Prophecy, Spoken Otherwise: In the Language of Aeschylus’s Cassandra

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.