"Cassandra's Tale" is a Greek legend.

Long, long ago, Priam and his wife, Hecuba, were king and queen of Troy. Their children included the hero Hector and twins, a boy named Helenus and a girl named Cassandra.

Cassandra was so beautiful that people compared her to the goddess Aphrodite. As she grew older, many young men fell in love with her. And then one of the gods saw her, and her life changed forever.

Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, was said to be the ideal of male beauty. He was also the god of poetry and music. The moment he saw Cassandra, he knew he must win her love. He offered Cassandra an extraordinary gift, that of prophecy, the ability to know the future, if in return she would love him.

Cassandra imagined the glory of such a power, and agreed to the god's bargain.

Alas, once Apollo had given her the power to see the future, she didn't love him. And she ignored the truth she ought to have known — that breaking a promise to a god would bring only heartache.

And that is what happened. Though Apollo did not take away Cassandra's ability to see the future, once she turned her back on him, he added to her prophetic powers a curse.

"Cassandra, you will always know the future," he said, "but you shall be doomed to despair. No matter that your predictions will always be true, no one will ever believe you."

After that, Cassandra always saw the future; she knew that Troy would be destroyed and that her brother Hector would be killed. For years she tried to warn her people, but no one believed her predictions. Hearing her prophecies, people laughed and called her mad. Even her parents did not listen.

Now Cassandra's mother, Hecuba, had given birth to another son, a beautiful boy she named Paris. Just before Paris was born, Hecuba dreamed that he would be Troy's downfall. To protect the land, she sent the baby away. The servants took him to Mount Ida to die alone in the wilderness.

But wild wolves protected Paris until a kind shepherd found him and raised him as his own. Meanwhile, Cassandra continued to warn her people that their land was doomed, that trouble was coming. Cassandra, in truth, predicted all that followed, but Troy was flourishing, so no one worried about the future, and no one believed Cassandra.

Apollo's curse had worked its magic.

Years passed, and when Paris was grown he was asked to judge a contest among the goddesses Aphrodite, Athena and Hera. Each goddess offered Paris a bribe in hopes of being selected. Paris chose Aphrodite.

So it was that Paris won Aphrodite's prize, the love of the most beautiful woman in the world — Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta.

"Helen is yours for the taking," Aphrodite told Paris, and so he traveled to Sparta, stole the queen from her home, and traveled with her back to Troy.

Menelaus called the Greeks to attack Troy, sparking a war that lasted nine long years.

The battles were endless, and as the war dragged on, Cassandra tried to warn her people. "Our hero Hector will die," she predicted, but the people were convinced Hector could not be beaten. True to Cassandra's predictions, Hector fell.

When Cassandra predicted the Greek hero Odysseus would abduct her brother Helenus, no one listened. Odysseus captured Helenus, who also could predict the future, and carried him away.

Unlike the Trojans, the Greeks and their leader, Odysseus, listened to Helenus' prophecies. So it was that clever Odysseus came up with a plan to overtake Troy at long last. He ordered a carpenter named Epeius to build a large wooden horse, with a hollow interior, so that Greek warriors could hide inside.

The Greeks tricked the Trojans by burning their camp outside of Troy and sailing to a nearby island. One Greek, Sinon, stayed behind. He persuaded the Trojans that the Greeks had left the horse as an offering to the goddess Athena and to take it inside the city walls.

The Trojans admired the beautiful horse, and Cassandra tried to warn the Trojans.

"You must not bring this horse inside our walls!" she cried, but again the Trojans ignored her. They dragged the horse inside.

That night, after the Trojans were asleep, Sinon set free the warriors hidden inside the horse. They killed the guards and opened the city gates, letting in the Greek soldiers who had returned from the island. They slaughtered the Trojans, including king Priam, and set the city on fire.

The soldiers carried Cassandra from the tower of Athena, dragging her to their own ships. Again Cassandra offered visions of the future.

"Your soldiers will never make it home," she told Odysseus. But as her own people had, the Greeks only laughed.

But they ought to have listened, for this was the beginning of many years of anguish at sea for the Greeks, though that is another story.