Monday, October 7, 2019

Cassandra's Vision



In Agamemnon Must Die, a retelling of the Oresteia by Aeschylus, I wrote a chapter about Cassandra. The most beautiful of Trojan princesses had been chosen by Agamemnon to be his war bride. In my retelling, her visions become one of the "choruses" that typically comment or editorialize on the "action" in classic Greek plays.

Perhaps this did not do Cassandra justice for she has captured the imagination of artists since then. There are wonderful Attic vases that portray the plight of the doomed princess, but those are best seen directly on proper websites. I offer instead a medieval woodcut (Penn Libraries call number: Inc B-720 All images from this book Penn Libraries catalog record from a 15th century German translation of Boccacio) and a painting from the late preRaphaelite period ([Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cassandra1.jpeg"> by Evelyn de Morgan).




On Wednesday, Oct. 9, at 6.30 p.m., I read this chapter to a meeting of Sierra Writers.

For information about buying Agamemnon Must Die, please see my website.

To those who are interested in historical fiction, I am pleased to introduce a wonderful Group on Goodreads.  It is one of many.

Our Story

This review first appeared in Goodreads ,  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2491467631 Rao Pingru wrote this charming "graphic nov...