Revenge and Violence in CassandraIn "Mycenae Lookout", Seamus Heaney tells the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Cassandra after the Trojan War. “Cassandra” is the second part of “Mycenae Lookout” and tells the story of Cassandra, the unfortunate prophetess of Apollo, who is captured by Agamemnon at the end of the war and brought back to Mycenae as a slave. The destinies of Cassandra and House Atreus collide with Agamemnon's return to Mycenae, where his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus plot his murder. Both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra seek revenge: Clytemnestra for the sacrifice of her daughter and Aegisthus for the overthrow of her father and the sins of Agamemnon's father, Atreus, of whom Aegisthus was the sole survivor. While Heaney likely drew inspiration from many classical sources for his poem, the section titled "Cassandra" seems particularly drawn from Aeschylus' play Agamemnon. Heaney compresses the events of Agamemnon into just 64 lines but nevertheless retains, in part through the play's use of binaries, the classic and timeless story of revenge and a vicious cycle of violence. “Cassandra” begins with the description of Cassandra. She is described as a prisoner of war, "dirty" (4), "devastated" (6-7), and "kissed in camp" (12), rather than as smooth, serene marble, as one might expect. of classical Greek. number to appear. Heaney focuses on her appearance and describes her clothes, "her little breasts," and the state of her head in lines four through ten. However, it is not until he gets to line 11 that he comments on what may have happened to her as a prisoner in the Trojan War. “Camp-fucked,” with its sense of sexual violence, implies that in addition to physical violence and slavery, Cassandra also endured rape (12). In lines eight through thirteen, Heaney chooses words such as "punk", "char-eyed", and "gape" to succinctly illustrate Cassandra's position in House Atreus: she is an alien, traumatized by the destruction she suffered. witnessed and stunned. to clumsiness by his descent from princess of Troy to slave of Mycenae. The speaker says, “People / could feel / a / missed truth” in Cassandra (14-17). This paragraph climaxes with the word “focus,” which is used as a verb.