Cassandra (myth)

Cassandra was a female human from Greek mythology of the planet Earth. She was the daughter of King Priam of Troy.

She had the power to see the future, but nobody believed her prophecies. 


 * According to myth, Apollo gave Cassandra both her power and the handicap of not being believed.

History
Her powers alienated her. She was thought to be insane and people stayed away from her. She foresaw the fall of Troy, but nobody believed her vision that the Trojan Horse would cause disaster. Instead, the Troyians let it through the fortified Scaean Gates and celebrated it. After Greek soldiers hidden in the hollow wooden horse opened the gates for their troops, murdered King Priam and sacked the city, Cassandra praised her gods that her father didn’t live to see his city burn, even as she was captured and enslaved. 

In 2267, Apollo told Carolyn Palamas that he knew Cassandra. 

In 2268, 12 days after having had her memory tampered by the Nomad probe, Nyota Uhura returned to bridge duty. She heard something unusual within a transmission but was unable to articulate what was wrong with it, only that it bode danger. She warned James T. Kirk not to beam down to Malor to search for survivors, but he didn’t believe her warning. Thinking she was not yet fit for duty, he relieved her and sent her back to sickbay. But she later exposed a hidden secondary message within the transmission and drew out a surviving Malurian grifter. Kirk apologized for not believing her and thought of Cassandra. Spock thought it an inapt comparison, as Uhura wasn’t making a prophecy, just doing her job. 

In 2367, Geordi LaForge created a holodeck program in which Homer performed stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey. On one occasion he told the Trojan Horse story, and Geordi asked Homer about Cassandra. Homer said the people’s denial of her inadvertently helped the Greeks, because they put aside any skepticism when they saw the Trojan Horse partly to deny Cassandra and bolster their own egos.