Semiramis - in Later Traditions

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 Semiramide by Domenico Cimarosa, Marcos Portugal, Josef Mysliveček, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Gioachino Rossini. Arthur Honegger composed music for Paul Valéry's eponymous 'ballet-pantomime' in 1934 that was only revived in 1992 after many years of neglect. In Eugène Ionesco's play The Chairs, the Old Woman is referred to as Semiramis.

• In 1910 Camille de Morlhon directed a film about Semiramis for Pathé, starring Yvonne Mirval.

• 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 John Myers Myers's novel Silverlock (chaps.17-18), Semiramis appears as a lustful, commanding queen, who stops her procession to try to seduce young Lucius (who has been transformed into a donkey).

• 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.

• One level of Resident Evil Revelations is set aboard an ocean liner named the Queen Semiramis.

• In 2008 italian company Menoventi create Semiramis, a play about the Assyrian queen.

• The Assyrian people indigenous to Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and northwest Iran still retain Semiramis or Shammuramat as a given name for female children to this day.