Sardanapalus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sardanapalus was, according to the Greek writer Ctesias of Cnidus, the last king of Babylon. Ctesias' Persica is lost, but we know of its contents by later compilations and from the work of Diodorus. Sardanapalus has often been identified with the Assyrian king Aššurbanipal, but his death in the flames of his palace recall the fate of Aššurbanipal's brother Šamaš-sum-ukkin. The Greek writer Choerilus of Iasus composed an epitaph on Sardanapalus, said to have been translated from the Chaldean (quoted in Athenaeus, viii. p. 336).
The death of Sardanapalus was the subject of an eroticist painting by the 19th century French painter Eugene Delacroix, the Death of Sardanapalus, which was itself based on the play Sardanapalus by Byron, which in turn was based on Diodorus. E. H. Coleridge, in his notes on the works of Byron, states, "It is hardly necessary to remind the modern reader that the Sardanapalus of history is an unverified if not an unverifiable personage.... The character which Ctesias depicted or invented, an effeminate debauchee, sunk in luxury and sloth, who at the last was driven to take up arms, and, after a prolonged but ineffectual resistance, avoided capture by suicide, cannot be identified."
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