The Exotic Eastern Queen

[I thought I could write up this post fairly quickly, but as I went along I realized that it had been a few years since I had read the scholarship on this character, and I didn’t have all the sources conveniently on hand, and it was harder to track down the information than I expected. Anyway, that’s why this is appearing so late.]

      There’s a certain character floating around the edges of classical myth, a near eastern queen who represents something magnificent and exotic when described by Greeks and Romans: Semiramis. She was a historical person, a queen of Babylon, although when related in Greek and Roman accounts she’s transformed into a mythic figure, the Good Queen or the Bad Queen or the Enchanted Queen or the Raglan Queen--it depends on who you’re reading, and what sort of narrative point he’s out to make. Her story is difficult to summarize because she just skirts the edge of the classical consciousness, and the stories told about her vary wildly.

      I’ll start with the historical side of Semiramis, before looking at how she’s been distorted and exaggerated by people who only heard about her fourth-hand. There is a known historical Assyrian queen by the name of Shammuramat, who held power as her son’s regent for a few years after the death of her husband. She lived in a culture that had a well-established writing system (thousands of years old, even then!) and a government that employed plenty of scribes, so we have records of her reign produced during her lifetime. She was not the founder of Babylon, as you might hear in Ovid, but you can find a few major works attributed to her. We still have a memorial stone that was set up for her, and Herodotus credits her with building a series of dykes (which he says are “remarkable to see”--bordering on faint praise since he only devotes a few sentences to her). It’s not a lot of material--she did only reign for a few years, until her son reached maturity--but it’s noteworthy to see a queen holding power over Assyria.

      So today you can study this queen as a historical person, based on the Assyrian evidence. Ancient Greeks and Romans, however, generally didn’t have access to this evidence, and when they mention her, her biography tends to take on mythic elements. You can find her in that highly accessible work of classical myth, which was after all where I first heard of Semiramis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which there is a fleeting reference to her. Someone is narrating a story of the exotic east, and to establish the location, notes that the story takes place “where Semiramis built her lofty city,” i.e., in Babylon. This should call up an image of one of the Seven Wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Here the series of dykes and the memorial stone aren’t important; what matters is the vague, fantastic flavor she gives the story.

      In fact there’s another, garbled reference to Semiramis right nearby in the Metamorphoses, when a character considers telling the story of Semiramis’ mother, Dercetis (also known as Derceto). The character decides against telling the story, but does in the process mention that Dercetis was changed into a fish, while Semiramis was changed into a dove. This seems to be a reference to a miraculous story of Semiramis’ birth (described by Diodorus Siculus), in which Semiramis was (in typical heroic fashion, like Romulus and Remus who were nursed by a wolf) abandoned in the wild to die but rescued by wild animals, in this case doves, who fed her tidbits of food until she was discovered by a shepherd. If Ovid’s audience has heard Diodorus’ story, they might question whether Semiramis was saved from exposure by doves, or was actually turned into a dove herself (one of these may be less reversible than the other). Her mother, Derceto or possibly Dercetis, according to Diodorus threw herself into a river and drowned after giving birth, but Ovid says she turned into a fish. There seems to be a fictionalizing process going on here: we start with a historical person with a mundane biography, but as the oral tradition gets passed along the person’s biography acquires legendary elements (exposed as a baby, raised by doves, melodramatic suicide). Later Ovid comes along writing a collection of imaginative mythic stories, and the legendary elements become the miraculous transformations that are the primary interest in the Metamorphoses. The real queen is being turned into a fantasy queen. 

      Speaking of contamination from legendary tropes, please note that as Semiramis’ character morphs to acquire characteristics of a typical fictional independent queen, she becomes more and more evil. Diodorus’ account largely shows her as the villainous queen who gains power through sex and then terrorizes men by means of sex. According to Diodorus she slept her way to the top (in the style typical of Bathsheba, Jezebel, Potiphar’s Wife, Cleopatra, Theodora…)--she was originally married to a nobleman, until she caught the eye of king Ninus, at which point she and Ninus forged their own alliance and her old husband was pressured to commit suicide. After her marriage to Ninus, she either killed him herself or arranged for him to be killed, at which point she gained power as regent. There are Armenian legends (several centuries later) that show her as a lust-crazed monster: as queen of Assyria, she hears a rumor that the king of Armenia is breathtakingly gorgeous, so she wages war on their country for the sake of subjugating the king (and, by that means, sleeping with him). As it happened, he was killed in the course of the battle, but she covered up this problem by disguising another beautiful man as the king and claiming that the king had been raised from the dead.

      Still, not all the re-casting of her life in legendary terms makes her look so bad. There is a Greek adventure story known as the Ninus Romance, which was lost during the middle ages, and partially reconstructed based on papyrus fragments, to the extent that we can see that it stars Semiramis and her (legendary) husband Ninus as sentimental teenagers falling in love for the first time. It’s very treacly. One of the two fragments we have is a speech in which Ninus tries to persuade Semiramis’ mother (his aunt) to let him marry his cousin Semiramis. This speech fortuitously preserves a lot of “as you know” style exposition (as if it were taken from the very beginning of the work?). Addressing Semiramis’ mother (here called Derceia), he runs over a lot of facts she probably ought to know: that he is seventeen, that he is the king, that he just returned from a victorious military campaign, that he driven to distraction by love of Semiramis. He also makes Semiramis’ age clear (she’s thirteen) and rails against a tradition that prevents them from marrying until she reaches the age of fifteen. (Even though Semiramis is established in this passage to also be in love with him, his argument that she should marry as soon as possible just because it’s already physically possible for her to become pregnant is pretty creepy.) In my opinion he comes off as a typically impatient teenager who thinks that two years are an interminable wait and worries too much that something terrible might happen to the object of his desire before he gets access to her. Semiramis, when she goes to make the same case to Ninus’ mother, is so overcome with the shame of expressing romantic desires that she is totally unable to speak, and her aunt praises her for being so modest--hardly the same lust-crazed monster queen described by Diodorus.

      Semiramis, in the more gracious legendary accounts, was a standout figure in many ways. She broke gender barriers not only by holding the office of regent while her son was underage, but in her independent career as well--one of the accomplishments attributed to her is the invention of non-gendered clothing. Although these stories of power are quickly exaggerated into erotic tyranny by men hostile to women in power, she still gets a positive spin in the works of Ovid, cited as a city-builder and local hero.

      What seems strange to me is that I’m not aware of many appearances of Semiramis in modern popular culture. As far as eroticized ancient queens go, Cleopatra remains perennially popular (and even Olympias was portrayed by Angelina Jolie on the silver screen nine years ago), whereas Semiramis seems to be forgotten--although I hear “Semiramis” can be used as a derisive nickname for any queen with a reputation for an uncontrollable libido. If you like, you can scan the “In Later Traditions” section of Semiramis’ Wikipedia page for some obscure references, although I came away pretty unimpressed. Just like I’ve always said about the Aeneid, we need a good film interpretation of Semiramis’ life.