93 93 Layard 1854–58, p. 58.
94 94 Dumont 2013, p. 113.
95 95 Idem, p. 114.
2 Mesopotamia in Literature and on Stage
2.1 The Resurrection of Classical Legendary Figures
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Mesopotamian characters conceived by the classical authors did not disappear from Western imagination. Many were the authors who focused on them and incorporated them as prominent figures in their narratives. Semiramis, Ninus, Nimrod, and Sardanapalus were gradually reborn. They received new features and deepened some behavioral traits that had been granted to them in the Classical era. Aspects such as incest, lust, and gender confusion1 were explored by authors like Dante,2 Boccaccio,3 or Petrarch.4 In most cases, the legendary figures associated with ancient Assyria and ancient Babylon were presented in a very pejorative way, exacerbating the traits forged in antiquity: Nimrod was the giant; Ninus the despot capable of killing husbands to rape their wives;5 and Sardanapalus the “transvestite.”6 Hence, when we reach the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we continue to recognize the aspects of an orientalism that, through cultural distance, places in this other the genesis of the most odd vices, the most amazing sins, and varied evils.
During the Renaissance and later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European society was increasingly committed to understanding the role of women.7 It was in this context that De mulieribus claris (1374) from Boccaccio emerged. In that work, the author tells the story of several women who, despite being considered weaker in body and spirit than men, had managed to gather the necessary strength to carry out considerable achievements. Among these, the author places Semiramis. The queen of Assyria, responsible for the construction of Babylon, appears right after biblical Eve, confirming her importance as a stereotype of female wit. However, in presenting her as the antithesis of Eve, Boccaccio throws her achievements, her government, and her multiple constructions into the background, preferring to focus on her sexual conduct. According to him, it was Semiramis who invented the chastity belt for the use of palace women in response to the jealousy she felt for his son, who was “among her lovers – and this is something most beastly than human.”8
One of the several impressions of the work, widely disseminated in Europe, presents an illustration that elucidates us about the three great aspects for which this woman became known: 1) sexuality; 2) troubled maternal relationship and incest; and 3) royal and military power (Figure 2.1). These three characteristics would accompany the persona of Semiramis and would be transplanted to literature and opera during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at a time when, through the Baroque, the legendary queen became a true tragic heroine. At least two of these traits reached the cinema, often mixed. Incest was set aside.
Figure 2.1 Woodcut illustration of Semiramis from an incunable German translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus Claris (1474 edition).Source: Rare Book Cataloging at Penn: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woodcut_illustration_of_Semiramis_and_her_son_Ninias_-_Penn_Provenance_Project.jpg. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
With the Enlightenment, it became almost a habit to resort to the past to access the present.9 Semiramis and Sardanapalus maintained a constant presence in the tragedies performed on the stages of the great European capitals. The light of the East10 had not been extinguished, remaining forever indebted to the myths created by the Classics about their neighbors and predecessors of the Near East.
2.2 Tragic Mesopotamian Heroes and Their Dramatization
2.2.1 Semiramis from Manfredi to Rossini
The dramatization of Semiramis’s life is probably due to the Italian Baroque movement, by the hand of poet Muzio Manfredi, in 1593.11 In fact, during this year the author produced two distinct tragedies, the first entitled Tragedia, the second Boscareccia.12 At about the same time, or perhaps even earlier, around 1580,13 the Spaniard Cristóbal de Virués, then resident in Italy and inspired by the principles of humanism, produced La gran Semiramis. In these early works, is evident the strong Greek heritage with regard to mythology and theatricality. Especially in what concerns Virués’s14 work, it is notorious in its dependence on the text of Diodoro Siculus, which was his great source of inspiration. The ingredients are the same, although the Spanish poet introduces new elements in order to stimulate the emotions of his readers. He was one of the first to focus on the theme of transvestism, exchanging the identity of Semiramis with that of his son Ninyas, whom the queen had placed with the vestal virgins in order to seize his identity. This aspect would later be recovered by Metastasio.
The important question to ask is: why does Semiramis become a tragic heroine and an unavoidable theme in tragic literature between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries? Why does her legend survive and the mythical queen is integrated as a main character in some Italian films produced during the 1910s, 1950s, and 1960s? On the one hand, we can affirm that in Semiramis all the ingredients liable to the construction of a dramatized and musicalized play are concentrated: love, passion, ambition, death, suicide, matricide, war, governance, and power. Semiramis brings together dubious and dual aspects capable of eliciting the most diverse reactions on the part of the reader/audience: gender alternation – a woman performing a man’s role often disguised in masculine garments; maternal behavior – the conflicting relationship with her son; sexual conduct – her profane loves and incest; governance – the construction and ostentation of her city; tyranny – the excessive ambition for power; crime – the assassination of her lover in order to ascend to the throne. On the other hand, we must not forget Semiramis’s association with the city of Babylon, which the Greco-Roman authors claimed to have been founded and embellished by her. Therefore, appropriating the image of Semiramis was nothing more than a simple way to criticize or praise the exploits, excesses, and tyrannies of the absolute and monarchical powers that prevailed in Europe as well as to extrapolate about social injustices. The queen of ancient Assyria had everything to offer.
Already present in Manfredi and Virués were two central themes in the queen’s story: the sexual appetite she craved for her son and the murder of her husband/lover. These aspects would be recovered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Desfontaines,15 Calderón,16 Crébillon, and Voltaire.17 When we reach the eighteenth century, there are three tragedies that stand out and that would influence later cinematographic compositions. The first is from Crébillon, Voltaire’s celebrated arch-enemy poet, who wrote the tragedy Sémiramis, first taken to the French stage in 1717. The French author focuses his plot on the murder of the husband carried out by the queen, who craved an incestuous love for her son.18 He adds important aspects to the story, such as the character of Belus,19 the one who intended to restore justice, and who would appear in other literary pieces. Years later, in 1748, Voltaire wrote his own Semiramis, intending to dethrone his rival. The Enlightenment philosopher created a woman stronger and more powerful than the one presented by Crébillon and, at the same time, made her more human by dividing the blame for the murder of the late Ninus with Assur, her lover, a character he introduced.20