Semiramis
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Semiramis was a legendary Assyrian queen, also known as Semiramide, Semiramida, or Shamiram.
Many legends have accumulated around her personality. Various efforts have been made to identify her with real persons. She is sometimes identified with Shammuramat, the Babylonian wife of Shamshi-Adad V (ruled 811 BC–808 BC).
The legends narrated by Diodorus Siculus, Justin and others from Ctesias of Cnidus make a picture of her and her relationship to King Ninus.
In later traditions
- In The Divine Comedy, Dante sees Semiramis among the souls of the lustful in the Second Circle of Hell:
And as the cranes go chanting forth their lays,
Making in air a long line of themselves,
So saw I coming, uttering lamentations,
Shadows borne onward by the aforesaid stress.
Whereupon said I: "Master, who are those People, whom the black air so castigates?"
"The first of those, of whom intelligence Thou fain wouldst have," then said he unto me,
"The empress was of many languages. To sensual vices she was so abandoned,
That lustful she made licit in her law,
To remove the blame to which she had been led.
She is Semiramis. . .
She succeeded Ninus, and was his spouse;
She held the land which now the Sultan rules.
She married her son after Ninus' death and lived with him.
Semiramis appears in many plays and operas, for example Voltaire's tragedy Semiramis and operas with the title Semiramiae by Domenico Cimarosa, Marcos Portugal, Josef Mysliveček, and Gioachino Rossini. Arthur Honegger composed music for Paul Valery's eponymous 'ballet-pantomime' in 1934 that was only revived in 1992 after many years of neglect. In Eugene Ionesco's play The Chairs, the Old Woman is referred to as Semiramis.
She has also appeared in several sword and sandal films, including the 1954 film Queen of Babylon in which she was played by Rhonda Fleming, and the 1963 film I am Semiramis in which she was played by Yvonne Furneaux. An Italian progressive rock group named Semiramis released one album in 1973.
In literature Semiramis often stands as an icon of beauty.
In William Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy Eula Varner is her modern incarnation. Faulkner quite likely got the name from Inferno V where she appears in the same list as Helen of Troy as those punished for uncontrolled passion.
