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In her poem entitled “Daddy Black Man,” Cassandra Adams, a prisoner, tells about her dream that her black father, whose physical features she inherited including the “caramel burnt skin, big doe eyes, and cheeks,” would one day love her.

In her poem entitled “Freedom Gon' Come,” Cassandra Adams laments that her freedom, which she got when she was released from prison on parole, means nothing because of the negative stereotypes held by society against incarcerated people like her.

This chapter presents an overview of the CIA's internal culture and collective identity, and of the social mechanisms that created and maintained them between 1947 and 2001. First, it documents four persistent features of the CIA's identity and culture that later chapters use to understand intelligence failure: homogeneity of personnel, scientism, a preference for secret rather than openly available information, and a drive for consensus over other analytic values. In later chapters, these features are revisited during each phase of the intelligence cycle to help understand how they create the conditions for intelligence failure. Next, the chapter details the four key mechanisms that gave rise to these features of the CIA and explain their persistence: the self-selection of personnel, the active selection of personnel, the socialization of analysts, and the mirror-imaging not only of the Agency's targets, but also the CIA's intelligence community partners and intelligence consumers.

No reading of prophetic language, and no reading of Humboldt’s reflections on language, could proceed without attending closely to Cassandra’s speech in the Agamemnon, to which this chapter is devoted. There, it will turn out that translation is the original problem of prophecy, as her utterances cross the registers of vision and speech; Greek and Trojan; human and divine tongues—whereby the divine source that is said to burn through her proves to be itself undecidable, at once reminiscent of the Furies and of their enemy, the oracular God Apollo. While Cassandra’s speech has repeatedly been described in the terms of the sublime, beginning with the earliest Greek hypothesis appended to the play, through Wilhelm von Humboldt’s preface to his Agamemnon, what is most striking about her language is not the past and future horrors of the House of Atreus that her words appear to summon, but, as the chorus will say, her “speaking of an other-speaking city” (1200–1), in another speech that also removes these Argive elders from their proper language.

The good-feelings aura of Manhattan Murder Mystery was undermined by the lack of any real creativity in that movie; the Greek chorus framing Mighty Aphrodite and thematically connected to its search for origins makes it a more compelling comedy. Mighty Aphrodite dramatically opposes Allen’s pessimistic perception of human life with his desire to make movies that provide the condemned with consolatory laughter, the Greek chorus transforming itself from a prognosticator of dark fates to celebrants of “that voodoo that you do so well.” Heredity proves to be other than deterministic in Mighty Aphrodite,which offers as benignly comedic a validation as Allen could manage to create on film of his much-quoted self-justification during the tabloid wars, “the heart wants what it wants.”

In this chapter, I concentrate on information as a resource and product of ethical interactions, and do so by considering its semantic value. From a semantic perspective, information has played a major role in any moral theory at least since Socrates’ time. ICTs have now revolutionized the life of information, from its production and management to its consumption, thus deeply affecting our moral lives. Amid the many issues they have raised, a very serious one, discussed in this chapter, is what I have labelled as the tragedy of the Good Will. This is represented by the increasing pressure that ICTs and their deluge of information are putting on any responsible (in the technical sense seen in Chapter 7) agent who would like to act morally, when informed about actual or potential evils, as defined in Chapter 9, but who also lacks the resources to do much about them.

Using Greek myth to illuminate some of the late Justice Scalia's rhetorical moves, this chapter argues that as an author of majority opinions, Scalia was often Procrustes, leaving no case behind but forcing all prior doctrine into the shape he needed for the new law of rules he was announcing. In dissent, by contrast, Scalia could be Cassandra: describing what for him are the drastic consequences he foresees from the majority’s logic, he often paints a prophetic picture which in time comes true, perhaps in part because of, rather than in spite of, his horrified articulation of an opinion’s implications. While the progression of gay rights cases from Romer through Obergefell is the clearest and most sustained example of Scalia as Cassandra, his procrustean majority opinions include Employment Division v. Smith. For each of these cases, the chapter examines the structure and unintended consequences of Scalia's approach.

Lycophron’s Alexandra, at its core, takes up a question that runs through Greek literature from its inception: what is the relationship between poetic artifice and the truth? By exploiting the formal features of a tragic messenger speech and by having the messenger report verbatim a lengthy prophecy uttered by the traditionally unbelievable but accurate Cassandra, the poem claims over-determined authority for its reconfiguration of the history of the Trojan War. In doing so, the poem rewrites the literary tradition, particularly that of Greek epic and tragedy. Inasmuch as the poem fuses the voices of the poet, the messenger, and the prophetess whose words he repeats, its use of obscure language and mythology forms part of a broader engagement with the capacities and limitations of language.

This chapter offers a continuous, linear reading of Cassandra’s prophecy with the goal of illustrating the way in which individual passages are linked. In structure, the prophecy as a whole is divided into two major parts of unequal length: the first a sweeping account of the coming Trojan War and its aftermath (31–1282) and the second a broader treatment of the conflict between East and West of which it forms part (1283–1460). Both begin in the distant past and conclude with the ascendancy of the Romans, who thus represent the larger telos of the prophecy. Beyond this parallelism, the two halves of the prophecy not only have their own internal logic but are also linked to one another thematically and verbally.

This chapter examines Cassandra’s treatment of three Greek heroes to whom she awards limited local honors. Philoctetes is killed in a way that evokes his activities in the Trojan War, and honored in Italy in a manner far different than is imagined at the end of Sophocles’ eponymous play. Diomedes is treated as an analogue of Odysseus. By reconfiguring the transformation of companions into birds so that it occurs in his lifetime Cassandra augments his suffering, and although she treats him as a city-founder, she calls attention to the problematic relationship of his community to the native Italian population. Finally, Agamemnon’s death with Cassandra is predicted in a way that engages closely with the models of Homer and Aeschylus.

The final chapter considers the poem’s treatment of the gods, including its version of the problematic “plan of Zeus” mentioned at the outset of the Iliad and elsewhere in the epic tradition and its handling of divine justice. It argues that the poem’s representation of the operation of the cosmos is closely connected to its structure: the first part of Cassandra’s prophecy is a diptych in which the apparent success of the Greeks gives way, as a consequence of their own misdeeds, to ruin, while the disaster soon to befall the Trojans is compensated by the greater glory to come. In this the poem’s debt to tragedy is both formal and thematic: both the Trojans and the Greeks are brought to misfortune through improper behavior at a moment of success. More specifically, the Alexandra seems to evoke the ideas that run through the Cassandra-scene of Euripides’ Trojan Women.

Discussing ‘Anything Can Happen’, his response, via Horace, to 11 September 2001, Heaney said to Dennis O’Driscoll: ‘For better or worse, you can’t be liberated from consciousness’. His version of the thirty-fourth of the odes in Book 1 was, he said, ‘partly an elegy—but, to quote Wilfred Owen’s “Preface”, it was also meant “to warn”’ (O’Driscoll 2008: 424). Working from the heavy collocation of time and mood Heaney offered in these remarks, uniting elegiac retrospect and uneasy anticipation, this essay explores the coincidence of classical sources and contemporary concerns in Heaney’s earlier sequence ‘Mycenae Lookout’. It attends especially closely to Heaney’s re-imagining of Aeschylus’ Cassandra, and the burden of consciousness she both bears and represents.

Victorian refigurations of the Cassandra myth ferment throughout the long eighteenth century, when new theatrical modes put into practice prevailing aesthetic theories that gave prominence to the visual over the verbal. This chapter examines the range of prophetic Cassandras, from the Shakespearean raving prophetess to the palm-reading Gypsies of the 1860s. Such variations can only be given full expression on the stage, where a set of gestures, costumes, and sociocultural referents develop new cultural, inter-theatrical, and semiotic systems. Performing as the epic Cassandra also triggered the career of a number of actresses and dancers who found in Cassandra the perfect means to prove their performing skills to the audience. At a time when women’s access to knowledge was being disputed, the Cassandra myth provided fertile soil wherein to test and contest the role of women in society.

Credibility is unfairly deflated and inflated in relation to other power dynamics, including misogyny. Various techniques are used to discredit unwelcome truths of women and girls, including dismissing their knowledge as trivial, and discrediting them as too emotional (or hysterical) to be reliable sources. Social credibility deflation can lead to self-doubt; consider gaslighting, where one person erodes another’s confidence in their ability to accurately perceive reality, making them doubt their own credibility. The chapter concludes by discussing feminist epistemologies of resistance, highlighting theories of Patricia Hill Collins, José Medina, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and inviting the reader to take part in a pluralistic dialogue reimagining credibility. This chapter is anchored by the story of Cassandra: the god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, then requested that she have sex with him. When she declined, he cursed her credibility: she would speak prophetic truths, but nobody would believe her.

This chapter explores the role of women as investors for their families. While some wives seem to have invested their own separate property and pin money without the agreement of their spouses, other married women invested openly. Despite their coverture, wives often performed the role of family investor in stocks and securities, and husbands frequently condoned this division of labor. Women, especially mothers, sisters, and aunts also served as financial agents for their extended kin, taking family money and investing it in the stock market to improve it. The case study of Mary Barwell reveals how one single woman became the financial agent for her brother in India, managing thousands of pounds for him and becoming involved in East India Company politics in the process.

Four closely interlocked scenes conclude the play. The Palace Chorus’s praise of Poppaea’s deadly beauty is interrupted by the message of the people’s damnatio of Poppaea’s statues. Nero’s soliloquy discloses his punitive plans for the Fire of Rome; his quarrel with the prefect, a stichomythic tour de force, shows the prefect to be the champion of the people and Octavia, Nero their enemy. Nero’s explicit orders force the prefect to ship her off to her death. The embarkation scene, with its ‘inverted triumph’ imagery and its death ship awaiting the protagonist, transforms the shackled Octavia into a latter-day Cassandra prophesying that the death awaiting her is also awaiting Nero. The final section summarizes the script’s dramatic excellence in the handling of settings and transitions, threshold, and cliff-hanger scenes no less than the continuous shifting between the front narrative and the meta-theatrical—qualities which were unlikely to have gone unrecognized.