Pod Insights The Ancients Cassandra: Priestess of Troy About this episode *This episode discusses sexual assault*
Cursed by Apollo to always speak the truth but never be believed; what makes Cassandra's story so timeless and compelling?
Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Emily Hauser to explore the mythological and historical connections of Cassandra, the tragic prophetess of Troy. They discuss how Cassandra's story and appalling treatment at the hands of both gods and men intertwined with themes of prophecy, tragedy, and misogyny, has fascinated generations. From Agamemnon, the Iliad and Clytemnestra, Tristan and Emily discuss Cassandra's role in ancient texts and possible real-life inspirations.
Hear related episodes:
Elektra:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3K3WyCkTIA4X8PxTgNC3Ky
Troy:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3K3WyCkTIA4X8PxTgNC3Ky
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Produced and edited by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds
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0:00 Tristan Hughes? Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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2:31 Tristan Hughes? It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. 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. 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. 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. 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.
3:15 Tristan Hughes? 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. Emily, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
3:28 Speaker 04 Thank you so much for having me, Tristan. I'm delighted to be here.
3:31 Tristan Hughes? 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. 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? Not just the men, but the women too.
3:48 Speaker 04 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, 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. And yet, at the same time, in a lot of ways, they feel utterly new each time you read them. 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, 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
4:33 Speaker 04 that we as humans experience and go through.
4:36 Tristan Hughes? 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, but do you think that fact that they're not flawless is one of the reasons that we always go back to them?
4:46 Speaker 04 Absolutely. I think it's certainly one of the reasons. 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. 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. 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. But what Homer does so brilliantly is actually he makes these characters so three dimensional and investigates, even
5:31 Speaker 04 in the cases of the women who get very little airtime, but still investigates how nuanced and complicated they are. 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. And she says, basically, if you want to have sex with Paris so much, go and do it yourself, which I think is such a good comeback. So they're really, they're really feisty, they're really layered, and I think that's what makes them really relevant now.
5:59 Tristan Hughes? And with Homer's epics, how many different women feature in Homer's epics in his version of the Trojan War and the Odyssey?
6:07 Speaker 04 Well, this is the interesting thing, 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? Because in fact, while the ancients believed that Homer was a real poet from a particular time, It now seems through decades of research that actually this was a tradition of oral poetry handed down over the centuries and then became crystallized as a fixed text. But we'll say Homer for sure as that placeholder. But yes, the Homeric epics, as 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,
6:49 Speaker 04 and then the Odyssey, which is the epic of homecoming and Odysseus and his voyage home. And in the Iliad, we don't get that many women, perhaps unsurprisingly because we're looking at the battlefield, we're looking at Achilles' wrath, we're looking at duels and the final standoff between Hector and Achilles. But we get women 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. One reason is because much of the Odyssey is taken up with Odysseus' voyage. And on his voyage, famously, he meets these sex goddesses, witches, monsters, all of whom are feminized and very interesting from-
7:30 Tristan Hughes? Are these figures like Circe and Calypso, these names? Well, no names.
7:33 Speaker 04 They are exactly, exactly. Circe, Calypso, the sirens, we've got Scylla and Charybdis, this monster and whirlpool, both of them are feminine. Everything is feminized on Odysseus' return in both the fantastical and the monstrous. And that's really interesting to do something with. And then, of course, we've got Odysseus coming home to Ithaca and Penelope, waiting for him there. 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 actually we can unpack that and see that there are problems with that assumption, right? There are women in there, therefore it must be by a woman.
8:18 Speaker 04 But I'd just kind of to say that there are very different ways that the Iliad and the Odyssey are working around women and people have been really interested in that over the years.
8:26 Tristan Hughes? 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?
8:40 Speaker 04 Absolutely. That's such a great question, Tristan. 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 public platform. Because Homer- Lies at the heart of so many discussions around gender in ways that perhaps people don't even realise. 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. 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. In Victorian education, in Britain in particular, they were at the kind of forefront of what
9:25 Speaker 04 every public school boy was being educated in. And in doing that, they have shaped the norms of gender. Now, obviously, I've said already, and we have 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. And the fact that histories and stories are to be told about men. So there's, there's this really great phrase that the Homeric epics use to describe their subject matter. And in the Greek, in the ancient Greek, it's klea andron, which means the glories of men. But klea, glory, literally means the things
10:07 Speaker 04 that are heard. So I mentioned that this is oral poetry. So this is the oral poetry that tells the glorious deeds of men that transmits them across the generations. So that mechanism that has preserved Homer, that has made Homer important, has also, at the same time, by the same measure, told us that stories and histories and epics and texts and myths need to be about men.
10:33 Tristan Hughes? 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. 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.
10:53 Speaker 04 Exactly right. And I'd go further, Matt, because I would also say that looking at the women's stories and 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. The word in Greek is mairniss, it means like divine anger. He's the son of a goddess, so he is capable of divine anger. And the reason he's angry is because his captive enslaved woman, Briseis, has been taken from him by Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks. Now, he's angry about this, not just because he's attached to her,
11:35 Speaker 04 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 honour. The more enslaved captive women you have, the more honour you have. So when he loses his enslaved woman, he loses his honour. 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 honour. But when you turn it on its head and you realise that actually his honour is predicated on the capture, the enslavement and the rape of women,
12:15 Speaker 04 it makes you see his heroism, in quotation marks there, in a very different light. There are costs to this heroism, and I think this is a cost that has not been talked about enough.
12:28 Tristan Hughes? Very much so, and it's really interesting. It's interesting, you almost like you have those pairs, Achilles, Briseis, Hector and Romaki. Cassandra maybe and King Primal, I don't know, maybe that's a bit too much of a stretch. But once again, you can almost link a couple of them together to understand further their characters.
12:43 Speaker 04 That's a really great point. I think that Homer does that deliberately and consciously. 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 Himeric epics and is exploited for really interesting reasons. 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. And it's just, it's my favourite 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, they just talk
13:25 Speaker 04 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. 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. 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. 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. But I'll also pick up what you said about Cassandra,
14:03 Speaker 04 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. But I feel like Cassandra, she stands alone in a way that other women don't. 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. She is an other and a part character.
14:37 Tristan Hughes? Well, this then feels the perfect time to now focus in on Cassandra. 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 and versus Hector, Andromache and the likes. So how big a role does Cassandra play in the Iliad? I mean, how does she fit into the story?
14:56 Speaker 04 Well, it's really interesting because Cassandra has such a big name in the later tradition of the Trojan War. 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. 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. 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, and as such, he then cursed
15:40 Speaker 04 her with the fact that anything that she said, she would tell the truth and she wouldn't be believed. 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. 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. 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. She's called the loveliest of all of Priam's daughters. We then get her at the moment where
16:25 Speaker 04 Hector's body is brought back into Troy, right? So this is after the duel between Achilles and Hector. 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. 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. 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.
17:03 Tristan Hughes? I know that in your book, you kind of very much big emphasis on exploring the real figures behind these women of Greek myth. 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?
17:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, oh, I, 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. 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. 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. And I'll just give you one of the examples that kind of shakes me to my core.
18:12 Speaker 04 So the ancients were amazingly good at kind of astronomy, date calculation. And there was a geographer from the Hellenistic period, so this is kind of later on into Greek history, called Eratosphenes, and he gave a date for the Trojan War. They all believed that this was a historical event and he dated it at 1184 BCE. Now wait for it. 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. And eventually, in the last few decades,
18:54 Speaker 04 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, and pottery experts have dated the fall of Troy that we think is the legendary Troy to 1190 to 1180 BCE. There is exactly the same decade as Heratosthenes said it was. 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? This is myth, this is legend, it's it's been kind of stirred up in the cauldron of myth and turned into fantasy. But there is a historical basis.
19:38 Speaker 04 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. 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. The later Greek traditions are writing about her in Greek, but she is Trojan in the myth. 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.
20:19 Speaker 04 And the historical women who would have been prototypes for a priestess, a princess like Cassandra, they would have been Anatolian women. So Anatolia is, you know, what we now broadly call modern Turkey. 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. And the Hittite Empire was this amazing kind of late Bronze Age civilization. And we have evidence from them, from tablets that were discovered in their capital city, Hattusa, of real princesses, real female prophets, dream oracles, female interpreters.
21:01 Speaker 04 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.
21:10 Tristan Hughes? 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 civilisation that coexisted alongside the time of the historical Troy?
21:29 Speaker 04 Exactly. It's actually a very Hittite idea to combine priesthood and princesshood. That's not something that you see in Greece. And so I think that this is something that is coming through from this other civilisation, which is fascinating, right? That all of these elements are trickling down and actually the women can be a great route back to this real history.
21:51 Tristan Hughes? 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, 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.
22:05 Speaker 04 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. 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. So you have the Iliad and the Odyssey, those were two of them. But then you've got loads other. You've got the sack of Troy, the Iliopasus, it's called in Greek. You've got the Cypria, you've got the little Iliad. So you've got all of these different epics and we know that they existed. They just weren't written down. The Iliad and the Odyssey were the only ones that got written down. So it's
22:50 Speaker 04 a tragedy for us because it would have been amazing to have these other epics. 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.
23:09 Speaker 04 But the Cypria 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. And Cassandra is mentioned in there. 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. And that is kind of really what the tragedians then latch on to. And that for us is really important evidence for this myth from this ancient epic.
23:46 Tristan Hughes? Emily, I didn't realise. I love that analogy of the box set, by the way. It really makes it easy. It's like the Iliad and the Odyssey are like Captain America and Thor. And then you've got Cypria as Wandavision or something like that. As you say, they're all part of that universe. But it's interesting. So I'd initially in my thoughts, I'd thought that the Cypria then came later. But so what you're saying, actually, it's created at a similar time to the Iliad and the Odyssey. 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, or epitomes, I guess.
24:18 Speaker 04 We have epitomes. We have little extracts, just little bits. So just sort of fragments that survive, quoted in other authors. But yeah, nothing to the extent of the Iliad and Odyssey, which are for all intents and purposes, complete epic. So yeah, the way of thinking about it is to think of these as as songs that were passed down for probably as early as the 14th century BCE. And they were a huge number of these different songs. And in fact, it wasn't like the Iliad and the Odyssey existed in the 14th century BCE and then were just being like memorised and passed on. Every bard would have their own version of it. 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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27:32 Tristan Hughes? And so which particular plays are we talking about that mention Cassandra in them? And what are they about?
27:39 Speaker 04 Essentially, we've got some main ones and then some that are on the side. 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. And then we've got Euripides's 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. 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.
28:17 Tristan Hughes? And who's Alexander meant to be?
28:18 Speaker 04 So Alexander, oh, this is a great one. Okay, this is going to take us back to the historicity of Troy. So Alexander is an alternative name in Greek epic, in Homer, for Paris, the prince of Troy, who was the one who abducted Helen. And what is so cool about this, I will just digress because this is like one of my kind of favorite points of overlap between epic and history. We have, again, this is from Hattusa, from the Hittite capital. Remember, we're back in Anatolia. This is this late Bronze Age history. And we have a tablet of a treaty that was signed between the Hittite king and the king of a city called Willusa. Now, the Iliad, you might wonder why it's called the Iliad.
29:03 Speaker 04 It's called that because the Greek name for Troy was Ilios. But in front of it, there used to be a letter that later dropped out of Greek called the digamma, which was pronounced wuh. So it used to be pronounced Willios. So Willios, we think, was Willusa. And this treaty between the Hittite king and the king of Willusa, we think, was actually with the historical king of Troy. 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.
29:39 Speaker 04 Paris of Troy, which is Alexande of Willusa.
29:42 Tristan Hughes? 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. You've highlighted those key sources we have for that, which give more to the character of Cassandra built upon from Homer. 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?
30:11 Speaker 04 It's so interesting because we've got that gap in the Iliad, right? 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. But what the tragedies do is they give us Cassandra embroiled in the Trojan War legend. 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. 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. And Cassandra is the one who says, this predicts
30:53 Speaker 04 the fall of Troy in flames. Of course, nobody believes her. We then get the next kind of step of this unfolding tragedy. You can see why the tragedians love this because it is like that ultimate feeling of inevitable tragedy coming. 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. This will be the destruction of the city. 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' stratagem to get the Greeks in through the gates, 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.
31:36 Speaker 04 And Cassandra is the only one who is shouting the truth.
31:39 Tristan Hughes? Interesting. So Cassandra is closely entwined with arguably one of the most famous images from the Trojan War to date, the Trojan Horse story. She is that lone voice, like, don't do this, don't bring it in, you're absolute nutters for doing this. But as you say, part of her fate, no one listens to her.
31:55 Speaker 04 Absolutely. 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 listening. I think this is a real theme in Cassandra. And obviously, the tragedians are really interested in that too.
32:12 Tristan Hughes? 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? 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?
32:33 Speaker 04 And that's exactly what the Greeks do. As I had mentioned, the economy of war in the Iliad is centred around the idea of booty ranging from tripods, which are basically kind of glorified casserole-ish stands, all the way to women. And those are itemised in the same way in the Epic. So there is a single word, geras, which means like a prize of honour, and that can apply to either of those, to objects, to women. And, you know, if you're thinking about this in this way of women equals honour, you can see how a higher status woman will mean more honour. So the real danger for the women of Troy,
33:13 Speaker 04 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. 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. 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.
33:43 Tristan Hughes? 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.
33:59 Speaker 04 Absolutely. So the way that Homeric thought kind of articulates value, particularly value of women, is around two axes. One is beauty and the other is skill, skill in particularly weaving. 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. This is when at the very beginning of the Iliad, he is forced to give up his enslaved woman, Chrysaeus, which by the way is why he takes Achilles' woman Chrysaeus. 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. And he essentially itemizes
34:42 Speaker 04 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.
34:51 Tristan Hughes? 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. What is this infamous fate that befalls Cassandra before she's taken away by Agamemnon?
35:09 Speaker 04 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. But she's clinging to Athena's statue in her temple. And nevertheless, she is raped by Ajax. 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. 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. And he rapes Cassandra. It
35:51 Speaker 04 is a terrible moment. It's sort of one of those climactic moments of horror in the fall of Troy. 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. 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. 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. And she then stops the Greeks from getting back to Troy. She sends a massive storm.
36:34 Speaker 04 And that is what kind of initiates and moves into the events then of the Odyssey. 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. 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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38:15 Tristan Hughes? 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. So what is that next part of Cassandra's story when she is taken away from Troy by Agamemnon? Because this is Cassandra leaving her homeland, as you say, maybe based on an Anatolian priestess slash prophetess and going to a foreign land, which is mainland Greece.
38:37 Speaker 04 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. So. As I said, there's a whole group of Trojan women who, in the myth, get carted off to Greece. Well, 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. 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. Now we are in Greece. And the tablets are bureaucratic lists of the palace holdings.
39:22 Speaker 04 One of the things that to me, as a historian of women, is so interesting is that women are often mentioned. 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. 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. And there is one enslaved woman in the tablets of Pylos, 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. She's been brought from Troy, she's been brought to a Greek palace, exactly like Cassandra.
40:06 Speaker 04 Cassandra, of course, goes to Mycenae. We also have a Bronze Age palace at Mycenae. But I just, I love, again, this is a moment where we've got interweaving between myth and history in women's stories.
40:16 Tristan Hughes? Yes, it's not evidence of, you know, 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.
40:28 Speaker 04 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. 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. But like, we're talking about constructs when we're talking about the figure of Cassandra in myth. 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.
41:05 Tristan Hughes? So let's then go back to the story of Cassandra. What is the fate that befalls Cassandra in Mycenae?
41:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, so this is the kind of most famous part of Cassandra's story, in part because it's told in Aeschylus's play, the Agamemnon, and one of the most famous tragedies of all Greek literature. So what happens is Agamemnon and his war-prize Cassandra arrive back in Mycenae. Agamemnon expects the royal treatment. He expects his wife Clytemnestra to be waiting dutifully for him at home, just like Penelope is waiting for Odysseus. 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 Iphigenia. So in the Agamemnon, we get Agamemnon arriving. She rolls out this purple carpet for him, and he treads it like
41:56 Speaker 04 a king, like an emperor. 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. 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. 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. 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.
42:35 Tristan Hughes? 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.
42:41 Speaker 04 It absolutely is. 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. So for at least the point of the end of the Agamemnon, we are in a good place for women. I will add, because you did mention that Mycenae is the kind of historical namesake of this real historical Bronze Age civilisation of the Greeks, the Mycenaeans. 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. And when Schliemann was excavating, he actually found what he thought was a king buried with
43:26 Speaker 04 a very famous kind of gold mask that he called the Mask of Agamemnon. But he also found a woman buried with two infants. And in the myth, Cassandra had two infant children with Agamemnon. 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, it's a little bit too early. But again, I love this kind of interweaving of history and myth that we're getting here.
43:52 Tristan Hughes? 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. If, as you said, they were being 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. There's almost a show of their prize.
44:13 Speaker 04 So the women we have listed at Pelos, they are certainly in the royal palace. 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. 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. So it's matching up very well with the expectations that the Homeric epic sets up for what will happen to an enslaved woman.
44:46 Tristan Hughes? 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. Is it quite interesting that all of her prophecies, there are 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?
45:19 Speaker 04 So I think once we're getting to this point, you know, we've talked about Hittite oracles, we've talked about the women who involved in divining and kind of interpreting dreams in the Hittite empire. 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. And I think Cassandra, by the time we're looking at tragedy, is very much on that level. 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 Chrysus. So yes, I think Cassandra is very much modeled on these historical women.
46:03 Speaker 04 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. And to me, that seems a little bit of the pattern of men kind of appropriating women's 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. And the ancients believed that at least some of Homer's poetry was stolen from a prophet. 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
46:47 Speaker 04 traditions said that Homer stole from them.
46:49 Tristan Hughes? 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. I think there's a famous fresco showing Cassandra dragged away by Ajax the lesser. I mean, so does Cassandra's story, it hits accord with the Romans too and it endures like many of the other key figures in the Iliad and, well, in the Trojan War story?
47:13 Speaker 04 It absolutely does, yeah. And that's, that's a good example of that fresco. 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. 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. What happens particularly as we look into kind of recent
47:54 Speaker 04 history and we look into the 20th and 21st centuries is that Cassandra becomes appropriated by women writers who were 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. And women writers, women artists, right? We've got Taylor Swift's song Cassandra that came out in Tortured Poets Department. We've got Florence and the Machine writing Cassandra. So women are really interested in how Cassandra's voice speaks out against misogyny and a kind of warning against attempts to take away women's agency, both over their voice and of course their bodies as well.
48:35 Tristan Hughes? 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.
48:43 Speaker 04 I think it's don't underestimate Cassandra and the women of Homer. It is so easy to see them all as these kinds of either a two dimensional tragic figure like Cassandra or two dimensional reason for the Trojan War like Helen. And I hope that 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. 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. 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, Bruceus,
49:27 Speaker 04 Chrysaeus, 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. 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.
49:47 Tristan Hughes? Cheraway, 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.
49:56 Speaker 04 Thank you so much for having me.
50:00 Tristan Hughes? 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. 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 favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.
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