On the eve of a birth a queen dreams a monstrous thing: she "had brought forth a firebrand," and "the fire spread over the whole city and burned it." The dream is a map of the future, and the whole tragedy of Troy is already legible in it. In the Library of Apollodorus (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE), Hecuba wakes from this vision and tells it to Priam, who "learned of the dream from Hecuba" and sent for his elder son Aesacus — for Aesacus "was an interpreter of dreams, having been taught by his mother’s father Merops." The reading is grim and exact: the coming child "was begotten to be the ruin of his country", and the diviner "advised that the babe should be exposed."

The rest of the record shows how little such foreknowledge saves anyone. The infant is carried out to Mount Ida and left, but he does not die; the record notes, with a strange tenderness, that the exposed babe was "nursed for five days by a bear". A herdsman finds him safe, raises him as his own, and names him Paris. The firebrand of the dream grows into the young man who will sail for Helen and set the city alight in earnest — the dream not averted by its own interpretation but fulfilled through it. The shape is old and cruel: the future is shown so plainly that the seeing changes nothing, and every step taken to escape the dream walks straight into it.

The firebrand had already told them everything. If Priam had never sent for the dream-reader, would the city have stood — or does the telling only make visible a fire that was always going to fall?