fellow 'mighty Hercules' behind his back.'
'No!' said Davus.
'Oh, yes, Husband. I've heard them: admiring women; envious men.' She smiled and reached up to squeeze one of his bulging biceps. Davus blushed and assumed a particularly stupid expression.
I cleared my throat. 'The original Cassandra was a Trojan princess, as I recall.'
'Indeed she was,' said Hieronymus, ready to assert his authority on the subject. As a boy he had received a fine Greek education at one of the renowned academies for which Massilia was famous. He could recite long passages from the Iliad and knew many of the Greek tragedies by heart.
'Cassandra was the fairest daughter of King Priam and Queen He cuba,' he said, 'and she was the sister of Paris, the prince who started all the trouble by stealing Helen and carrying her back to Troy. Cassandra could foretell the future. That was her terrible curse.'
'But why call it a curse?' asked Diana. 'I should think that knowing the future would be rather useful. I could tell whether or not I'd be able to find anything decent to buy at the markets, instead of trekking down there only to come back empty-handed.'
'Ah, but you see, there's the rub,' said Hieronymus. 'Knowing the future doesn't mean that you can alter it. Suppose in the morning you had a vision of yourself down at the markets later that afternoon finding not a thing to buy. You'd still be destined to make that trip down to the market, only now you'd know ahead of time that you were doomed to accomplish nothing.'
'And that would be doubly frustrating,' acknowledged Diana.
Hieronymus nodded. 'Foreknowledge is a curse. Imagine knowing the circumstances of your own death, as Cassandra did, and being able to do nothing about it.'
Davus frowned. 'Imagine knowing ahead of time your greatest joys as well. Wouldn't that spoil them? Everyone loves a good surprise, even small surprises. When someone tells you a story, you don't want to guess the ending beforehand. You want to be surprised.' Every now and then Davus said something to make me seriously doubt that he was as simple as he looked. 'But how did the Trojan Cassandra come to have this gift, or curse?' he said. 'Was she born with it?'
'No, but she had it from a very early age,' said Hieronymus. 'When she was only a small child, her parents left her alone in the sanctuary of Apollo at a place called Thymbra, near Troy. When Priam and He cuba returned, they found Cassandra entwined by two serpents flicking their tongues in the child's ears. Afterward, Cassandra was able to understand the divine sounds of nature, especially the voices of birds, which told her of the future. But the child kept this gift to herself, not trusting it and uncertain of how to use it. When she grew older, she returned on her own to Thymbra and spent a night alone in the sanctuary, hoping for guidance from Apollo.
'The god appeared to her in human form. Cassandra was beautiful. Apollo wanted her. He made a deal with her: in return for his instruction, Cassandra would allow him to make love to her, and she would bear him a child. Cassandra agreed. Apollo was as good as his word. That night he initiated her into the arts of prophecy. But afterward, when he moved to touch her, she resisted. When he embraced her, she struggled and fought against him. Who knows why? Perhaps he overawed her. Perhaps she feared the agony of giving birth to a demigod. Apollo was insulted. He grew furious. Cassandra was afraid he would strip her of the gift of prophecy, but he did something far worse: he ordained that no one should ever believe her prophecies.
'Poor Cassandra! As one calamity after another befell Troy, she saw them all coming and tried to warn her loved ones, but no one would listen to her. King Priam thought she was mad and locked her away. Perhaps in the end she truly was mad, tormented to distraction by the curse Apollo had put upon her.
'Of course, everyone knows about the end of Troy-by the stratagem of hiding in a giant horse the Greeks gained access to the city and then torched it, killing the men and taking the women into slavery. During the sack of the city, Cassandra fled to the sanctuary of Athena and embraced the statue of the goddess as a suppliant. Little good that did her; Athena had no sympathy for any Trojan. Ajax broke into the temple and dragged Cassandra from the statue, tearing her fingers from the cold marble. He raped her there in the sanctuary.
'But it was Agamemnon, asserting his privilege as leader of the Greeks, who claimed Cassandra as his booty. Mad or not, she was the most beautiful of Priam's daughters, and Agamemnon wanted her. He had the audacity to bring her home with him and flaunt her in the face of his wife, Clytaemnestra, who was outraged. While Agamemnon and Cassandra slept, Clytaemnestra stabbed them both.
'Cassandra foresaw her own death, of course, but she was powerless to do anything about it. Or perhaps, by that point in her miserable life, she welcomed her end and did nothing to stop Clytaemnestra. Ultimately, it was the god she blamed for her woes. In his play about Agamemnon, Aeschylus gives us Cassandra's lament: 'Apollo, Apollo, Lord of the ways, my ruin.' '
Poor Cassandra, I thought, first punished for preserving her chastity from a god, then made the concubine of the man who killed her family. Was the Cassandra I had seen that day yet another woman victimized by men's war and gods' cruelty? What misfortune had driven her mad? Or was she not mad at all, but cursed, like the original Cassandra, and truly able to perceive the future?
If I were to ask her, what could she tell me about my fate and the fates of those I loved? And if I were to hear her answers, would I regret having asked?
IV
The day after Cassandra's funeral, I spent the morning alone in the garden. The day was hot and the sky cloudless. I sat on a folding chair, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and watching my shadow recede until the sun was directly overhead.
Bethesda felt unwell and was spending the morning in bed. Every now and again I heard the sound of her gentle snoring from the unshuttered bedroom window that opened onto the garden. Diana and Davus had gone out to do the day's marketing. They had given up on finding radishes and were in search of fennel, which Bethesda was now certain would cure her. Hieronymus had gone down to the Tiber to fish, taking Mopsus and Androcles with him. No one had asked if I wanted to go along with them; they all sensed that I wished to be left alone.
At length I heard Diana's voice. She and Davus were back. I saw her hurry along the portico to the back of the house and step into the bedroom to look in on her mother. A little later she came to the garden and sat beside me.
'Mother's asleep. We should keep our voices low. I couldn't find any fennel, but can you believe it-there were radishes everywhere! So many they were practically giving them away. By Juno, it's hot out here! Papa, you shouldn't be sitting in the sunlight.'
'Why not? I'm wearing a hat.'
'Has it kept that brain of yours from overheating?'
'What do you mean by that?'
She paused and assumed an expression she had inherited from her mother, a look at once pitying and presumptuous. She might as well have said aloud: I know exactly how your sluggish, tortuous thought processes play out, dear Papa. I'm well ahead of you, but I'm resolved to be patient. I shall wait for you to catch up to your own inevitable decision.
Instead, she said, 'You've been thinking about her all morning, haven't you?'
I sighed and readjusted my bottom on the folding chair, which was suddenly uncomfortable. 'Your mother isn't well. Of course she's in my thoughts-'
'Don't be coy, Papa.' My daughter's voice assumed a stern edge. 'You know what I meant. You've been thinking about her. About that woman, Cassandra.'
I took a deep breath. I stared at a sunflower across the way. 'Perhaps.'
'You're brooding.'
'Yes.'
'You must stop it. We need you, Papa. It's getting harder every day just to get by, and Mother's ill, and Davus does all he can to help, but still, sometimes I don't know what we're going to do…' Her voice became grave, but there was no self-pity in it. Always hardheaded, always practical and forward thinking and resourceful, never despairing, that was Diana. She was truly our child, the inheritor of what was best in both Bethesda and
