The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815)

Context

Lord Byron, Napoleon & The Destruction of Sennacherib

Byron was one of the leading poets of a group known as the Romantics. Romanticism was a general artistic movement (literature, music, the visual arts, etc.) which dominated European culture from the last part of the 18th century until the mid-19th century. Romanticism had many key features, including:

• an interest in the cultures and history of the Middle East and Far East

• the importance of liberty and freedom

• a fascination with mystical and supernatural events

All of these are features of Byron’s poem.

• Byron was one of the most notorious men in England: “mad, bad and dangerous to know” and often is unconventional in his approaches.

• The poem was originally published as part of a collection called Hebrew Melodies in April 1815. This was a time when the subject of war was of great concern throughout Europe.

• The wars against Napoleon had been going on for sixteen years and were quickly reaching a climax. The Battle of Waterloo, which ended the war, took place just two months after the poem’s publication.

•  Just like Sennacherib and the Assyrians in the poem, Napoleon and the French had carved out a huge empire and nothing seemed capable of stopping them. It is estimated that the war resulted in approximately 3.5-5 million casualties. It must have seemed to Byron’s original readers that only a miracle could stop the destruction.

King Sennacherib

Sennacherib was the king of Assyria from 107 BCE to 681 BCE, who was primarily remembered for his campaigns against Babylon and Judah, and for his assassination, in 681 BCE, by his own son. At the time, Babylonians refused to accept Assyrian rule, which led Sennacherib to attack and demolish the city, an event recorded in the Bible’s Book of Kings. This was, however, not the only time that Sennacherib was noted, as most of the Book of Kings is about his campaigns against Syria, Anatolia, and the Arabs of the northern Arabian deserts.

That being said, Assyrian art is considered to have peaked during his rule, with such buildings such as Nineveh, a would-be prototype for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or for the ‘palace without a rival’, which comprised of at least 80 rooms practically dominated by sculpture, built out of limestone blocks and mud brick, the doors of which were flanked by huge figures.

With Sennacherib being a figure of such alternate personalities, it is easy to see why Lord Byron has chosen to immortalize him in a poem; Byron himself is a man noted for his contradictions, being both a gentleman with a ferocious temper, as well as a gifted poet, who had both fought in wars as well as written about them. One can assume that Byron saw a lot of himself in Sennacherib, and though the episode he has chosen to immortalize may be considered one of the darkest periods of Sennacherib’s life, it is still nonetheless an homage to the man himself, a standing ovation to a brutal warrior who lived a tumultuous life.

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