Cassandra: The prophet of bad tidings

Cassandra, whose name became a synonym of prophet of bad tidings, was the fourth and most beautiful daughter of Priam, the king of Troy. No wonder Apollo the god of music and art, but also of divination, since he was connected with Delphi, where Greeks used to go to find out about their future, fell in love with her.Before accepting his love, however, she asked him to teach her the art of divination. Apollo did so, but Cassandra did not give in to him. So, since he could not take her knowledge and divination talent away, he cursed her, so that nobody would believe her. Cassandra foretold that her brother Paris will abduct Helen, the beautiful queen of Sparta and urged him not to do it because of the evils that would fall on Troy. But when she said that the Greeks will march against her city and that they will destroy it, nobody believed her because of Apollo's curse.

When she continued to come up with new bad prophesies, everybody thought she was mad. But the truth was that she could clearly see the future. She predicted the death of her older brother Hector by Achilles and the sacking of the city. Near the end, when the Greeks withdrew to a nearby island leaving outside the walls the "Trojan Horse" with a few men hiding inside it she warned her compatriots about it. Naturally, they did not believe her. They tore the walls down to bring the horse inside the city and lost their city and their freedom when those hiding inside the horse came out and opened the gates to the Greeks who returned from their hiding place. When the end came, she was taken as concubine by Agamemnon, the king of Mycene and leader of all Greeks. But when Agamemnon returned to Mycene, his wife Klytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus killed him. They also killed Cassandra who had warned her new master of the impending danger, but she was not taken into account.

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