The Horse

The warning about the horse is the clearest demonstration of how the curse actually works, because she is not vague and she is not alone. Virgil has Laocoön hurl a spear into its flank and hear the hollow boom, and gives Cassandra a single devastating line of narration: that the god had ordained her mouth never to be believed by the Trojans. Two independent warnings, one of them physical evidence anyone could hear, and the city still opens its own wall to take the thing inside. Virgil gives the city its reasons — Sinon's lie, and the serpents that kill Laocoön — but the reasons are the point. The curse does not make her incoherent. It makes the listeners immune, which is a far stranger thing to watch.