Cassandra

"One thing left. I want to sing my own dirge. I pray to the sun, to this last minute of life: let my enemies pay with blood for what they did to me—I'm just a killed slave, easy fistful of death. But you, o humans, o human things—when a man is happy, a shadow could overturn it. When life goes wrong, a wet sponge erases the whole picture. You, you, I pity."

"What else remains, I will not taunt her with. Unhappy Odysseus, he does not know the sufferings that await him; or how these ills I and my Phrygians endure shall one day seem to him precious as gold. For beyond the ten long years spent at Troy he shall drag out other ten and then come to his country all alone . . . where dreadful Charybdis lurks in a narrow channel between the rocks; past Cyclops the savage shepherd, and Ligurian Circe who turns men to swine; shipwrecked often upon the salt sea-wave; longing to eat the lotus, and the sacred cattle of the sun, whose flesh shall utter in the days to come a human voice, bitter to Odysseus. In brief, he shall descend alive to Hades, and, though he shall escape the waters' flood, yet shall he find a thousand troubles in his country when he arrives."

"“See, men and women of Troy, come and see— look on Hector, if, while he was still alive, you would rejoice when he came back from war, for he was a great joy to all our city and its people.”At Cassandra's shout, no man or woman was left unaffected."