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A furious prophecy: Cassandra’s rites (Lycophron, Alexandra 1126–73) and Aeschylus’ Eumenides

Alexander Sens

Résumés

La dette considérable de Lycophron envers Eschyle est illustrée par son rapport avec Agamemnon et les Choéphores dans la prédiction de Cassandre à propos de sa propre mort et de celle d’Agamemnon ainsi que dans le bref résumé qui suit de la vengeance d’Oreste sur Clytemnestre. Cet article soutient que l’étape suivante de la prophétie de Cassandre, dans laquelle elle discute de deux rites institués à la suite de sa mort, poursuit le remaniement de l’Orestie en exploitant des thèmes importants dans les Euménides, notamment la supplication, la violence rétributive, la promulgation de lois démocratiques. Les récits couplés des cultes dauniens et locriens sont des exemples de l’utilisation par le poète de la substitution mythologique, par laquelle il évite la référence explicite à un événement là où il pourrait se produire naturellement dans la chronologie de la prophétie de Cassandre et le remplace par un récit différent, thématiquement connecté. Le rapport de Lycophron avec les Euménides est déclenché par une référence aux Érinyes dans l’histoire des jeunes filles dauniennes et est plus largement exploité dans l’histoire des jeunes filles locriennes, dans laquelle Lycophron met en œuvre un mélange de vengeance personnelle et de système juridique démocratique. La fusion de la vengeance personnelle et de la loi résonne de manière significative contre le nouveau système juridique civique décrit dans les Euménides, où les nouveaux tribunaux pour les homicides à Athènes sont censés remplacer le processus de rétribution qui se déroule plus tôt dans la trilogie.

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  • 1 R. Hunter, M. Fantuzzi, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge, CUP, 200 (...)
  • 2 A. R. Looijenga, “Unrolling the Alexandra: The Allusive Messenger-Speech of Lycophr (...)
  • 3 See C. Cusset, “Le bestiaire de Lycophron: entre chien et loup,” Anthropozoologica 33-34, 2 (...)
  • 4 See A. Kolde, “Parodie et ironie chez Lycophron : un mode de dialogue avec la tradi (...)

1No extant Hellenistic poem engages more robustly with the plays of Aeschylus than does the Alexandra ascribed to Lycophron. This affinity is reflected generally in the Alexandra’s metrical practice and diction,1 as well as by allusions in the messenger’s prologue both to the Prometheus Bound (a play ascribed to Aeschylus already in the Hellenistic period) and to the Agamemnon.2 More fundamentally, the long, riddling prophecy by Cassandra that occupies the bulk of the poem owes an obvious conceptual debt to the exchange between Cassandra and the chorus in the second half of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, where, speaking in obscure and metaphorical language, she envisions Agamemnon’s and her own deaths and offers an explanation of the historical and ethical background that has led inexorably to them.3 Lycophron specifically reworks this passage, along with Homeric treatments of the death of Agamemnon (Od. 11.409–34, 24.96–97), in Cassandra’s prediction of her and Agamemnon’s deaths and their aftermath in Alexandra 1099–1119. Lycophron’s specific debt to Homer and Aeschylus in the account of the killings has been well discussed,4 and my focus here will not be on Lycophron’s reworking of Aeschylean and Homeric models in that part of the prophecy, but rather on the next section of Cassandra’s prophecy, which, I would like to suggest, continues the engagement with Aeschylus and gains resonance from being read alongside the end of the Oresteia.

  • 5 For the structure of Cassandra’s prophecy, see C. McNelis, A. Sens, op. cit., 67–100. For a (...)

2Cassandra’s account of her own death and that of Agamemnon represents a transitional moment in the Alexandra. It comes at the end of a long sequence in which the inspired princess envisions the death and suffering the Greeks will experience in their attempts to return home and it introduces an account of the cult honors, posthumous glory, and other compensations that that she, her family, and coming Trojan generations will receive in the future.5 Cassandra’s death thus forms a closing frame to the opening of the catalogue of misfortunate nostoi, where Cassandra, after predicting Ajax’s assault (348–64), announces that many Greeks will suffer as a result of the crime that has been committed against her, and this ring composition is reinforced by the pairing of references to Nauplius’ destruction of returning Greeks at 373–86 and again at 1093–98, in the lines immediately preceding the account of Agamemnon and Cassandra’s deaths.

3Lycophron’s relatively extended version of those deaths is immediately followed by a brief account of Orestes’ vengeance that picks up the representation of Clytemnestra as a female viper in both the Agamemnon (1233) and in the Choephoroi (294, 994), and that figures in Cassandra’s account of her murder in Lycophron (1114).

σκύμνος δὲ πατρὸς κῆρα μαστεύων φόνου
εἰς σπλάγχν’ ἐχίδνης αὐτόχειρ βάψει ξίφος,
κακὸν μίασμ’ ἔμφυλον ἀλθαίνων κακῷ.

“The whelp of the father, seeking vengeance for the murder, will plunge his sword into the guts of the female viper, healing with evil the evil, internecine defilement.”

  • 6 Cf. S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, Oxford, OUP, 2015, 396.

4The proverbial framing6 of 1122 captures the moral ambiguity of her death as it is treated in the Choephori and Eumenides: Orestes’ attempt to heal the pollution wrought by Clytemnestra’s evil action (κακὸν μίασμ’ ἔμφυλον ἀλθαίνων) is itself evil (κακῷ). Cassandra does not, however, treat the resolution of that problem as it plays out in the balance of the Oresteia, and indeed in focusing on the miasma generated by Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband (cf. Ch. 1028), the language of the passage downplays the pollution falling on Orestes as a result of his actions, a major theme of the end of the Choephoroi and the opening of the Eumenides. At a basic level, her silence about Orestes’ maddened flight, his purification at Delphi, and his acquittal in Athens, as well as about the Erinyes’ transformation from archaic goddesses of vengeance to patrons of Athens, is in keeping with the broader trends of the prophecy, in which Cassandra often avoids reporting tales with happy or even satisfactory resolutions for Greeks. Charles McNelis and I observed in our study of the Alexandra that “the omission of Orestes’ fate and its consequences tendentiously leaves the dispute open without resolving its inherent tensions,” and we noted that Cassandra herself oblique calls attention to Cassandra’s silence about the role of the Erinyes in story of the house of Atreus by mentioning them in a different context several lines later, in reference to the clothing of women worn by women supplicating Cassandra in her temple in Daunia in order to escape marriage (C. McNelis, A. Sens, The Alexandra of Lycophron: A Literary Study, Oxford, OUP, 2016, 177–78). There may, however, be more to say, and in what follows, I would like to suggest that this glancing reference to the Erinyes forms part of a broader engagement with themes—supplication, retributive violence, the enactment of democratic law—that figure prominently in the Eumenides, and that they do so in a sequence that broadly follows the events as they unfold in Aeschylus’ play.

  • 7 See especially M. Mari, “Cassandra e le altre: miti di donne nell’Alessandra di Licofrone,” (...)

5In the Alexandra, the abbreviated story of Orestes’ revenge is followed by a brief account of the cult to be established for Agamemnon in Sparta and then a far lengthier prophecy containing a pair of narratives describing Cassandra’s afterlife. Both focus on the fate of unmarried girls. Though they appear to be based in actual cult practice,7 they are first and foremost literary creations designed to suit Lycophron’s own literary ends. In the first of them, Cassandra describes how in Daunia the residents of a city which is cast as a successor to Troy (cf. 1129–30 οἵ τε Δάρδανον πόλιν / ναίουσι with S. Hornblower [ed.], Lykophron: Alexandra, Oxford, OUP, 2015, 400) will create a temple in her honor. In it, girls seeking to avoid marriage to defective husbands will seek her protection by embracing her cult statue (1126–40):

οὐ μὴν ἐμὸν νώνυμνον ἀνθρώποις σέβας
ἔσται, μαρανθὲν αὖθι ληθαίῳ σκότῳ.
ναὸν δέ μοι τεύξουσι Δαυνίων ἄκροι
Σάλπης παρ’ ὄχθαις, οἵ τε Δάρδανον πόλιν
ναίουσι, λίμνης ἀγχιτέρμονες ποτῶν.
κοῦραι δὲ παρθένειον ἐκφυγεῖν ζυγὸν
ὅταν θέλωσι, νυμφίους ἀρνούμεναι,
τοὺς Ἑκτορείοις ἠγλαϊσμένους κόμαις,
μορφῆς ἔχοντας σίφλον ἢ μῶμαρ γένους,
ἐμὸν περιπτύξουσιν ὠλέναις βρέτας,
ἄλκαρ μέγιστον κτώμεναι νυμφευμάτων,
Ἐρινύων ἐσθῆτα καὶ ῥέθους βαφὰς
πεπαμέναι θρόνοισι φαρμακτηρίοις.
κείναις ἐγὼ δηναιὸν ἄφθιτος θεὰ
ῥαβδηφόροις γυναιξὶν αὐδηθήσομαι.

“In no way will my divine honor be left without recognition among men, withered the obscurity of forgetfulness. Rather, the best of the Daunians, those who reside in the city of Dardanus and share boundaries with the marsh water, will construct a temple for me on the banks of the Salpe. And when maidens wish to escape the yoke of marriage, rejecting bridegroom resplendent in haircuts in the style of Hector and having some deficiency in their form or fault in the race, they will embrace my cult-statue with their arms and thus acquire the strongest defense against marriage, putting on the clothing of the Erinyes and dying their faces with herbal drugs. And for a long while I will be called an immortal goddess by those staff-bearing women.”

  • 8 G. Biffis, art. cit., para. 7.

6Cassandra’s description of the suppliants bears a striking resemblance to a passage of Timaeus (FgrH 566 F 55) in which the historian notes that Greeks, on encountering Daunian women wearing dark clothes, carrying staffs, and with their faces smeared with red color (among other attributes), think of the tragic Poinai, goddesses who were closely associated with the Erinyes. That Lycophron was drawing on Timaeus or a common source seems inevitable.8

  • 9 Cf. C. McNelis, A. Sens, op. cit., 121–24.

7But it also seems unlikely to be a matter of chance that the one of two references to the Erinyes in Alexandra appears in the passage that immediately follows a compressed summary of the events of the Choephori. Elsewhere in the Alexandra, Lycophron sometimes uses the expectations generated by literary models as a foil for introducing unexpected elements in the place where others would be appropriate, as when, for instance, Cassandra’s account of Achilles’ funeral (271–75), though closely modeled on the description of the event by the ghost of Agamemnon in Odyssey 24.58–92, pointedly leads not to Achilles’ glorification, as in Agamemnon’s account (Od. 24.93–94), but rather to his vituperation by Cassandra, who treats him as a corpse-seller and an effeminate coward (276–80).9 Specific mention of the Erinyes in the story of Cassandra’s Daunian cult may be understood against this background: it appears in the same relative position in literary chronology where they would appear in a fuller account of the house of Atreus as it is represented in the Oresteia, and so it functions as a marker of a similar mythic substitution that entails a broader engagement with the dramatic action of the Eumenides.

  • 10 See M. Mani, art. cit.; M. Menichetti, art. cit.; S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra(...)
  • 11 Cf. LIMC s.v. Cassandra.
  • 12 S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, op. cit., 400; M. Menichetti, art. cit. For supp (...)

8In the structure of the Alexandra, the story of the Daunian ritual marks the beginning of a new phase of the narrative after the lengthy account of the sufferings to be experienced by the Greeks as a consequence of Ajax’s crime. Thematically, the passage forms a bookend to the account of the rape in 348–64,10 where the Trojan princess refers to her attempt to preserve her virginity and escape Ajax by seeking refuge in Athena’s temple, an event well known from literature and art,11 where she is traditionally represented as clutching the Palladium, an ancient statue of Athena, though that detail is not explicitly given by Lycophron, who instead focuses on the goddess’ disgust. In Cassandra’s account, her own cult statue (βρέτας) will, after her death, serve as protection for those seeking to avoid a marriage in a place cast as a success Troy (cf. 1129–30 οἵ τε Δάρδανον πόλιν / ναίουσι).12 The reference to the Erinyes in this context may form part of the ring composition, for the goddesses are also named directly in the poem is the account of Ajax’s death at 387, in the passage which opens the catalogue of reprisals visited on Greeks.

  • 13 Aeschylus (Cho. 1049–50, Eum. 375) explicitly treats the Erinyes’ clothing as dark; Cassand (...)
  • 14 Cf. Castor’s instructions to Orestes at Eur., Electra 1254–55 ἐλθὼν δ᾽ ᾽Ἀθήνας Παλλάδος (...)

9At the same time, the supplication of Cassandra by a group of women wearing the clothing of the Erinyes may be read against the opening of the Eumenides, which itself opens with a scene of supplication:13 Orestes seeks refuge in Apollo’s temple at Delphi, surrounded by the sleeping Erinyes who have been pursuing him since the murder of his mother; ultimately he is instructed to go to Athens and supplicate Athena by grabbing her cult statue (Eum. 80) ἵζου παλαιὸν ἄγκαθεν λαβὼν βρέτας, where ἄγκαθεν serves the same function as does ὠλέναις in Lycophron 1135 περιπτύξουσιν ὠλέναις βρέτας.14 In Cassandra’s narrative, however, the Erinyes play a role diametrically opposed to that which they play in Aeschylus: in Aeschylus, they pursue a murderer, who supplicates the gods, while in Lycophron women dressed in their manner appeal to the deified, murdered Cassandra to defend them.

10Within Lycophron’s poem, then, the Daunian ritual is multiply determined: it is at once an arcane reference to a local rite, the closing frame of an extended ring composition, and perhaps, a clever mythical nod to the (missing) events of the Eumenides in precisely the relative position where the elements drawn from that play might be expected.

  • 15 On the relationship between Lycophron’ treatment of the Locrian Maidens and the rite which (...)
  • 16 G. Biffis, art. cit., footnote 6.
  • 17 S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, op. cit., 415.

11Something similar may be said about the next phase of Cassandra’s account of her posthumous fate. In extended narrative, Cassandra prophesizes that she will be the source of pain to another group of women deprived of their daughters as part of a ritual in which unmarried girls are said to be sent to Ilion to be hunted and killed, unless they succeed finding sanctuary in Athena’s temple.15 Although Cassandra is here not the direct recipient of cult rites, the narrative treats her tendentiously as an agent of pain (1141–42 πένθος . . . τεύξω) for the Locrian women whose maiden daughters will be sent to Ilium, and thus implicitly for the girls themselves.16 The marriage theme appears again, in recast form: the girls will be involuntarily deprived of husbands in requital for Ajax’s violation, an act which treated as a perverted, impious marriage (1151 ἐμῶν . . . δυσσεβῶν γάμων), the laws for which Ajax has violated (1143). The passage is thus a complement to the story of the Daunian maidens, with Cassandra playing the role of tormentor rather than protector of unmarried girls, and like it also looks back to the account of Ajax’s crime and its consequences for Greek children (cf. 360 γάμων, 365–66 ἑνὸς δὲ λώβης ἀντὶ μυρίων τέκνων / ῾Ελλὰς στενάξει πᾶσα τοὺς κενοὺς τάφους).17 At the same time, however, just as the Daunan maidens’ supplication of Athena may be understood as a reversal of Orestes’ supplication of Apollo and Athena, several features of the passage may be read productively against other themes that run through the Eumenides, and in particular against the way that play treats the relationship of civic law and intergenerational retributive violence.

  • 18 On Aeschylus’ innovation in this regard, cf. A. Sommerstein (ed.), Aeschylus. Eumenides, Ca (...)

12The second half of the Eumenides offers a mythical explanation for two features of contemporary mid-fifth-century Athenian life. First, it explains the creation of a formal, civic process for adjudicating murder cases to replace the practice of retributive violence that plays out over multiple generations, as exemplified by Clytemnestra’s and Orestes’ actions in the first two plays. At Athens, Athena creates for the first time a new, formal legal process for adjudicating cases of murder (484–85, 682 πρώτας δίκας κρίνοντες αἵματος χυτοῦ) and establishes a homicide on court Areopagus to serve as a check on illegal and impious behavior in the future (690–92). The play thus tendentiously treats the establishment of Athenian institutions and the transition from the previous system of justice based on vengeance to one founded on the laws of the democratic polis (cf. 680 κλύοιτ᾽ ἂν ἤδη θεσμόν) as an outcome of the story of the house of Atreus.18

13In addition, the play explains the genesis of the Erinyes’ new role in Athens. Having decided in Orestes favor at the conclusion of his trial, Athena persuades the Erinyes to cease from their anger and become patron goddesses of the city, with the result that the events of the heroic past culminate in the welfare of a single, favored city. Among those to benefit are unmarried women: in the final part of the play, they respond to Athena’s request for blessings with a prayers for fertile crops and animals (938–48), for the end of civil strife (976–87), and, notably, for young men not to die prematurely by violence (956–57 ἀνδροκμῆτας δ᾽ἀωρους ἀπεννέπω τύχας) and for young women to survive and be able to marry (958–60 νεανίδων δ᾽ ἐπηράτων ἀνδροτυχεῖς βιότους / δότε).

  • 19 Underlying the practice is the Hellenistic civic practice of granting immunity and certain (...)

14In the Alexandra, Cassandra emphasizes that as punishment for Ajax’s violation of her, Locrian girls will be punished over multiple generations for a thousand years (1153 τὸν χιλίωρον . . . χρόνον), noting explicitly that new waves of girls will arrive to replace those who will die (1160–61 ἄλλαι . . . ταῖς θανουμέναις ἴσαι / . . . ἵξονται). In this sense, the suffering of the girls is an example of a principle of archaic justice and a theme that runs prominently through the first plays of the Oresteia: that justice works itself out over multiple generations and so may fall on the descendants of the original perpetrator. The brutality of the populace, moreover, will be formally sanctioned by law: Lycophron has constructed the passage such that it ends with the striking claim that the people of Ilion have formally passed and recorded a law that formally grants a legal right to revenge killing (1172–73 δῆμος δ’ ἀνατεὶ τὸν κτανόντ’ ἐπαινέσει, / τεθμῷ χαράξας, τοὐπιλώβητον γένος ‘the people will praise rather than punish the one who has killed the reviled race, and it will inscribe this fact in law’).19 The end of the passage thus reverses the legal implications of Cassandra’s treatment of Ajax as a ‘violator of law pertaining to sex’ (1143 ἀθεσμόλεκτρον). Like the history of the House of Atreus, the story of the Locrian maidens concludes with a legal remedy, but with a very different outcome: in the Alexandra, as in the Oresteia, a violation of norms leads to the formal establishment of democratic institutions, but in Ilium, unlike Athens, the end result of the democratic process is to institutionalize brutal vengeance without legal consequences. Unlike the Eumenides, in which the creation of a new legal system supplants the previous practice of intergenerational violence and leads to the establishment goddesses whose benefices include the protection of unmarried girls and their sociosexual interests, the story of the Locrian maidens concludes with the ahistorical assertion that the populace of Ilion has used the law to authorize and sanction retributive violence against young girls of an individual Greek polis over many years. Put another way, whereas Aeschylus represent the establishment of a civic process as a way of constraining the relatives of victims of crime from taking justice into their own hands, Lycophron imagines a melding of personal vengeance and the democratic legal system. Whereas in the Oresteia, Cassandra’s fate forms part of a historical trajectory that leads to the benefit of a single Greek polis, here her misfortunes lead to pain of a different Greek community.

  • 20 M. Menichetti (art. cit.) notes that, together, the two stories pick up the two sexual adva (...)
  • 21 A. Henrichs, “Anonymity and Polarity: Unknown Gods and Nameless Altars at the Areopagos,” I (...)

15Finally, it may be noted that contrasting roles played by Cassandra in the Daunian and Locrian rites match the duality of the Erinyes in the Eumenides, where they appear first as archaic goddesses of vengeance who defend the rights of the mother and then as patrons of a city state and as protectors of its youth. The Daunian and Locrian rituals described in Cassandra’s process also represents her in two parallel roles, albeit in a different order—first as a protector of girls who do not wish to marry and second as source of multigenerational vengeance in which the punishment is representation of marriage. In this sense, the represents the totality Cassandra’s cult sphere—prevention of marriage—in a bipolar way,20 just as the Eumenides represents what Albert Henrichs has described as the Erinyes’ “opposite, yet mutually reinforcing, aspects—one sinister, the other benign.”21

16As with the complementary story of the Daunian maidens, the treatment of the fate of the Locrian maidens serves multiple functions within the complex and highly allusive architecture of the Alexandra. Although, unlike in that passage, no obvious verbal link signals its debt to the Oresteia, its complementarity to the Daunian episode encourages a reading of it, too, against the background of the Aeschylean play that is markedly missing from Cassandra’s narration. Not only does it represent as inscribed in the civic laws of Ilium a version of the intergenerational violence such runs through the Oresteia and is allegedly brought to an end in the Athens of the Eumenides, but it also represents the events of the mythical past as an ongoing pain for the young women of Locris rather than as culminating in a boon for the community, as occurs in the Eumenides. In these respects, it, like the account of the Daunian rite, stands in implicit contrast with the end of the Aeschylean trilogy in a way that suits the broader, pointedly anti-Hellenic tendencies of the Alexandra.

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Bibliographie

Biffis, G., “Can iconography help to interpret Lycophron’s description of the ritual performed by Daunian maidens (Alexandra 1126–1140),” Aitia 4, 2014 (https://journals.openedition.org/aitia/1025).

Cusset, C., “Le bestiaire de Lycophron: entre chien et loup,” Anthropozoologica 33-34, 2001, 61–72.

Cusset, C., “Tragic Elements in Lycophron’s Alexandra,” Hermathena 173/174, 2002–2003, 137–53.

Cusset, C., and Prioux, É. (eds.), Lycophron : éclats d’obscurité, Actes du colloque international de Lyon et Saint-Étienne, 18-20 janvier 2007, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2009.

Durbec, Y., Essais sur l’Alexandra de Lycophron, Amsterdam, A.M. Hakkert, 2011.

Henrichs, A., “Anonymity and Polarity: Unknown Gods and Nameless Altars at the Areopagos,” ICS 19, 1994, 27–58.

Hornblower, S. (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, Oxford, OUP, 2015.

Hornblower, S., Lykophron’s Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World, Oxford, OUP, 2018.

Hunter R., Fantuzzi M., Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge, CUP, 2004.

Kolde, A., “Parodie et ironie chez Lycophron : un mode de dialogue avec la tradition ?,” in C. Cusset, É. Prioux (eds.), Lycophron : éclats d’obscurité, Actes du colloque international de Lyon et Saint-Étienne, 18-20 janvier 2007, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2009, 39–57.

Looijenga A. R., “Unrolling the Alexandra: The Allusive Messenger-Speech of Lycophron’s Prologue and Epilogue,” in C. Cusset, É. Prioux (eds.), Lycophron : éclats d’obscurité, Actes du colloque international de Lyon et Saint-Étienne, 18-20 janvier 2007, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2009, 59–80.

Mari, M., “Cassandra e le altre: miti di donne nell’Alessandra di Licofrone,” in C. Cusset, É. Prioux (eds.), Lycophron : éclats d’obscurité, Actes du colloque international de Lyon et Saint-Étienne, 18-20 janvier 2007, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2009, 395–430.

McNelis, C., and Sens, A., The Alexandra of Lycophron: A Literary Study, Oxford, OUP, 2016.

Menichetti, M., “Cassandra e le altre fanciulle. Miti e riti,” Aitia 4, 2014 (https://doi.org/10.4000/aitia.1016).

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Sommerstein A. (ed.), Aeschylus. Eumenides, Cambridge, CUP, 1989.

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Notes

1 R. Hunter, M. Fantuzzi, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge, CUP, 2004, p. 437–43.

2 A. R. Looijenga, “Unrolling the Alexandra: The Allusive Messenger-Speech of Lycophron’s Prologue and Epilogue,” in C. Cusset, É. Prioux (eds.), Lycophron : éclats d’obscurité, Actes du colloque international de Lyon et Saint-Étienne, 18-20 janvier 2007, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2009, 59–80; C. McNelis, A. Sens, The Alexandra of Lycophron: A Literary Study, Oxford, OUP, 2016.

3 See C. Cusset, “Le bestiaire de Lycophron: entre chien et loup,” Anthropozoologica 33-34, 2001, 61–72; C. Cusset, “Tragic Elements in Lycophron’s Alexandra,” Hermathena 173/174, 2002–2003, 142; E. Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature, Cambridge, CUP, 2019, 108–45.

4 See A. Kolde, “Parodie et ironie chez Lycophron : un mode de dialogue avec la tradition ?,” in C. Cusset, É. Prioux (eds.), Lycophron : éclats d’obscurité, Actes du colloque international de Lyon et Saint-Étienne, 18-20 janvier 2007, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2009, 48–54; Y. Durbec, Essais sur l’Alexandra de Lycophron, Amsterdam, A.M. Hakkert, 2011, 17–25 and 71–80; C. McNelis, A. Sens, op. cit. On tragic, and more specifically Aeschylean elements in Lycophron’s language, cf. C. Cusset, “Tragic Elements in Lycophron’s Alexandra,” art. cit.

5 For the structure of Cassandra’s prophecy, see C. McNelis, A. Sens, op. cit., 67–100. For a different view, Y. Durbec, op. cit., 55–62.

6 Cf. S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, Oxford, OUP, 2015, 396.

7 See especially M. Mari, “Cassandra e le altre: miti di donne nell’Alessandra di Licofrone,” in C. Cusset, É. Prioux (eds.), Lycophron : éclats d’obscurité, Actes du colloque international de Lyon et Saint-Étienne, 18-20 janvier 2007, Saint-Étienne, PUSE, 2009, 395–430; G. Biffis, “Can iconography help to interpret Lycophron’s description of the ritual performed by Daunian maidens (Alexandra 1126–1140),” Aitia 4, 2014; M. Menichetti, “Cassandra e le altre fanciulle. Miti e riti,” Aitia 4, 2014.

8 G. Biffis, art. cit., para. 7.

9 Cf. C. McNelis, A. Sens, op. cit., 121–24.

10 See M. Mani, art. cit.; M. Menichetti, art. cit.; S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, op. cit.

11 Cf. LIMC s.v. Cassandra.

12 S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, op. cit., 400; M. Menichetti, art. cit. For supplication in marriage rites, cf. G. Biffis, art. cit.

13 Aeschylus (Cho. 1049–50, Eum. 375) explicitly treats the Erinyes’ clothing as dark; Cassandra leaves that fact implicit.

14 Cf. Castor’s instructions to Orestes at Eur., Electra 1254–55 ἐλθὼν δ᾽ ᾽Ἀθήνας Παλλάδος σεμνὸν βρέτας / πρόσπτυξον (~ Lyc. 1135 περιπτύξουσι).

15 On the relationship between Lycophron’ treatment of the Locrian Maidens and the rite which underlies it, cf. recently S. Hornblower, Lykophron’s Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World, Oxford, OUP, 2018, 154–66; S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, op. cit., 404–12; M. Mani, art. cit.

16 G. Biffis, art. cit., footnote 6.

17 S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, op. cit., 415.

18 On Aeschylus’ innovation in this regard, cf. A. Sommerstein (ed.), Aeschylus. Eumenides, Cambridge, CUP, 1989, 2–3.

19 Underlying the practice is the Hellenistic civic practice of granting immunity and certain honors to some categories of murderers; cf. S. Hornblower (ed.), Lykophron: Alexandra, op. cit., 419.

20 M. Menichetti (art. cit.) notes that, together, the two stories pick up the two sexual advances that define her: Apollo’s advances and Ajax’s assault.

21 A. Henrichs, “Anonymity and Polarity: Unknown Gods and Nameless Altars at the Areopagos,” ICS 19, 1994, 28.

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Alexander Sens, « A furious prophecy: Cassandra’s rites (Lycophron, Alexandra 1126–73) and Aeschylus’ Eumenides »Aitia [En ligne], 13.2 | 2023, mis en ligne le 14 octobre 2024, consulté le 15 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/aitia/12303 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12t4e

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