Cassandra and Ajax: How Art Reflects Evil

Why did the ancient feel free to represent violence and hate in their visual art, while we don't?

A few days ago, I stumbled into this image found by chance on the Web. This “Kylix” vase from mid 6th century BC represents the rape of Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess, by the Achaean warrior Ajax. It is an especially crude and violent scene; today, it would not be allowed to be shown in public. But what did the ancient have in mind when they showed this image and many similar others? (Image courtesy of Bibi Saint-Pol at Wikipedia.)

Try to ask any reputable image-creating AI to show the rape of Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess. Even if you specify that it is part of an ancient and respected piece of literature as the Iliad, at the very minimum, the AI will inform you that your request doesn’t follow the “content policy” or “Community policy.” At worst, it will threaten to shut you off forever from the site. Even rogue AIs, such as Dezgo.com, will not produce the image of a rape.

Conversely, there was no problem for our ancestors of classical times to represent this event. The scene of Cassandra’s rape is common on vases, mosaics, and wall paintings. It is always shown with the same elements: Cassandra clinging to the statue of the Goddess Minerva, to whom she had asked for refuge. She is often half-naked, her breasts shown, rarely fully naked as in the image at the beginning of this post. Note, by the way, that naked breasts didn’t have a sensual meaning for the ancient; they were seen as an indication of distress. Then you see Ajax (“The Lesser Ajax”) pulling her away, sometimes by her hair, sometimes by an arm. Other figures may appear in the scene, maybe a perplexed Priam, Cassandra’s father. Here are a few examples.

What did this story mean for our ancestors? Why weren’t they ashamed to show it in its brutal details? Evidently, the ancients thought differently from us. It is a concept that Julian Jaynes exploited in full in his attempt to understand the mind of the ancients in his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (1976), perhaps the most interesting book in history (maybe after the Iliad). In short, Jaynes proposed that the ancient were genetically different from us in the way their brain worked. Their brains lacked the empathy capabilities we have. That is, they were normally unable to put themselves “in the shoes” (or, more correctly, in the brain) of other people.

Here lies the fascination with the story of Cassandra’s rape. In a certain sense, it is a story of crime and punishment: Ajax is eventually punished for his violent act. But even though the Achaeans wanted to stone him to death, it was not because they cared about what Cassandra felt. Rather, they were afraid that the angered Goddess would take her revenge on them. Later on, the Achaean leader Agamemnon claimed Cassandra for himself as a concubine, and nobody bothered asking Cassandra for her opinion.

The views of the ancient were indeed very different from ours. When the Trojans were defeated, Cassandra was no longer a princess but a slave, and slaves had no rights in the ancient world. That included their role as sex toys, and their masters could do whatever they wanted with them. To use a modern concept, in sexual terms, slaves were nothing more than rubber dolls.

As another example from the Iliad, when King Priam goes to see Achilles to ask him for his dead son's body, Achilles is dismayed and cries. It is a poignant scene, one of the most fascinating ones of the whole “Iliad.” But Achilles doesn’t cry because he understands the old man's pain. He cries because in Hector’s death, he can imagine his own death at some moment in the future. Nowhere in the Iliad does Achilles show what we would call today “empathy.” Even when Agamemnon takes from him his slave girl, the Trojan Briseis, Achilles is enraged not so much because he “loved” Briseis (as we would interpret the story today) but for the offense made to his honor of warrior.

We see here one of those long-term changes that sweep human history. Today, if your AI refuses to show the scene of Cassandra’s rape even though your intention was to stigmatize Ajax, the rapist, it is not because anyone is worried about the revenge of the Goddess Minerva but because we consider rape a crime in itself. It took time. Despite the advent of Christianity, slavery remained legal and common in the West up until a couple of centuries ago, and still today it exists, although not officially. But, over some 30 centuries after the end of the Trojan War, the views on slaves and women radically changed.

So, is Jaynes right when he says that our brain has physically evolved over time to develop better empathy tools? It could be. It is a fascinating idea that finds some support in ancient art, not just Greek, but also from the ancient Middle East. On the other hand, the change in views may be simply the result of a different social situation. The brains of human males may well be still the same as their Bronze Age ancestors. They are kept tame by laws and customs but they are ready to turn themselves into killers and rapists if the occasion arises.

It is said that the distance between civilization and barbarism is just three hot meals. It may not be a much longer distance from the mayhem of wars of extermination, as shown by many examples from the past century and the current ones. We may have found ways to shut off our perception by declaring that the victims are not really human. They are untermenschen, or “human animals,” and they can be exterminated at will. Then, the refusal of AI to show the rape of Cassandra is only in part the result of moral outrage, but also of our unwillingness to look at what’s being done to the poor and the dispossessed of the world. To say nothing of the rape being perpetrated on Earth itself.

Perhaps humankind needs a new step forward in empathy of the kind that Julian Jaynes noted over the centuries. But we don’t have centuries to arrive at that.

For more discussions about Empathy, see Chuck Pezeshky’s blog

See also a previous post of mine on slavery in the ancient world.