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 OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS:
HARMONY, EUPHANTASY, AND LAW IN
ROSSINI'S SEMIRAMIS

Peter Goodrich*

The libretto of Rossini's Semiramis is taken directly from Vol-

taire's eponymous theatrical tragedy.' Set in Babylon in 1200 B.C.,
the tragedy told is one version of the myth of Semiramis, Queen of
Assyria, lawgiver, ruler, and subjugator of men. In its barest form,
the late eighteenth century version of the narrative is that of a wife
who kills her husband and falls unwittingly in love with her son.
Unaware of his identity, she seeks to marry her son, but the inces-
tuous union is prevented by the ghost of her murdered husband.
In the final scene of the opera, in the half-light of his father's tomb,
the son accidentally kills his mother and is proclaimed king. Jus-
tice of a sort, as fury or fate, has been seen to be done, and Semir-
amis joins the serried throng of "those massacred women who are
everywhere in the operas we love."2
First performed in 1823 the opera is something of a liminal
work. Monumental in proportion and firmly rooted in neo-
classical tradition, Semiramis is often, and perhaps not inaccu-
rately, labelled an opera of restoration in which an earlier musical
model and its classical proportions are repeated in a rejuvenated
and more powerful form. Such a notion of restoration is not, how-
ever, without its paradoxes. On the borders of modernity, the op-
era reformulates the vision of an antique and idealised mythical
world. It sings of a past in which a feminine eros leads tragically to

* Corporation of London Professor of Law, University of London, Birkbeck College.

My thanks to Arthur Jacobson, Desmond Manderson, and Anton Schuitz for discussion of
themes from this Article.
1 See Libretto of GIOACCHINO ROSSINI, SEMIRAMIDE (Peggie Cochrane trans.,
Decca 1989). I refer to the libretto, which was adapted by Rossini from Voltaire, as Ros-
sini's. For Voltaire, see 17 VOLTAIRE, Semiramis, in THE WORKS OF VOLTAIRE: A
CONTEMPORARY VERSION (William-F. Fleming trans., 1901). I use both the French and
English nomenclature of Semiramis throughout.
2 CATHERINE CLP-MENT, OPERA, OR THE UNDOING OF WOMEN 21 (Betsy Wing
trans., University of Minnesota Press 1988) (1979); see also SUSAN MCCLARY, FEMININE
ENDINGS: MUSIC, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY (1991); Rhian Samuel, Feminist Musicol-
ogy: Endings or Beginnings?, 3 WOMEN: A CULTURAL J. 65 (1992) (providing commen-
tary on MCCLARY, supra).

1649
1650 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

thanatos, and the spirit or imago of the dead father dominates and
revenges the sexually motivated wrongs of the past through the
manipulation of the present. It is equally an opera that employs
the traditional recitative form, but only accompanied by the or-
chestra and a novel musical drama of declamation. There is a cho-
rus that follows the protagonists and comments on their acts and
an overall degree of self-referentiality and repetition that is un-
usual, even for Rossini.
While it is certainly possible to trace in the musical form the
political themes of the ancients against the modems, of love
against law, and ultimately of the restoration of law through the
imago, the ghostly office of the dead father, such historical and
political readings will be treated here as starting points.3 For in-
troductory purposes, it can simply be noted that opera is always a
spectral affair and that in its auditorium, in the vast and ornate ar-
chitecture of a lost world, "the ghosts of a society wander here in a
dream."4 It is that dream of the permutations of sexuality and
death, the staging of the spectres of eros in the public sphere, that
this Article endeavors to address. In various different senses, op-
era is as much concerned with the dead, with image and lineage, as
it is with the precession or imagination of future states.' It is a
dream in the double sense both of reworking the remains of the
past-a past which was never present-and of giving expression to
a volition or vision of the future. It is that clinical duality that I
trace in the specific death of Semiramis, and I do so in the un-
abashed and apposite form of analysing death through another
death, through the "dead part of opera":6 its language, its narra-
tive.
In opera it is traditionally the case that the words have little
meaning and are foreign and forgotten, so the auditor is moved
unconsciously by sound, by form, and by the very act of forgetting
the tragic drama of women who sing and who die.7 There is, so to

3 On the classical derivation and meaning of imago, see George Didi-Huberman, The
Molded Image: Genealogy and the Truth of Resemblance in Pliny's Natural History,
XXXV 1-7, in LAW AND THE IMAGE: THE AUTHORITY OF ART AND THE AESTHETICS
OF LAW (Costas Douzinas & Lynda Nead eds., 1999).
4 CLtMENT, supra note 2, at 3.
5 See JACQUES ATTALI, NOISE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MUSIC 11 (Brian
Massumi trans., 1985) ("Music is prophecy.... It makes audible the new world that will
gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not
only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.").
6 CLtMENT, supra note 2, at 18.
7 Such a connotation of death is also present in the musicological notion of "feminine
ending." See MCCLARY, supra note 2.
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1651

speak, an unconscious politics to the opera's dramatic enactments

of death, and it is through the theatricality of this recitative staging
of the tragedy of Semiramis that we can learn, to borrow Voltaire's
moral, of a spectral law that governs desire and "of secret crimes
that have only the Gods as their witness."8 My thesis is that to un-
derstand, or rather to reconstruct, the meaning of this ghostly jus-
tice, of this fate or law beyond law, requires a careful jurispruden-
tial reading of the opera. Such a juristic reading accords with the
essentially agonistic and probative character of the narrative and is
a precondition to an aesthetic appreciation of this modernistic
transformation-or more properly transmogrification-of the
myth of Semiramis. Ironically, it is the highly contemporary theme
of ambivalent sexuality, of the power and the threat of an incestu-
ous eros, of the transgressive mixing of lineage and love, and of
law and femininity that marks the opera as a modernisation of the
traditional narrative.

I. HARMONICAL JUSTICE AND MUSICAL CONSENT

An initial digression is necessary. Just as music has histori-
cally paid little attention to writing, law-cold prose, serious social
speech-has generally marginalised music. It has tended also to be
the case that the links drawn or the analogies made between law
and music are most frequently pitched at the level of musicology
and jurisprudence, rather than at that of practice or substantive
norms. Although it is clearly the case that music-chant and
dance in particular 9-played a crucial role in the ecclesiastical tra-
dition and specifically in the training of the body in its conformity
to the rites of the Church, that tradition is less apparent in the
secular tradition transcribed by legal historiography. 10 Indeed, it is
necessary to return to the Renaissance and early modern legal
treatises upon the dual polity to gain a sense of the place of music
in the juristic ordering of sociality.

8 17 VOLTAIRE, supra note 1, at 225 (translation modified).

9 For an interesting study of dance and law, see Pierre Legendre, La passion d'etre un
autre: Etude pour /a danse (1978), in LAW AND THE UNCONSCIOUS: A LEGENDRE
READER (Peter Goodrich ed., 1997).
10 It is probably for this reason that the most explicit legal use of music is to be found
in the Inns of Court where the proximity of the legal community to its monastic roots is
most apparent. For the use of music in the rites and revels at the Inns, see the detailed
descriptions of feasts in GERARD LEGH, THE ACCEDENS OF ARMORY (1562), and the
extended commentary in Paul Raffield, The Separate Art Worlds of Dreamland and
Drunkeness: Elizabethan Revels at the Inns of Court, 8 L. & CRITIQUE 163 (1997). On the
corporeal symbolism of early legal training, see Peter Goodrich, Eating Law: Commons,
Common Land, Common Law, 12 J. LEGAL HIsT. 246 (1991).
1652 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

Although accounts differ across nations and jurisdictions, the

Renaissance clearly placed music at the origins of sociality. The
bards or singers were not simply the first orators capable, through
song, of bringing disparate groups together, but were also the
original lawgivers, either because their words had the power of
law, as in the case of Hegesias," or because their melodic rendition
of the origin of community best represented the immemorial and
indefinite tonal norm of a divine legislator.12 In a tradition that
stems back at least to Cicero's De inventione, rhyme, which is the
form of observation and expression of "the celestial courses ...
[and] the first mover,"'3 necessarily comes closest to the law of na-
ture, and song, metre, and verse best represent a divinely inspired
will or law.14 Nietzsche, drawing upon the same rhetorical tradi-
tion, and specifically the "gay science" of the troubadours and tro-
bairitz, formulates the same point in more epistemic terms: "[B]y
means of tones one can seduce men to every error and every truth:
who could refute a tone?"' 5
Music, if such is appropriately the figure for the sound, tone,
or harmony of nature, is both the form and the expression of a
prior law, that of origin and its invisible or spectral truth.
Eustache Deschamps, to take an early example, wrote that natural
music was "the music of the mouth, which offers metrified speech,
sometimes in lais, elsewhere in ballads, at other times in rondeaux
and songs.' 1 6 Music, in Deschamps's influential view, was the last
and most universal of the sciences. Natural music, in its purest
form, was the expression of the principle of love: it was feminine

11 Hegesias was a Greek orator of the third century B.C. who went to Egypt and there
"inveighed so much against the incommodities of this transitory life, and so highly com-
mended death the dispatcher of all evils; as a great number of his hearers destroyed them-
selves" and so forced Ptolemy II to bannish him. See PETER GOODRICH, LANGUAGES OF
LAW: FROM LOGICS OF MEMORY TO NOMADIC MASKS 93 n.8 (1990).
12 This somewhat arcane theme can be pursued in the work of the Renaissance English
barrister George Puttenham. See GEORGE PUTENHAM, The First Booke, of Poets and
Poesie, in THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE (facsimile reproduction 1970) (1589). Another
important source is SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, AN APOLOGIE FOR POETRIE (Edward Arber ed.,
1869) (1595). On the indefiniteness of origins, see JOHN FAVOUR, ANTIQUITIE
TRIUMPHING OVER NOVELTIE (1619).
13 PUTTENHAM, supra note 12, at 4; see also SIDNEY, supra note 12, at 2-5. On Cicero
and invention, see ERNESTO GRASSI, RHETORIC AS PHILOSOPHY: THE HUMANIST
TRADITION 68-101 (1980).
14 A concise and influential early expression of this theme can be found in CICERO:
PRO ARCHIA POETA ORATIO (Steven Cerutti ed., 1998).
15 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE JOYFUL WISDOM 145 (Thomas Common trans.,
1910).
16 EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS, L'Art de Dictier [1392], in OEUVRES COMPLtTES DE
EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS 270 (Gaston Raynard ed., 1841).
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1653

in its sweetest forms and persuaded or soothed with "pleasing

voices."' 17 The association with love also provoked a reference to
music in trials and to the poetics of courts of love. The earliest
lawyers were, in this perspective, poets and rhetors, and the origin
of law was to be traced to a harmony of nature that preceded any
merely bureaucratic or administrative rule. To this depiction of
the earliest or "originary" form of law, the Renaissance lawyer and
poet George Puttenham added the cautionary, historical tale of
the demise or estrangement of law from its naturally musical roots.
He stated laconically in The Arte of English Poesieis that, even in
his day, the bard had fallen into disrepute and was subject to scorn
and derision as being "a light-headed or phantastical man,"' 9 a
practitioner of "superfluous knowledge and vain science. ' 20 To
make the allusion complete, Puttenham retorted quite brilliantly
that "the phantastical part of man represents of the best, most
comely and beautiful images or appearances of the things of the
soul" '21 and continued that "such persons as be illuminated by the
brightest irradiations of knowledge and of the verity and due pro-
portion of things, they are called by the learned not phantastics but
euphantasiste, and of this sort of phantasie are all good poets ...
22
all legislators.., and counsellors.
The euphony that preceded and ideally conveyed the force of
law required that the legislator and, by delegation or semblance,
the lawyer be euphantisists, that is, practitioners of an art that
owed both its legitimacy and its persuasion to a ghostly concor-
dance, an original and natural harmony that John Selden, amongst
others, explicitly linked to the laws of the first Venus, the passions
of nature or of God herself. The timbre of law, one could infer,
was the indication of its linkage to justice, the sonority of phrase or
rule being its affectual purport and power. It is within this tradi-
tion that the best legal arguments would "sound" with the judge
and that the audibility of law was recognised as both a literal and a
metaphorical truth of its transmission.23 Euphony, harmony, and
audibility were primary virtues of law and, as early constitutional
lawyers were to put it, this musicality of governance lay at the

17 Id. at 271.
18 PUTTENHAM, supra note 12.
19 Id. at 15.
20 Id.
21 Id.
22 Id.
23 For an interesting discussion of audibility and law, see 2 THE REPORTS OF SIR JOHN
SPELMAN 159-61 (J.H. Baker ed., 1978).
1654 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

source of the normative order that custom and law would become
over time.
The allusion to music as the best rhetoric and to harmony as
the proper or proportionate relation of law to justice gains numer-
ous further elaborations in works that endeavour to set out the
relation between the parts and the whole of civil and political soci-
ety. As has been argued most persuasively in the recent and re-
markable study of law and music by Desmond Manderson, the
philosophy of law must inevitably recognise an aesthetic dimen-
sion to justice because, to use his formulation, "law is one of the
ways in which form is developed in society, and law expresses itself
through form. 2 4 Thus, to take one example from the common law
and one from civilian law, legal treatises on the juristic foundation
of the polity inevitably resorted to harmony and melody as the ex-
pressions of a just relation between law and equity and between
rule and application.
In one fairly standard account of the relation of written law to
equity or decision and, hence, to justice, sixteenth century com-
mon lawyer William Lambarde set out the view that both govern-
ment by rigour of written law alone, "Arithmeticall Government,
(as they call it)," 25 and by equitie or "Geometrical judgment at the
pleasure of the Chauncellor or Praetor,"26 would alike be poisons
to the polity, "and yet if they be well compounded together, a most
sweet and harmonical justice will follow of them."27 Lambarde
never offered any explanation of the means of gauging the propor-
tionate or harmonical relation between rule and judgment, be-
tween rigour or strict law and lesbian artifice or pliant justice, but
rather assumed an aesthetic sense innate in the judge. This aes-
thetic is indeed spelled out toward the end of the work, where the
frame-the form-of the polity was depicted as both natural and
harmonical. It was natural, in his view, because it imitated:
the natural body of man, truly called a little World; out of the
three Cells ... namely, the Head, Breast, and Belly, the whole
three powers of the soul do open and utter themselves; and

24 DESMOND MANDERSON, SONGS WITHOUT MUSIC: AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS OF

LAW AND JUSTICE 376 (forthcoming 2000). Another powerful representation of the aes-
thetic and justice can be found in COSTAS DOUZINAS & RONNIE WARRINGTON, JUSTICE
MISCARRIED: ETHICS AND AESTHETICS IN LAW 265-310 (1994).
25 WILLIAM LAMBARDE, ARCHEION OR A DISCOURSE UPON THE HIGH COURTS OF
JUSTICE IN ENGLAND 44 (Charles Mcllwain & Paul L. Ward eds., 1957) (1591) (emphasis
omitted).
26 Id. (emphasis omitted).
27 Id. (emphasis omitted).
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1655

Harmonical, because from such, and so-well tuned a Base,

Mean, and Treble, there proceeds a most exquisite consent, and
delicious melody.28
The Renaissance common lawyers' emphasis upon the audi-
bility of law and the melody of justice was appropriately located in
an analysis that began with the harmonics of the body and with a
sensory depiction of that music that constituted a justice beyond
the mere letter or hard script of law. Puttenham's "euphantasist"
lawyer, in other words, had to listen to a tune that lay between the
words, a harmony that could be apprehended aesthetically, but
could not be reduced to the mere prose of legal rule. The impossi-
ble conjunction of abstract norm and unique fact of general rule
and particular application could only be achieved aesthetically by a
phantasmatic bridging of the unconjoinable.2 9 Music was the best
anagram of the aesthetic method whereby the incomensurable
were related by means of the expression of desire in law. The soul,
which traditionally was related directly to the faculty of judgment,
had its most concrete and originary expression not as a colour or
as a breath, but as a sound, and it was the rhyme or rhythm of the
sounds of the soul that linked speech directly to the trajectory of a
natural harmony, that of justice and the law of nature.
Lambarde's theory of the melodic quality of justice and of the
harmony that subtended the relation of the parts of the polity to
the juridical whole of a nation and system required that legal order
be interpreted as much by difference as semblance. What marked
the melody or harmony of the juristic whole was not the positive
representation of prosaic rules, but rather the gaps or distances be-
tween the words. In aesthetic terms, difference was the indicator
of melody, and the numerical demarcation of the gaps between
positive forms-the silence between sounds-was what deter-
mined the specific harmony or tune to whose rhythm justice
played. For Hooker, indeed, who was perhaps most explicit on
this point in Book 1 of his book Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical
Politie, law came ideally from long established custom and use. In
that form, in the deepest substratum of the juridical order, the sign
of legitimacy and so of the justice of law was precisely "that it has
been received by long silence,"30 uninterrupted, one might say, by
the noise or babble of positive and merely human forms.

28Id. at 126 (emphasis omitted).

29I borrow the latter formulation from JEAN-CLAUDE MILNER, FOR THE LOVE OF
LANGUAGE 120-21 (Ann Banfield trans., 1990).
30 1 RICHARD HOOKER, OF THE LAWES OF ECCLESIASTICAL POLITIE 87 (1676).
1656 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

Perhaps because the continental tradition was never likely to

be satisfied by the rather atonal empiricism of Hooker's general
theory, by the common lawyers' very English emphasis upon si-
lence and passivity as sources of law, a more elaborate accounting
of the aesthetic of the "harmonical proportion" of justice was ex-
pounded. The exemplar of such a theory is found in Book V of
Jean Bodin's De Republica3 and is best understood as a variation
upon the scholastic schema set out already by way of discussion of
Lambarde's Archeion. Seeking to expound the median path that
harmonical justice should carve between arithmetical inflexibility
and geometric pliability, between the frigidity of law-of dura lex
or hard law-and the alliteration or similarities that justice evokes,
Bodin resorted to numerical distinctions. "The difference of the
Geometrical and Arithmetical proportion, is in this to be noted,
that in the proportion Arithmetical are always the self-same rea-
sons, and the differences equal; whereas in the Geometrical pro-
portion they are always semblable, but not the self same, neither
yet equal."32 Thus, in numerical terms, the proportions or relations
of law could be depicted in the progression three, nine, fifteen,
twenty-one, twenty-seven, and so on, while that of justice would be
three, nine, twenty-seven, eighty-one.33 For Bodin, neither of the
two numerical progressions was a satisfactory depiction of har-
monical justice, which required a "third kind of rule" to be de-
vised. 4
Harmonical justice required that the four members of the
polity-law, equity, the application of law, and the office of the
judge-have among themselves the "same proportion which these
four numbers have, viz. 4, 6, 8, 12. For what the proportion is of 4
to 6, the same the proportion is of 8 to 12."11 The equality of pro-
portion or of numerical scale reflected an equal or reciprocal re-
spect both honoured and due between the different parts of the
whole. Bodin concluded his analysis with the wonderful warning
that "if you shall transpose these numbers before set in harmonical
proportion, and so make the magistrate superior unto equity; and
the execution of the law, to be above the law itself; both the har-
mony of the commonweale, and the musical consent thereof, shall

31 JEAN BODIN, THE Six BOOKES OF A COMMONWEALE (Kenneth Douglas McRae

ed., photo. reprint 1962) (1606).
32 Id. at 757.
33 See id. at 760.
34 Id.
35 Id.
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1657

perish. '36 Elsewhere, Bodin repeated that harmonical justice is in

part equal and in part "semblable" because nature was:
harmonically composed... of matter and form, of which the
one is maintained by the help of the other, and that by the pro-
portion of equality and similitude combined and bound to-
gether. And for that the matter was of no use without the form,
and that the form could have no being without the matter: he
[God] made the world equal to the one, and semblable to the
other ....
Bodin's conception of harmonical justice as a third kind of
rule or governance was offered as a critique of Plato and as a spe-
cies of censure of contemporary lawyers. With regard to the latter
critique, that of the soul of the lawyer, Bodin, in common with
many other Renaissance critics of the law,38 was of the view that
the lawyers were guilty of failing to look outside their discipline to
forms of knowledge that, while they lacked judicial experience, of-
fered access to an understanding of harmony and governance that
lawyers alone could not conceive. The theory of harmony re-
quired, in other words, both a mathematical understanding of nu-
merical scale and tonal harmony of measure and proportion, and
also an aesthetic appreciation of the importance of the relation of
39
music to harmony, and of harmony to polity or musical consent.
The legal order, in this view, was to honour .and express or repre-
sent the harmony of the natural order. If number and world were
joined through the artifice of music, then only an aesthetics of law
could ultimately comprehend the health or well-being, in short, the
justice of the whole.

II. SEMIRAMIS AND THE LAWS OF SEMBLANCE

The foregoing divagation into the theory of harmonical justice
evidences, amongst other things, the fact that music and particu-
larly the early modern theory of harmony are explicitly conceived
as being forms of encoding the law of nature. The audibility, and
particularly the melody, of the world is a question of measure-
ment, of number and scale, and thus in turn the musical language
of the social, the form of encoding, imposes harmony upon na-

36 Id. (emphasis added).

37 Id. at 792.
38 Amongst the more important critiques contemporary with Bodin are those of Wil-
liam Fulbecke, Abraham Fraunce, and Francois Hotman. For discussion and biblio-
graphical references, see GOODRICH, supra note 11, at 15-52.
39 "The word harmony sweeps its semantic zone with precision: number, artifact, well-
being, language, and world." ATrALI, supra note 5, at 61.
1658 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

ture.40 Bodin's musical consent lies at the cusp of a reciprocal rela-

tionship in which matter mirrors form just as much as form renders
matter-noise-audible. The harmony of nature could be appre-
hended only through the encoding, the language or law, of the so-
cial order. It is this fact that lent to opera its privileged or, in
Nietzsche's view, egregious place as the ultimate form of represen-
tation or political enactment of the harmony of the natural world.4'
Whatever the aesthetic status of opera, and of the neo-
classical recitative stilo rappresentativoagainst which Nietzsche in-
veighed, opera must be seen in some sense as returning to, or re-
storing, an antique relation between music and word, verse and
song. More than that, the theatrical dimension of this musical
staging of declamation, adds a further criterion to the analysis of
the euphantasist spectacle that opera can represent to law. The
terrain of harmonical or musical justice is that of phantasy, of ap-
paritions, of sounds that ironically make the soul visible to the
world. Thus, if we move from the frigid domain of a self-regarding
law,42 to the theatre of justice that opera ideally represents, the
object language of analysis is one that is not only beyond or more
than law, but also a political enactment of spiritual or spectral
forms whose apprehension depends upon aesthetic and affectual
criteria.
Returning to Rossini's Semiramis, the hermeneutic question
that I wish to pose is precisely that of the politics and the justice
that the opera enacts. To the extent that the interpretation of the
declamations of the opera requires a reference to the musical style
of the piece, it is primarily to indicate the movement from secular
law to the materia spiritualis of the phantasm and of a law that ex-
ceeds the senses and so at least has the capacity to govern the body
according to the harmonical dictates of the soul. 43 In another tradi-
tion, this law could be depicted as the heir to the troubadour and
to the various jongleurs or minstrels of the soul whose words and
world were recorded and encoded as the laws of love.44 Semiramis

40 See MANDERSON, supra note 24, Fugue & Quartet; see also JOHN BOKINA, OPERA
AND POLITICS: FROM MONTEVERDI To HENZE (1997); Music AND SOCIETY: THE
POLITICS OF COMPOSITION, PERFORMANCE AND RECEPTION (Richard Leppert & Susan
McClary eds., 1987).
41 Nietzsche's views on the Socratic character of opera are expressed with great force
in FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY 142 (1909).
42 Seneca remarked, "Nihil mihi videtur frigidius quam lex .... (nothing seems to me
more cold than law). BODIN, supra note 31, at 767.
43 An important discussion of this theme can be found in Legendre, supra note 9, at
173-88.
44 The classic codification of these laws as rhetorical rules is a treatise by a group of
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1659

indeed is in an important sense an amorous tragedy, a staging of

the law of love whose tragedy is precisely that the body acts out-
side of the volition of either mother or son, and so is witness to the
triumph of an unwitting corporeality, one might say of the body as
the unconscious, over the reason of the soul. More prosaically, at
the dawn of modernity, the drama of the unconscious-focused
here not upon the father but upon the mother-is set out in terms
of a fate that will annihilate the mother in favour of the son. The
crucial question is thus one of what that fate leaves, what spectre
or meaning proleptically attaches to this particular death?

A. Genealogy
There are many accounts of the life-and after-life-of
Semiramis and so a certain sense of context is immediately neces-
sary. The opera is set explicitly in the ordered world of mythopoi-
etic antiquity, and its narrative is structured by an array of signs,
including noises, expressive of divine will. Each moment of the ac-
tion, in other words, responds to oracular or opaque intimations of
other worldly desires; the intent of the dead and of ghosts, or the
will of gods expressed directly in the enigmatic and often atribiliar
language of invisible causes. The drama commences with the in-
vocation of the gods to guide Semiramis in her choice of a succes-
sor, and "Assyria's fate will change."45 The first sign of the com-
plexity or tragedy of that fate is a peal of thunder and a flash of
lightning that strikes the altar of the temple before which Semir-
amis appeals for guidance, and the sacred fire on the altar is put
out.46 The gods are not at peace with Babylon, and the high priest,
the prophet, informs Semiramis that "there are crimes ... terrible
crimes, concealed.., and unpunished."47
The context of the tragedy, and the principal question that it
poses in terms of the fate of the Queen, is that of the providence,
the fate or spiritual law, that governs succession. Semiramis is
here the ambivalent and, in conventional moods, disturbing figure
of female governance, of feminine desire enlaced in right and rule.

fourteenth century Toulousian troubadours printed as M. Gatien-Arnoult, Monumens de

la literature romane depuis le quatorzieme siecle, in LAS FLORS DEL GAY SABER ESTIER
DICHAS LAS LEYS D'AMORS (Slatkine Reprints 1977) (1841-1843).
45 ROSSINI, supra note 1, at 34.
46 See id. at 36.
47 Id. at 37. It is hard here to avoid some reference to Freud's interpretation of the
Oedipus myth, whose plot similarly circulates around "the trace of [an] ancient guilt."
SIGMUND FREUD, The Interpretation of Dreams 205, in THE BASIC WRITINGS OF
SIGMUND FREUD (A.A. Brill trans. & ed., 1938).
1660 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

The drama begins with Semiramis as Queen, as established succes-

sor to Ninus, her husband, and as the maker of law and ruler of an
empire. Her success has been indubitable, and the prior order of
her regnancy is reflected in the harmony and levity of the lengthy
sinfonia with which the opera begins. The question of succession,
in other words, is not a simple one, either in legal or political
terms. It harbours all the doubt that attends to the unseen marks
of lineage or blood and the ultimately unknowable question of pa-
ternity. Only maternity is certain, and the figure of Semiramis
even bestows that certainty with moral doubt-according to Dio-
dorus, Semiramis never knew her mother or her father.
The shadow of feminine regnancy to which the libretto al-
ludes, the operatic opening onto the rite through which the Queen
of Babylon will choose a successor, suggests at least an initial le-
gitimacy to the rule and succession of a woman. That indeed is the
earliest and explicitly feministic signification of the myth of Semir-
amis, as set out by Diodorus Siculus in his histories 48 and reinter-
preted during the medieval and Renaissance receptions in terms of
feminine superiority or the history of women's law. Shrouded
though it may be in myth and antiquity, Semiramis is pivotal to the
history of feminine succession, as also to the many concordances of
illustrious, famous, noble, or erudite women whose history makes
up what Selden termed the "other face" of western law.49
In this aspect, Semiramis is subject to an inexorable law of
semblance. She belongs to a tradition in which women were closer
to the gods than men and hence potentially more powerful than
the dominion of kings and male judges. When John Fortescue al-
luded to Semiramis in a mid-fifteenth century treatise entitled De
naturalegis naturae (On the Nature of Natural Law), the first trea-
tise-length work of which I am aware that is devoted wholly to the
question of feminine succession, it is as a reference to the power,
the justice, and law of women who had conquered and governed
kingdoms of the ancient world. 0 In Diodorus's classic account of
Semiramis, she was the epitome of military prowess, of just gov-
ernance and of political wisdom. Born of the gods, she was raised
by birds and won the heart of Ninus, King of Assyria, through her

48 2 DIODORUS SICULUS (C.H. Oldfather trans., 1989).

49 See JOHN SELDEN, JANUS ANGLORUM FACIES ALTERA [THE REVERSE OR BACK-
FACE OF THE ENGLISH JANUS] (1682).
50 JOHN FORTESCUE, De natura legis naturae [On the Nature of Natural Law], in THE
WORKS OF SIR JOHN FORTESCUE, KNIGHT 267 (C. Fortescue trans., 1869) ("[W]ho hath
ever subjugated nations with the sword more strenuously than Semiramis.").
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1661

intelligence-her strategic ability-as much as her beauty. 1 When

she succeeded to the throne upon the death of Ninus in battle, she
consolidated and expanded his empire, built great cities and vast
aqueducts, and knew also when it was time to abdicate in favour of
Ninyas, her son. According to Diodorus indeed, Semiramis was
warned by the oracle of Ammon that she would disappear from
among men and gain undying honour when her son Ninyas con-
spired, with the help of a eunuch, against her. 2
In the medieval and Renaissance reception of the classics,
Semiramis was again accorded a place of honour, and her story
was retold as an instance of the power and law of women. For
Christine de Pizan, Semiramis was the first of the women recorded
in the City of Women and was the epitome of heroism, of "courage
and resolution" in the use of arms and the subjugation of king-
doms. She knew neither fear nor sorrow; "in brief, she had soon
conquered the entire Orient and placed it under her rule."53 Now
established as a prominent figure in the querelle des femmes,
Semiramis gained mention in a number of Renaissance defences of
feminine power and political rights. For Agrippa, she was the
founder of empires and cities, and she was a wise ruler and an im-
placable adversary. 4 In the later work of Anthony Gibson, it was
not only her wisdom in military endeavour that was to be ac-
knowledged and honoured, but also her exemplification of what he
termed a "virtue feminine that hath been of greater efficacy than
that of men. '55 The virtue referred to is explained initially in terms
of the causal role of women in the foundation of "[a]ll the great
monarchies [that] were instituted by the counsel of women,"56 and
latterly and theoretically by a feminine eloquence and ability to
invent which depends upon "the faculty imaginative, which [is] a
57
function of the soul.
In Puttenham's terminology, Semiramis was an euphantasist,
a lawgiver who could hear the euphony and harmony of the order
of nature and of the gods. She ruled arithmetically, geometrically,

51 See 2 DIODORUS, supra note 48, at 365-71.

52 See id. at 397.
53 CHRISTINE DE PIzAN, THE BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES 39 (Earl Jeffrey Ri-
chards trans., 1982).
54 See HENRICUS CORNELIUS AGRIPPA, DECLAMATION ON THE NOBILITY AND
PREEMINENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX 85-86 (Albert Rabil, Jr. trans. & ed., 1996) (1529).
55 ANTHONY GIBSON, A WOMANS WOORTH: DEFENDED AGAINST ALL THE MEN
IN THE WORLD 4a (1599).
56 Id. at 4b.
57 Id.
1662 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

and harmonically, for her works displayed a full sense of propor-

tion in building magnificent cities, pliablility in her feats of engi-
neering aqueducts and changing the course of rivers, and harmony
in her design of gardens and parks for her luxury and pleasure.
For Jean de Marconville, to take a final eulogistic example from
the querelle, Semiramis belonged within the illustrious history of
women judges and magistrates, women whose judicature was the
expression of the superiority of feminine virtue and their imagina-
tive faculty of invention. 8 As a peroration to this disquisition,
Marconville relayed an anecdote concerning Semiramis. Wishing
to mock the immoderate avarice of men, she built a beautiful sep-
ulchre and tomb on which she engraved the following inscription:
"Any king, worried about wealth or gold, who should open this
monument will find what they wish for inside."5 Sometime later
the king of Dacia (Daire), while admiring the beauty of the sepul-
chre, noticed the inscription and, after reading it and believing it to
be true, opened the sepulchre, and inside it he found the following
words inscribed upon the reverse side of the stone: "Only a great
miser, and bad man, would wish thus to disturb the monuments
and memories of the dead."6
If one were to mark the positive inscription of Semiramis's
law, it would be in terms of an invention and judiciousness that
aligned a feminine legality, the governance of women, with nature
and the reason of the spirit. The feminine was here associated
with night, with dream, with images, and with the opening of the
soul. In addition to the theory that it is the soul that provides ac-
cess to the melodies of justice and the harmony of law, it can also
be added as a detail that from Aristotle to Irigaray, women were
defined as more moist than men. That women were moist meant
classically that they were more delicate, softer, and experienced a
greater affinity to the fluid and shifting patterns of interior life
than to the heat and obdurateness of exterior boundaries or mas-
culine rage." To extrapolate somewhat from the context of Semir-
amis, women were closer to the law of nature, to what the tradition
termed the law of the first Venus, the law of love. It is this priority
of a feminine law, of a law of love stemming from Aphrodite and

58 See JEAN DE MARCONVILLE, DE LA BONTI ET MAUVAISETt DES FEMMES 28-29

(C6t-Femmes 1991) (1564). The earliest reference to women judges, and the likely
source of some of Marconville's remarks, is PLUTARCH, Mulierum Virtutes (Bravery of
Women), in 3 MORALIA 472 (Frank Cole Babbitt trans., 1989).
59 MARCONVILLE, supra note 58, at 34-35 (author's translation).
60 Id. at 35 (author's translation).
61 See id.; GIBSON, supra note 55, at 3a-3b.
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1663

Venus, that is most directly challenged in what might be broadly

regarded as the iconoclastic and misogynist tradition of critique of
Semiramis, to which tradition Voltaire and Rossini contributed.
B.Gender and Semblance
Sex and semblance seem to be the joint motifs of the polemi-
cal denunciation of the history and symbolism of Semiramis. The
trajectory of this adverse criticism is one that counterposes excess
to virtue, and femininity to law. Whether the narrative figure of
Semiramis is interpreted here as a projection of masculine fears, as
the inscription of an unconscious and libertine desire, or as a
mythopoietic face of the dogmatic tradition, there is an uncanny
repetition of themes of sexual excess and of the semblance of
Semiramis, and of other Amazonian women, to the masculine
gender. Proximity, or conscious and unconscious in other words,
seem to lie at the root of the antagonism that Semiramis elicits:
her difference was invisible, she could pass as a man or a woman
according to her whim or, in French law, she was not a sister but a
semblable.
The theme of semblance, of a woman who can appear as a
man, can be traced to Diodorus who seemingly incidentally re-
marked that, when her husband Onmes sent for Semiramis during
the seige of Bactra in Asia, "she devised a garb which made it im-
possible to distinguish whether the wearer of it was a man or a
woman." 62 Diodorus also mentioned that, in her campaign against
India, Semiramis disguised camels as elephants in a partially suc-
cessful endeavour to counterbalance the superiority of the Indian
forces.63 That talent for taking the appearance of the other, how-
ever, had a more sinister and violent connotation in a brief final
remark, which Diodorus addressed to an alternate history of
Semiramis attributed to Athanaeus. She was in this version a
courtesan who married King Ninus. She subsequently persuaded
the King to yield to her the royal prerogative for a period of five
days. Upon receiving the signs of office, the sceptre and regal
garb, she held a great banquet "at which she persuaded the com-
manders of the military forces and all the greatest dignitaries to co-
operate with her;... and on the second day.., she arrested her
husband and put him in prison."6
The images of women as men, camels as elephants, and cour-

62 2 DIODORUS, supra note 48, at 367.

63 See id. at 403-05.
64 Id. at 419.
1664 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

tesans as Queens gain varied reformulation in the later tradition.

Even Christine de Pizan remarked obliquely upon this violence of
semblance, this transgressive need for women to appear as men,
when she commented on the Amazons that the mark of that tradi-
tion of feminine supremacy was one of likeness or similitude and
was best explicated by the insignia of the Amazon:
[They were] called Amazons, which actually means the "breas-
tless ones," because they had a custom whereby the nobles
among them, when they were little girls, burned off their left
breast through some technique so that it would not hinder them
from carrying a shield, and they removed the right breast of
commoners to make it easier for them to shoot a bow. 65
To fight, to be like men, the Amazons had to mutilate themselves
and so appear like men by removing either the left breast, the sign
of caritas,or the right breast, the sign of maternity.
Contemporarily with Christine de Pizan, Giovanni Boccaccio,
in his entry on Semiramis, talked of feminine cunning and of the
deception by which she succeeded as head of state upon the death
of her husband. In this account, Semiramis was the semblable of
her son in height, body, facial features, voice, and skin tone.
Dressing and appearing in the guise of her son and covering her
hair and arms, she took over the crown and reigned in his stead. 66
In this account the law of semblance-of taking on the attributes
of the other for purposes of cunning and deceit, or, in doctrinal
terms, being merely an image-was the guise in which the later le-
gal tradition, and specifically the Salic law, denounced the govern-
ance and right of feminine succession. In political terms it was
similarity that most immediately divided the sexes. The mother
could appear as the son, the wife as the husband, a woman as a
warrior, a courtesan as a queen, and a queen as a judge. It is also
in this context that we should understand the sexual excess, the se-
ductions and transgressions of both gender and law that other pro-
ponents of the masculine querelle relayed.
Let us then make a first hermeneutic observation on Rossini's
version of the history by way of reference to this play of likeness or
ethics of semblance. In the opera, Semiramis dictated her own fate
by virtue of conspiring to poison her husband Ninus. It is this se-
cret parricidal act that sets the gods to work through the agency of

supra note 53, at 41.

65 PIZAN,
66 I have
used the recent French critical edition of BOCCACE: DES CLERES ET
NOBLES FEMMES 19-20 (Jeanne Baroin & Josiane Haffen eds., 1993) [hereinafter
BOCCACE].
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1665

her husband's ghost and the deeds of her son. Her transgression
must be met by law, her excess by innocence, and her age by
youth. The dead father-in Lacanian terms the prior law-passed
on the signs by means of which the son could be recognised and
the crime of his mother unveiled. The son, however, cannot bring
himself to avenge his father's death, and thus in the guise of an-
other, Semiramis dies. She goes to the tomb of her husband to en-
deavour to protect her son Arsace from the murderous intentions
of her co-conspirator, Assur. In the twilight of the.tomb, her son
imagines that he has encountered his enemy Assur. In the belief
that he is wreaking revenge upon the hand that administered the
poison to his father, he stabs his mother. In the indifference of
dusk, invisible or indistinguishable in the half-light, Semiramis dies
because she appears to be a man; she dies as a semblance, having
appeared to be another. The means of her dominion-her ability
to take on the appearance of another-is also the mechanism of
her downfall: having ruled by appearance, by semblance, as an
image, her death enacts an essentially comparable' non-reference,
the false semblance of both images and women in the perspective
of doctrine and the ius imaginum inherited from Roman law. In
Diodorus's account, it may be recalled, Semiramis came from no-
where. Her birth transgressed the boundaries between the gods
and men, and so it would seem she was fated to a death that mir-
rored the transgression of her birth, and Lachesis, the first of the
parcae, dictated her destiny.
The second and related trajectory of the reception of Semir-
amis links the thematic of semblance more directly to an excessive
sexuality. The themes of seduction and betrayal, of lust and lech-
ery, of Semiramis as idol or mere image without reference or truth,
probably stems from the Middle Ages and its reception of the clas-
sical querelle des femmes. It should be noted initially, however,
that Diodorus does intimate a certain understandable licentious-
ness to the behaviour of the Babylonian Queen. According to
Diodorus, Semiramis built a palace and a park dedicated to pleas-
ure, to "every device that contributed to luxury, ' '67 in Chauon in
Media. She would spend much of her time there but could not
marry for fear of being deprived of her supremacy. Lacking a hus-
band, she would choose the most handsome of her soldiers and
would "covertly chase [them] out and disport with them after her
appetite; and then, for that [they] should not discover her counsel,

67 2 DIODORUS, supranote 48, at 393.

1666 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

she slew each one of them, one after another .... "68

This implicit denigration of feminine passion became a com-

monplace within the medieval legal tradition, and woman was of-
ten defined, as by Alciatus, as the confusion of sense and refer-
ence, meaning and sensuality, and most explicitly as insaturabilis
bestia or insatiable beast.69 Surprisingly, however, lechery was not
simply sexual excess, it was also transgression of the law of ap-
pearances, a violence instituted at the level of the order of repre-
sentation. An extreme though not untypical example is found in
the fourteenth century interpretation of Jehan le F6vre, who not
only marked Semiramis as vile, lecherous, incestuous, and unclean,
but also associated her with Pasiphae. She is another queen, he
said, who had lain down under a bull disguised in a hollowed out
wooden cow. This was barefaced lechery: "Just like a brutish
animal Pasiphad placed her crotch where there was a crack in the
70
artificial cow to receive the bull's prick."
The association of Semiramis with a violence projected into
the order of legal representation, her condemnation by reference
to what was technically a monstrous act, is a familiar figure within
the Judeo-Christian tradition. What is less immediately apparent
is that the crime suggested by the story of Pasiphad is also a species
of idolatry and hence a transgression of the licit orders of repre-
senting desire. To gain her pleasure, Pasiphad took on the appear-
ance of another. She substituted one image for another: her own
likeness for that of an animal. In furthering her libertine project,
she defied the patristic rules of visual circumscription. It was false
latriato seduce by adopting the semblance of an other, and here by
changing not simply her appearance but also her species. Equally
interestingly, the success of her lust was predicated not simply
upon an idolatrous dissembling, but also upon a logic of appearing
like the other, a logic of the similar or more properly semblable.
Crucially, this logic of seduction functions as a transgression di-
rected not, as one might suppose, towards difference, but towards
becoming like the other so as to subjugate him or lead him into the
possibility of difference, and here also that of what might be
termed a libertine experimentation.
Later presentations of Semiramis's sexual appetite are fre-

68 I have preferred here to use THE BIBLIOTECA HISTORICA OF DIODORUS SICULUS

139-40 (F.M. Salter & H.L. Edwards eds. & John Skelton trans., 1963).
69 See A. ALCIATUS, DE NOTITIA DIGNITATEM 190 (1651).
70 2 JEHAN LE FtVRE, LES LAMENTATIONS DE MATHEOLUS 1571 (reprint 1892)
(1371).
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1667

quently placed in the context of the similarity that most immedi-

ately divides the sexes. The most remarkable feature of Semir-
amis's amazonian appetite or lust is thus that far from exiling this
monstrous image of the feminine, it would seem to have internal-
ised it: the drive towards female governance would incorporate
the masculine into a gynocratic order and law and simultaneously
into a domain of excess and transgression. The periphrastic face of
Semiramis-the face of a femininity that required both violence
and similitude to mark its sexual difference-is precisely that of an
erotic power that comes with the disordering power of images, and
particularly with the substitutions of the order of similarity.
Whether bovine, breastless, or as in the case of the "langobards"
she had tied her hair to her chin to confuse the enemy,71 the femi-
ninity of the women warriors and lawgivers was marked precisely
by the absence of a sign of femininity. It is important, however,
that this absence be understood in terms not of lack, but as a posi-
tive irony, a radical signification through a figure of absence or
aposiopesis.
The final and perhaps the gravest crime that Semiramis is re-
ported to have committed was precisely that of destroying the or-
der of lineal representation. According to Giovanni Boccaccio
and Christine de Pizan, Semiramis became the lover of her son.
For Boccaccio this carnal coupling was "more bestial than hu-
man"72 and simply represented the decadence and evil of the court
of queens. In Christine de Pizan's version of the story, Semiramis
married her son for two reasons: first, she would have lost her po-
sition as Queen had she married another; and second, no one else
in the empire seemed to her to be worthy of lying in her bed.73 Pi-
zan argued that, either because Semiramis was a god or because
she lived sometime before the advent of written laws, she was free
to pursue her natural desire without constraint or sin. Whether
libertine, lecherous, or both, it is the quintessentially eighteenth
century theme of the erotics of incest-of the logic of a similarity
that masks difference-that is taken up by Voltaire and Rossini. If
incest is the erasure of difference or the destruction of the princi-
pal sign of individuation through the order of generations and the

71 The story of the "langobards" or longbeards is recounted in THOMAS HEYWOOD,

TUNAIKEION OR NINE BOOKES OF VARIOUS HISTORY CONCERNINGE WOMEN 122
(1624) ("[I]n 638 Justinus sent spies to discover the strength of the forces of Albinus." Al-
binus, on learning of this, ordered all the women "to cut their hair and fasten it about their
chins, thereby to seem men, and make the number of his army appear the greater.")..
72 BOCCACE, supra note 66, at 22.
73 See PIZAN, supra note 53, at 40.
1668 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

proximate marks of blood relationship, then the fact that Semir-

amis legislated that women could take as their husbands whom-
ever they liked and without regard to consanguinity marks a final
conflict between desire and law.
Semiramis used the positive law, the ultimate mask of the
same, to effect her desire. In this interpretation, she drew the law
into the domain of nature, the shadow into the light, and thereby
perhaps blinded the weak vision of a masculine juridical order.
More importantly, the feminine was here infinitely more powerful
than the masculine, but that power was only effective by virtue of
the disguised logic of the same. The erotic plot which Semiramis
devised was made possible by, and was effected through, the era-
sure of genealogical difference. More interesting still, even if
Semiramis desired to sleep with her likeness, her son, she did so on
the basis of drawing her son out of his condition or lineal degree of
difference: in effect she legislated that he could become the same
as her, that his difference could, for these purposes, be erased. He
was no longer her son, but her semblable.
Casanova is famous for remarking that "incest... makes me
laugh."74 Semiramis too would seem to have laughed at incest, and
like all great lovers she did not live to see the ending of her love.
She spelled out or gave a name to a part of nature that had previ-
ously only existed in the form of monstrosity or the negative classi-
fication of sin. Moreover, she played out the internal division of
the sexes according to a feminine principle, a logic of semblance in
which the physical masking of the feminine was matched by an op-
posite trajectory-that of the masculine into the feminine. In ei-
ther case, the principle of division was internal to gender and un-
constrained by the apparent exteriority of the body.
To return to the immediate hermeneutic in the operatic ac-
count of Semiramis's incestuous love, she is, almost meekly, inno-
cent of any intention to seduce her son. That she longs for her son
is without question; she "would happily give up the empire of the
world to [her] son; but [she] lost that son .... -75 To this it should
be added that, when Semiramis finally learns of the identity of Ar-
sace as her son, when "the veil of darkness [is] at last ... rent as-
sunder, "76 she implores him: "[G]o on-strike; fulfil a god's be-

74 FRAN(OIS ROUSTANG, THE QUADRILLE OF GENDER: CASANOVA'S "MEMOIRS,"

152 (Anne C. Vila trans., 1988).
75 ROSSINI, supra note 1, at 66.
76 Id. at 71.
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1669

hest! Extinguish in my blood an abominable love."77 Casanova's

laugh has grown cold in the years that separate his memoirs from
the opera. The allegorical figure of Semiramis has moved dra-
matically and pathetically from the symbolic to the real, or more
precisely from divinity to despair, from empire to subjection, from
passion to abjection. The image of semblance upon which the
power of transgression depends has been torn away to reveal not
law or the beauty of form, but rather the weakness and indiffer-
ence of the body as the site of feminine guilt.

CONCLUSION
Why then do we sing of the death of this woman Semiramis?
In the earliest histories, she was both wise and prudent, and rather
than dying she returned from the realm of the living to that of the
gods. In another version, she became a bird. Only in the late
eighteenth century was her death re-written as the inexorable exe-
cution of an invisibly ordained judgment, as punishment for her
masks, her sensuality, and her femininity. At the dawn of the in-
dustrial and technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, in
the wake of a great liberation from the immediate exigencies of
nature, women were again to be subjected. In this sense, Semir-
amide represents the reassertion of the antique Salic law for the
dubious benefit of the modern age."
In another sense, if we listen to the opera or at least its words,
they render audible and explicit a politics of law that is more usu-
ally shrouded by the apparent professionalism and putatively eso-
teric quality of law. The myth of Semiramis is historically remark-
able for belonging to a tradition of gynocratic politics and of
women's law. Semiramis governed the greatest empire known to
the antique Orient and was lauded in myth and in history as a
judge, a lawmaker, and a leader of men. In short, she was the ul-
timate symbol of an alternative tradition, of what Irigaray most re-
cently, though certainly not uniquely, dubbed proleptically a sci-
ence, history, religion, and law appropriate to women. In secular
legal terms the principal reference to Semiramis comes in debates
over the legitimacy of feminine succession, and while mention is
made of the gynocracy of Assyria, there is nowhere the same de-
gree of image or of detail that theatre and opera can provide. Op-
era was here the cultural face of law and spelled out for a mascu-

77 Id. at 81.
78 On the salic law, see the texts collected in LES DROITS DES FEMMES ET LA LOI
SALIQUE (1994); see also ANTOINE HOTMAN, TRAIT DE LA LOY SALIQUE (1616).
1670 CARDOZO LAW REVIEW [Vol. 20:1649

line or simply dominant imagination a subjection of women that

had again become precarious in the fin de sicle mood of continen-
tal Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Why then do we sing of the death of Semiramis? At one level
admittedly, the denial and vicious denigration of the gynocratic
tradition requires it. The legal profession that rebuilt the civil law
in the wake of the Napoleonic Code was explicitly a school of exe-
getes, of rationalists who sought to ban the "levity of interpreta-
tions," and to impose, more geometrico, an arithmetical govern-
ance, a strict law in which the letter rather than the spirit would
rule and rule alone. Their measure or scale was that of the self-
same reasons, equal differences, which Bodin formulated numeri-
cally by the progression three, nine, fifteen, twenty-one, twenty-
seven, and so on. Ironically, or perhaps predictably, that monoto-
nous scale of equal difference disallowed access to any historical
understanding of justice. It killed difference by equalizing it, and
thereby submerged justice under the weight of repetition. In that
sense, the opera Semiramide kills the ultimate symbol of feminine
rule so as to instantiate in a somewhat more popular form, in mu-
sic, in the social unconscious, both the memory and the threat of
harmonical justice and feminine rule.
There is, however, also a creative ambivalence to the use of
musical form to give expression to so prosaic or misogynistic and
legalistic a theme. The counterposition of prose, or strict law, to
the poetics of an euphantasist practice of judgment, an aesthetic of
law, is always prone to a deconstruction by virtue of the very
means by which the antagonism of the genders or the reassertion
of the querelle des femmes occurs. Ironically that ambivalence or
flaw in the popular reason of law gains a poetic and long accepted
reflection in the medieval reception of the myth of Semiramis.
Both Boccaccio and Pizan related the same curious anecdote of
the power of Semiramis as empress. That final image of Semir-
amis illustrates the complexity of law's interiority or mood. While
Semiramis is in her chamber surrounded by women of the court
who were pleating her hair, a messenger brings news that one of
her kingdoms had rebelled against her. She immediately leaves
her court and gathering up an army of loyal subjects she stamps
out the rebellion with speed and dramatic force. For a long time
afterwards one could see on a vast pedestal in Babylon a huge
statue of richly embellished bronze, representing a princess hold-
ing a sword whose hair was tressed one side and unkempt on the
other.
1999] OPERATIC HERMENEUTICS 1671

That janus image of a feminine sovereign, order and law, jux-

taposed with a wild or natural order and power well captures the
two faces of Semiramis. Both sovereign and libertine, she was a
woman who bore the force of a law that exceeded that of the mas-
culine or positive order of rule. She was similar yet different ac-
cording to an internal principle of division. She was the bearer of
an eros, or logic of desire, that substituted the mask of similarity
for the antinomy of difference. That difference necessarily be-
longs within the logic of the same-of similarity and difference. It
might also be valuable to recognise that the image of a feminine
justice summons an au deld or beyond of law that precisely cannot
be comprehended in the black letter or cold prose of a written le-
gality. What John Selden termed the "other face" (facies altera) of
English law-its feminine history, its images both internal and ex-
ternal-is also properly its other. The image was law's other, or an
alternative law, a feminine justice and rule that was irreducible to
the order of positive law and quite possibly irrecoverable to con-
temporary legal historiography. Semiramis was in many respects
an exemplar of that otherness, and the ambivalence of her image-
that she was figured as part nature, part law, part force, and part
order-is suggestive of both the ideal and the threat that feminine
figures of justice pose to the order of law. And as her death une-
quivocally announced, she was the harbinger of an aesthetic-of a
harmony or rhythm-that has yet to be achieved.