyed every bond between me and my family—
destroyed so they cast me out wandering in penury,
destroyed so they shut me out dying in poverty.
And now Apollo the prophet forecloses on me,
devises a fate that bristles lethality:
instead of the fatherland altar, awaiting me
is a chopping-block warm with the blood of the slaughtered He.
And yet these our deaths are not unavenged from on high.
Our killers will pay to one who I see draws nigh.
The price for his father's life is: his mother must die.
Fugitive exile under a hostile sky,
he will return; and in his returning I
see the capstone action of his clan’s frenzy to die.
For an oath has been sworn by the powers hidden
on high that the bait for his trail is to find where his father’s corpse lies.
But why should I wail as if others would pity me?
These are the eyes that saw out Troy’s tragedy;
now the death of Troy’s killers is what they see.
These are the gods’ black mercies; and they await me.
The door of this house is the threshold of hell for me.
I pray to meet with a well-timed stroke of death,
to bleed out quietly, succumb without fighting for breath;
that easy submission may close out the light from these eyes.
CHORUS
So much you have suffered; so much you have learned from it;
so much you have said. Yet, seeing the truth of it—
the truth of your coming death—how can you just go
like an ox to an altar-bloodshed that you foreknow?
CASSANDRA
My clock has run down. There is no further point in flight.
CHORUS
Do not condemned eyes open wide to cram in their last light?
CASSANDRA
My last light is now. I gain nothing by running away.
CHORUS
I admire your courage, your steadfastness undismayed.
CASSANDRA
When someone’s being butchered, that’s what the spectators say.
CHORUS
But humans are blessed who thus greet their dying day.
CASSANDRA (going forward)
O my father, my dead father and all his dead children!
(Then she stops, her hand goes to her mouth, she bends double)
CHORUS
What is the matter? What fear now turns you back?
CASSANDRA (retching)
Pah! Ach!
CHORUS
What mind-nausea’s this that makes you spit and hack?
CASSANDRA
The palace stinks. It stinks of dripping blood.
CHORUS
It’s just the scent of our offerings to the gods.
CASSANDRA
It sweeps over me like the bad breath from a tomb.
CHORUS
What does? The sacrifice incense-fume?
CASSANDRA
This is no sparrow-reflex, no flight because others fled.
After they've killed me, don't forget what I've said:
that for my woman's death, another woman dies,
that another man's blood will pay for this man mis-wived.
My claim as your guest-friend here is: do not forget.
CHORUS
How I pity the course for you that the gods have set.
CASSANDRA
One last word, for a funeral; one last song, for my own.
I pray to the sun, the last sunlight I'll ever see,
that those who will pay for killing him pay also for me:
for killing me, slave-girl, unarmed, defenceless, alone.
O human life. O life. The happiest man of all
is nothing more than a shadow on a wall;
the woman whose agony fills her life's short day—
one damp-sponge dab wipes all of her away.
And this, more still, brings the endless pity on.
Exit CASSANDRA into the palace.
