Meaning
An accurate prediction of disaster that nobody believes - delivered by someone whose very correctness makes them easy to dismiss. Calling someone a Cassandra concedes they are right and laments that it will not matter. The capital letter survives from the Trojan princess; the phrase nearly always implies the speaker will be ignored, so it doubles as a complaint and a prophecy. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba of Troy, was cursed by Apollo - in Aeschylus's Agamemnon she admits she consented to the god and broke her word - to utter true prophecies that no one would believe. Her father locked her away as a madwoman; she alone foresaw that Paris's abduction of Helen would burn Troy, warned against the wooden horse until she took up an axe herself, and prophesied Agamemnon's murder and her own to a Mycenae crowd that could not comprehend her. The figurative noun is old and well-documented: a Belgravia magazine contributor of 1876-77 complained that unwanted prophecies made people sure to mistake me for a Cassandra, and the modern run runs from Paul Krugman's budget Cassandras in the New York Times (1997) to Naomi Klein in 2023. Laurie Schapira's 1988 book The Cassandra Complex fixed the psychological label.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a Cassandra
- a Cassandra prophecy
- the Cassandra complex
Usage Examples
- The engineer's Cassandra warning about the valve went unheeded until the third leak.
- Every regulator employs one Cassandra whose filings read, in retrospect, like the accident report.
- Her Cassandra reputation was sealed: right about the merger, right about the launch, believed about neither.