Sardanapalus - in Art and Literature

In Art and Literature

The death of Sardanapalus was the subject of a Romantic Period painting by the 19th-century French painter Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, which was itself based on the 1821 play Sardanapalus by Byron, which in turn was based on Diodorus.

E. H. Coleridge, in his notes on the works of Byron, states, "It is hardly necessary to remind the modern reader that the Sardanapalus of history is an unverified if not an unverifiable personage.... The character which Ctesias depicted or invented, an effeminate debauchee, sunk in luxury and sloth, who at the last was driven to take up arms, and, after a prolonged but ineffectual resistance, avoided capture by suicide, cannot be identified."

Hector Berlioz, the 19th-century French Romantic composer, wrote a very early cantata on the subject of the Death of Sardanapalus. It was his fourth and finally successful attempt in the Prix de Rome competition, run by the Paris Conservatoire. Only a fragment of the score survives.

In the introductory pages of Book I of Aristotle's "Ethics" those who, ( erroneously, according to Aristotle) equate the good life with the life of brute pleasure are likened to Sardanapalus.