Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Under Apollo’s curse, Cassandra’s true sight wins no belief in Troy. She warns against Paris’s voyage and Helen’s bringing; she foresees the city’s fire, her mother’s slavery, her own allotment to Agamemnon. In the final days she alone—or she with Laocoon in overlapping tradition—denounces the Wooden Horse as an armed ambush, not an offering. The Trojans, already persuaded by Sinon’s lie and worn by war, reject her. Some tellings have her seize axe or brand to smash the Horse and be stopped by the crowd as mad. When the city falls she takes refuge at Athena’s image; Ajax son of Oileus drags her away—the sacrilege that dooms the Locrian return—while her earlier cries about the Horse are remembered as proof that Troy heard and refused the truth. The pattern is the curse’s working in situ: every accurate word discounted as frenzy until the flames make belief useless. Catalogue these Trojan ignored prophecies apart from the curse’s origin (04/076) and apart from her later Mycenaean visions (04/100).