Packed within a coughdrop sized carnelian oval is all of the heartbreak of Troy’s last day. Things have officially gone bad here for Cassandra, Priam’s daughter and priestess of Apollo, gifted with second sight but doomed to have her prophecies dismissed and ignored: a Trojan princess abused by marauding Greek warriors, taken as concubine by Agamemnon, and slaughtered along with him in Mycenae.
Here, already unrobed (nearly…that whiff of drapery just makes her nudity more glaring) and with hair loose in incipient chaos, she kneels in a flurry and clutches the diminutive Palladion (Troy’s archaic cult statue of Athena upon which the safety of the city depended). Not shown is Ajax (‘the Lesser’…very lesser) who in other renderings looms behind her, usually grabbing her by the hair in a gesture universally denoting sexual violence in Greek art.
It’s a beguiling image – horrible and beautiful all at once, capturing the moment before Cassandra is subjected to a sacrilegious and tragic fate. It’s a remarkable choice of image for an intaglio, and treated in a sort of ambiguous way by the Hellenistic engraver who manages to evoke the problematic behavior of Greek victors while revelling in the forms of the princess’ nude body.
