A young woman, in a nowhere town at the edges of Empire, daughter of a mother who has killed herself, living under the house of a father who can’t wait to marry her off and get rid of her, a young woman who dreams of a better life. But when her theft of a murdered governor’s rings brings her to the attention of a court official come to replace him, the young woman has a chance to not only escape her common life, but to transcend it entirely.
The book is Babylonia, by Constanza Casati.
This is Casati’s version of the story of Semiramis. Constanza Casati, known for her previous novel detailing the life of Clytemnestra, takes a further step toward historical fiction with this novel. What we know about the actual Semiramis as a historical character with attested resources is pretty thin, to be honest. We know there was a woman whom Semiramis was based on, with some authority in the otherwise fiercely patriarchal Neo-Assyrian Empire of the 8th century BC.
But beyond that and a few inscriptions, there is only a small amount of factual evidence about the real person behind Semiramis. So what Casati does here is invent out of whole cloth (but with a rigorous look at Neo-Assyrian Empire life and culture and society as far as we know them) a commoner background for Semiramis, trying to improve her life by any and all means, convinced she has a better destiny. I am reminded of Alma Alexander’s heroine Calladora (from her novel Empress) based on the Byzantine Empress Theodora, who likewise was convinced she had a better destiny than the common life she was born into. Casati’s invented Semiramis is right in Calladora’s mold.
But given the lack of actual facts of Semiramis’ life, what Casati does do is to fold in the heavy mythic tradition that Semiramis has accumulated around herself, far more than the actual historical record. It is Casati’s own thesis in the book that the strange event of a Queen on the Neo-Assyrian throne had an afterlife far beyond the historical record itself, inspiring a lot of authors, including right in the Classical era, to start inventing aspects of her life.
Diodorus Siculus is our main culprit here and our main ur-text for traditions on Semiramis, although the mythmaking on her began centuries earlier. He collects a lot of the myths, especially her superhuman ones, and medieval and later writers, knowingly or not, owe a debt to him. But really, once you start digging and getting interested, she is a historical personage that doesn’t have a lot of real facts about her.
Casati uses this mythology about Semiramis, in the same way she did with the Homeric tradition as well as Greek plays and myths in Clytemnestra. Just like that previous novel, she keeps the focus on realism, with no fantastic elements whatsoever, but immerses the narrative in a world where fantastic elements are accepted as part of everyday life. Take Semiramis' mother Derecto, who kills herself at the beginning of the book, abandoning her child. In the novel, she’s an ordinary mortal and distraught woman. In the mythic sources above, she’s a river goddess, or a water goddess or otherwise semi-divine, (and thus so is Semiramis). And in the narrative of the novel itself, especially as she rises to power, these myths come to be believed by people. The novel is not just the rise of Semiramis’ power and position and prestige, it is the very story of how the myths were shaped to begin with, how the pieces and inspirations for those myths were constructed.
But there is also a relationship triangle here that Casati takes from one of these mythic romances and remakes as her own. The points of view (with a few exceptions) bounce between Semiramis, Onnes, the “new governor” who brings her to the palace, and Ninus, the King of Assyria. A lot of the middle and end of the book is the tensions between these three characters as they resolve their feelings for each other, or at least come to terms to admit them. Given that this is a strongly patriarchal society with very strict laws, mores, and customs, this does not go well and provides a lot of the meaty drama as Semiramis tries to survive and thrive in a strongly patriarchal court.
Besides these, the most fearsome, ferocious and off-the-page character doesn’t get a point of view, and that is Ninat. Ninat is the queen mother, mother to the current king, wife of the king’s father (Shalmaneser) and is a ruthless and determined political operator and a survivor. In what is the very epitome of a “deadly decadent court” of intrigue, Ninat has survived and even thrived. She does not take the arrival of Semiramis well at all, as well as she might. She is barely controlling her son as it is at the moment and the arrival of Semiramis is a destabilizing factor that she cannot afford. We don’t get a point of view from her, which is a conflicting choice in my thinking. I would like to really know what she is thinking, given her adversarial role toward all of the characters that we do get a perspective of.
One gripe I have is with the title of the book. Babylonia: A Novel. If I told you nothing else about the book, what would you think the book was actually about, or who it was about. I, who have a modest general knowledge of ancient history, would not have guessed Semiramis as any of a dozen guesses. The historical Semiramis (Shammuramat, which is the Queen name that Semiramis takes by the end of the book upon her ascension) has no real connection to Babylon.
The mythic sources mentioned earlier have Semiramis doing everything and anything, including having her name on one of the gates of Babylon (Herodotus, predictably). But Babylon is never the focus of her wide ranging adventures, exploits and rule. And in the novel itself aside from Semiramis’ encounters and confrontations with a prince of Babylon, Marduk, Semiramis in the novel itself neither visits nor has any real connection to Babylon at all. When she gets crowned Queen, she is crowned Queen of Assyria and Queen of Babylon but that is really an afterthought and due to circumstances, not any real tie to the place.
There is one exception to all this, that might explain it and it is part of the Semiramis mythic literature I have not mentioned as yet. “The Whore of Babylon” is a mid 19th century text by a minister, Christopher Hislop, a religious anti-Catholic pamphlet that mixes, matches and invents a lot of Near Eastern history and mythology together to “prove” that the Catholic church is actually a polytheistic descendant of Babylonian religion. In the course of this, Semiramis is the titular Whore of Babylon and (somehow) is responsible for Goddess worship, which explains devotion to the Virgin Mary, et cetera.
So if I follow the title “Babylonia: A Novel”, it seems to be using memories of that pamphlet and its mischaracterization of Semiramis in order to come up with the book title. And I think it is an atrocious idea. For a novel that tries to reclaim Semiramis in a modern, and feminist sort of mold and story, and as we have seen in my review, does well at it, to revert to one of the more inventive and slanted and disgusting characterizations of someone we actually know very little about it is more than disappointing... it undercuts the actual project of the novel. It buries what you are trying to do with the book.
The novel is not meant to be a definitive entire life of Semiramis. The novel ends, basically, on her ascension as full Queen Regnant. Given that, again we know very little about the real Semiramis, who, like Clytemnestra (in the author’s previous work) is much more a character of myth than of actual fact, I am quite satisfied. In a touch that reminds me a bit of works like I, Claudius, we even get a strong implication at the end as to who is telling us this story, and given their thread through the book, you will not be surprised. It makes a lot of sense.
So what Casati does in the novel, ultimately, is not terribly different than what she does in Clytemnestra but is an extension of the same. There are more historical facts behind the person that the semi-mythical Semiramis is based on (Shammuramat) but there is so little that Casati is even freer in her invention that she was with Clytemnestra. There are definite parallels between her Clytemnestra and Semiramis (one could say that, based on two novels, that the author clearly likes to write a type). After all, a line from Clytemnestra certainly does apply to Semiramis throughout to the end of the book: “Queens are either hated, or they are forgotten.” Semiramis, like Clytemnestra, knows which one she would rather be.
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Highlights:
Non-fantastical Near Eastern story of a character who is mostly mythical
Strong feminist story in a culture even more patriarchal than her last novel
Some elements of the book, including the title, undercut author’s intentions
Reference: Casati, Constanza, Babylonia: A Novel, [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2025]
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin
