The painting above is Rape of
Cassandra featured in Virgil's Aeneid. Having spurned Apollo's advances,
Cassandra is punished to never have her prophecies believed. This leads the
Trojans to reject her warning that Troy is in imminent danger from the Greeks.
When Troy falls, Cassandra flees to the Temple of Athena where she encounters
Ajax. He is later killed by Athena and the sea god Poseidon for his crime.
Ajax is a Greek mythological
hero, the son of King Telamon and Periboea, and the half-brother of Teucer. He
plays an important role and is portrayed as a towering figure and a warrior of
great courage in Homer's Iliad and in the Epic Cycle, a series of epic poems
about the Trojan War.
Cassandra was a woman 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. 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 (or whispered in) her ears
so that she could hear the future. Cassandra became a figure of epic tradition
and of tragedy.