Sophonisba

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For the Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532-1625), see Sofonisba Anguissola. For the American activist Sophonisba Breckinridge (1866-1948), see Sophonisba Breckinridge.

The Death of Sophonisba, by Giambattista Pittoni

Sophonisba (also Sophonisbe, Sophoniba; in Punic, Saphanba'al) (fl. 203 BC) was a Carthaginian noblewoman who lived during the Second Punic War, and the daughter of Hasdrubal Gisgonis (son of Gisco). A celebrated beauty, until 206, she had been betrothed to Massinissa, the leader of the Massylian (or eastern) Numidians. But in 206 Massinissa allied himself to Rome. Hasdrubal having lost the alliance with Massinissa started to look for another ally, which he found in Syphax, King of the Masaeisylian (or western Numidians). As was normal in those days, Hasdrubal used his daughter to conclude the diplomatic alliances with Syphax who had previously been allied to Rome.

When Syphax was defeated in 203 BC by Masinissa, King of Numidia, and the Romans, Masinissa fell in love with Sophonisba and married her. Scipio Africanus refused to agree to this arrangement, insisting on the immediate surrender of the princess so that she could be taken to Rome and appear in the triumphal parade. Masinissa, upbraided by Scipio for his weakness, was urged to leave her.

Masinissa feared the Romans more than he loved Sophonisba. Thus, he went to Sophonisba and swore his love to her. He told her that he could not free her from capitivity or shield her from Roman wrath, and so he asked her to die like a true Carthaginian princess. With great composure, she drank a cup of poison that he offered her. The outrage that Sophonisba escaped through suicide may not have been rape or physical violence, but from being led in a triumphal parade at Rome, with its accompanying degradations and humiliations.

Her story, probably much embellished, is told indirectly in Polybius (14.4ff.); and more concretely in Livy (30.12.11-15.11), Diodorus (27.7), Appian (Pun. 27-28), and Cassius Dio (Zonaras 9.11). Polybius, however, never refers to Sophonisba by name in his allusions to her marriage to Syphax, and in his extensive account of Laelius' maneuvers against Syphax. The historian had met Masinissa. Nevertheless, it has been proposed that Polybius' account provides the basis for the Sophonisba story.[1] When Polybius does refer to her, he uses the diminutive in a tone that may be less than flattering. In one passage, Polybius ridicules Syphax for being less courageous than his own "child bride."

Her story became the subject of tragedies (and later operas) from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The first tragedy is credited to the Italian Gian Giorgio Trissino (1524). In France, Trissino's version was adapted by Mellin de Saint-Gelais (performed in 1556), and may have served as the primary model for versions by Antoine de Montchrestien (1596) and Nicolas de Montreux (1601). The tragedy by Jean Mairet (1634) is one of the first monuments of French "classicism", and was followed by a version from Pierre Corneille (1663). The story of Sophonisbe also served as subject for works by John Marston (1606), Nathaniel Lee (1676), James Thomson (1730), Voltaire, Vittorio Alfieri (1789), Daniel Lohenstein, Emanuel Geibel, Antonio Caldara, Henry Purcell, Christopher Gluck, and others.