Cassandra

The night Troy fell, Ajax dragged her from Athena’s temple where she had fled for sanctuary and took her. The goddess who had stood beside the Greeks through every year of the war turned her face from them. The guilty and any who sailed with them paid for it. She was given to Agamemnon as a prize and brought back to Mycenae. [SPOILER: Agamemnon’s shade tells Odysseus how she died: she screamed as they slaughtered her at the dinner table where his own throat was cut. Her prophecies, he says, did not help her. He had thought them the delusions of a mad woman. The retelling treats her almost entirely through what was done to her, the violation in the temple, the killing at the table. She is the cost of someone else’s hubris twice over.]