Julius Sabinus - Cultural References

Cultural References

The modernised French version of Epponina's name, Éponine, became familiar in revolutionary France, because of its connotations of wifely virtue, patriotism and anti-imperialism. Even before the revolution there were several French works about Sabinus and Éponine. Michel-Paul-Gui de Chabanon's operatic tragedy Éponine was performed in 1762. Sabinus was a lyric tragedy in five acts composed by François-Joseph Gossec, premiered at Versailles on 4 December 1773. After the revolution Eponine et Sabinus (1796) was performed at the Lycée theatre. De Lisle de Salles' novel Éponine led to his imprisonment during the Reign of Terror, as it was interpreted as an attack on the Committee of Public Safety.

In his novel Les Misérables, the French author Victor Hugo used the name for a character who also aspires to die with her own beloved in a revolution. Epponina also appears as "Éponine" in Baudelaire's poem Little old Ladies from Les Fleurs du Mal in a verse dedicated to Hugo:

These dislocated wrecks were women once,
Were Eponine or Laïs! hunchbacked freaks,
Though broken let us love them! they are souls.

There were several paintings of the couple, including works by Nicolas-André Monsiau and Etienne Barthélémy Garnier. These usually depict them hiding in a cave, a reference to a myth that a cave near Langres was the place in which Sabinus had hidden. It is still locally known as "Sabinus' cave" (Grotte de Sabinus). Joseph Mills Hanson, who visited it shortly after World War I, described it as a "cave in the rock having two entrances, the one looking south, the other east. The interior is very irregular in outline but it is perhaps fifty feet deep, twenty feet wide, and seven feet high. Near the east entrance is a rough pillar, left evidently by the cutting away of the surrounding stone." A statue of the Virgin Mary was placed there, along with graffiti left by American soldiers in the war.