Cassandra’s Madness in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

CECILIA J. PERCZYK

Greek, Roman, and Bizantine Studies

Duke University

Lugar: Durham; Año: 2023 vol. 63 p. 245 - 266

2159-3159

This paper looks at madness in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon as embodied in the figure of Cassandra. Although, in Ancient Greece, the ability to prophesy seems to have been viewed positively as one of the blessings of madness (Pl. Phdr. 244a), but in Aeschylus’s tragedy Cassandra’s prophetic capacity takes on a negative valency. During the hallucinatory crisis, Cassandra expresses the suffering caused by the visions, the object of which is her and Agamemnon’s demise, among other circumstances. She also has to endure the fact that the Chorus does not understand her. Prophetic madness is, then, presented as a disease, a representation that implies a decoupling from the religious sphere, because it is associated with pain and death, both central elements in the configuration of diseases by Hippocratic medicine during the fifth century B.C.E. Although a god, Apollo, is placed at the origin of the disease, at the same time there are similarities with diseases listed in the Corpus Hippocraticum, together with a large number of technical medical terms, so references to Hippocratic treatises, in particular De morbo sacro, will be included in the article.