DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND THE BURDENS OF NINEVEH

IN HIS LATE PLAY, Sardanapalus (1821), Byron repeatedly presents questions of legacy, as the Assyrian monarch struggles to determine what his reign will mean to future eras. The drama ends with Sardanapalus and his beloved slave, Myrrha, atop a suicidal pyre meant to destroy the palace as the rebellious satraps close in–the pyre also to be the king's final monument, the act by which posterity will remember him. Indeed, he imagines his flaming destruction will produce “a light/To lesson ages, rebel nations, and/Voluptuous princes,” even though “Time shall quench full many/A people's records, and a hero's acts;/Sweep empire after empire, like this first/Of empires, into nothing” (V.i.440–45). In the event, Sardanapalus's last words on the matter come in the form of a satire on the Egyptian pyramids, those proud Ozymandian monuments which time has turned into sites of confusion: [I]n this blazing palace,And its enormous walls of reeking ruin,We leave a nobler monument than EgyptHath piled in her brick mountains, o'er dead kings,Or kine, for none know whether those proud pilesBe for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis:So much for monuments that have forgottenTheir very record! (V.i.480–87)