Читать книгу Reception of Mesopotamia on Film - Maria de Fatima Rosa - Страница 16

There are two legendary figures drawn from the political-cultural universe of ancient Mesopotamia and conceived by the Greco-Roman authors that stand out: Sardanapalus and Semiramis. Both represent composite characters, i.e., it is impossible to associate them with a specific king or queen from ancient Mesopotamia; instead, they probably derive from a group of several sovereigns, men and women who stood out in the social and political life of Babylon and/or Assyria. Thus, in Sardanapalus it is possible to find elements of the life and history of Assurbanipal,⁶⁷ Shamash-shumu-ukin, and Sîn-shar-ishkun,⁶⁸ and in Semiramis are present components of queen consorts like Samu-ramat, Naq’ia, and Atalya.⁶⁹ In both cases, we are dealing with historical figures who played a fundamental role in the destinies of Mesopotamia and who altered the course of history to some extent. The distance of the Greco-Roman historians and philosophers to these past events has certainly led to the interplay and mixing of various plots in the composition of their personas.

When it comes to the narrative about the life and works of Sardanapalus and Semiramis, two names emerge: 1) Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian who writes the most detailed account about these monarchs in his magnus opus Bibliotheca Historica, composed during the first century BC (supported by the lost text of Ctesias the Cnidian, dated to the fourth century BC); and 2) Justin, a famous theologian of the second century AD, who tells us of interesting aspects of near eastern antiquity in his work entitled Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus. All the narratives and tragedies composed during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras were based on these two major operas. We know, for example, that Byron had in his private library a copy of the Bibliotheca Historica.⁷⁰ The work was widely disseminated throughout Europe. On the other hand, the librettist Carlo Maderni supported his work Sardanapalo in the writings of Justin.⁷¹ In turn, the cinema would be inspired by these.

The distorted nature of these figures is underlined in Diodorus Siculus’s narrative. The subversion of roles normally reserved, in a society such as the Hellenistic or the Greek, for women and men, is the touchstone of his and other works related to these characters. Thus, Semiramis’s courage,⁷² bellicosity, and good government skills, contrasted with the levity, idleness, and calmness of the reign of Sardanapalus, the effeminate king par excellence. For the classical authors and those who followed them closely, nowhere was the subversion of gender identity more expressed than in the eastern Assyrian elite.

With regard to Sardanapalus, his supposed preference for the home should be stressed. The contrast between male courage and female domesticity is highlighted by Juvenal: “the woes and hard labours of Hercules are better than the loves and the banquets and the down cushions of Sardanapalus.”⁷³ In contrasting Hercules, the virile and courageous hero of classical mythology, to Sardanapalus, the one who preferred love to battle and bed cushions to work, the Roman poet attributes to the latter a whole derogatory logic that clearly went against the values ​​fostered in classical Greco-Roman society. To the man (andros) belonged the courage (andreia) and not the rooms of the house. Such is also the logic behind rebel Xandros’s interrogation in Maciste, l’eroe più grande del mondo (1963) (Goliath and the Sins of Babylon in an English translation) when longing for action: “Are we man or a pack of women? I am tired of being idle!”

Aristotle has even suggested that “somebody killed Sardanapallus when he saw him combing his hair with his women.”⁷⁴ The most conventional version of the king’s death disagrees, however, with the philosopher. As the story goes, it resulted from a fire caused by himself in the rooms of the royal palace. Ignoring the ongoing conspiracy of Arbaces, general of the Medes,⁷⁵ and Belesys, the Chaldean priest,⁷⁶ as well as the impending defeat of Assyria, Sardanapalus decides to lock himself up in a room where he gathers his concubines and eunuchs, setting up a pyre with gold and silver. The fire, the destruction of Nineveh, and the fall of Assyria, are thus, in the Greco-Roman view, associated with the hedonistic life carried out by the sovereign, constituting a trace of his vicious and androgynous nature.⁷⁷

The same distorted nature is repeated in relation to Queen Semiramis. We have seen before that she represented courage, normally (but not solely) conceived by the Greeks as a trace of masculinity. According to Ctesias,⁷⁸ she was the daughter of the Syrian goddess Derceto, who had abandoned her in a deserted place, where she was cared for by doves and discovered by pastor Simmas. The future queen’s association with the pastoralist world was not forgotten by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia in La Cortigiana di Babilonia (1954). After growing up, Semiramis participates in an Assyrian military campaign. To this aim she disguises herself in men’s clothes.⁷⁹ Later, when he hears of her bravery and achievements in the battle, King Ninus⁸⁰ suddenly falls in love her. They marry and bear a son, named Ninyas. Shortly after, the king dies, opening the door to Semiramis’s rule over Assyria.

The recently enthroned queen then builds the city of Babylon and adorns it with magnificent walls, towers, and a bridge. As a good ruler and military woman, Semiramis decides to expand her reign, subduing Ethiopia. After this achievement, her attention turns to the Indus Valley. Although she undertakes a military expedition against this distant land, her expectations of victory are dashed. Sometime later, Ninyas conspires against his mother and her reign ends. According to some authors, as Diodorus, Semiramis was transformed into a dove after living sixty-two years, forty-two of them ruling over the first great empire in the East.

Despite the virtues that Diodorus ascribes to her, her thirst for power and extreme ambition are already evident in his account. In later narratives, these behaviors are expressly depreciated. For instance, Diodorus claims that “the most handsome of the soldiers she consorted with them and then made away with all who had lain with her.”⁸¹ This conduct is extrapolated in Justin, who, in addition to the soldiers, states that the queen conceived “a criminal passion for her son.”⁸² Ambition, masculinity, and sexuality become interconnected characteristics that made up the deviant figure and not conformed to the norm that was Semiramis. Like so many other oriental female figures who have become timeless, like Cleopatra⁸³ or Zenobia,⁸⁴ she often used her beauty and her sexuality in favor of power and the imposition of her authority.⁸⁵ In the cinematographic perspective this idea also prevailed, and heroines such as Cleopatra or Semiramis often appear immersed in the same undifferentiated Orientalizing universe.⁸⁶

In sum, if Semiramis personified the exotic and lustful oriental woman, able to lie down even with her own son, Sardanapalus “practised sexual indulgence of both kinds without restraint,”⁸⁷ an aspect that emphasizes his androgyny⁸⁸ and evokes the orientalist idea of ​​the effeminate and indulgent satrap. Semiramis opposes herself to the ideal woman in ancient Greece, the woman who took care of the house, just as Penelope would have done so faithfully and diligently awaiting the return of Ulysses.⁸⁹ For his part, Sardanapalus contrasts his androgyny with the audacity and militarism presented by his female counterpart. His name would go down in history as a synonym for idleness and debauchery. A simple epithet underscored the deviant conduct of the sovereigns of ancient Assyria and all those who followed their example: “Leading the life of a Sardanapalus,” thus become a metaphor for those who dedicated themselves to physical pleasure.⁹⁰ Similarly, Semiramis became a name ascribed, throughout history, to several queens to evoke either their positive behaviors and achievements,⁹¹ or their derogatory ways.⁹²

At the time of the rediscovery of Mesopotamia, the orientalist and ethnocentric vision propagated since the Greco-Roman authors was so ingrained in the Western mentality that even the testimonies found in situ were unable to overthrow the ancient dogmas based on the dichotomy we/the other. Thus, British explorer Henry Layard even claimed that the adornments and clothing of the Mesopotamian monarchs he saw in the bas-reliefs and statues exhumed in Assyria were “more befitting a woman than a man.”⁹³ The stereotype prevailed.

And considering this legacy, we are not surprised that cinema has perpetuated it. Of the cinematographic narratives based on these two legendary figures, the ones that collect more ingredients from the Greek and Roman accounts were the Italian production Sardanapalo, re dell’Assiria (1910) by Giuseppe de Liguoro, and the French short film Sémiramis (1911) by Camille de Morlhon. The first depicts the conspiracy of Sardanapalus’s former allies, the king’s way of living, feasting with the women, and his death in the palace fire.⁹⁴ The second presents the victorious battles of the queen, celebrated in the hanging gardens, her fight against Arabia, and her death and transformation into a dove.⁹⁵ As we can easily infer from the screenplay of these silent films from the early days of cinema, the vision of Assyria and Babylon propagated by Diodorus Siculus resonated in posterity.