O hear the talk of the commentators, there's something revolutionary in the current crop of female whistleblowers: the F.B.I.'s Coleen Rowley and Enron's Sherron Watkins have been hailed as some kind of breakthrough for women's rights to sound largely unheeded warnings.

There's nothing new, though, about Ms. Rowley, the longtime Minneapolis special agent, if you've read your Aeschylus and Virgil. She is a modern-day Cassandra.

The name swims up from the depths of memory, dimly recalled from World Lit. If people know anything of Cassandra at all, they tend to think of her as some kind of madwoman.

But Cassandra's curse was one of the most ingenious of Greek myth.

There she is, desperate to be understood, treated as if she is mad or insensible, but actually cursed. The god Apollo, in a twist, gave her the power to see the future but not the ability to communicate it to others: nobody believed her warnings.

In the "Aeneid, " she tries to tell the Trojans that the giant wooden horse outside the gates was going to be a problem. "Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour/Foretold our fate; but by the god's decree,/All heard, and none believed the prophecy."

Poor Cassandra. In Aeschylus's play "Agamemnon," she even has to predict her own murder.

We all know the type: the kind of person who spoils a party by glaring at everone and muttering imprecations. By some accounts, Cassandra was a colossal pain, harping constantly in her frustration; one big, grating "I told you so" ever in the making. The fact that she turns out to be right seems only to make her even more irritating to those around her.

Whistleblowers of either sex are a difficult breed, tending toward the quirky, anxious and irritable. Such is often the way with truth tellers. After all, if truth were easy or pleasant, it would not be in such short supply.

Which brings us back to Coleen Rowley, determinedly unfashionable and determined to be heard, grinding away at the truth as she sees it at great length and accusing the top levels of the F.B.I. — at a time when the Bush administration has been stung by criticism that it did not act on warnings it did receive before Sept. 11.

"Certain facts have been omitted, downplayed, glossed over, or mischaracterized, " she wrote to the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, in her now famous May 21 memo, hammering at her points for 13 grueling pages.

She admitted that she might be seen as difficult. "I know that those who know me would probably describe me as, by nature, overly opinionated and sometimes not as discreet as I should be."

Her prediction: "Until we come clean and deal with the root causes, " she told Mr. Mueller, "the Department of Justice will continue to experience problems fighting terrorism and fighting crime in general."

And then again last week — at the most un-Cassandra-like forum of a Senate hearing — she stood her ground through hour after hour of testimony. She presented a gentler, more accommodating demeanor, but the message is still the same, age-old yet urgent:

Listen.