Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/796

782 Assyria, who being attracted by her beauty and art, married her after the death of her husband; an action of which according to some authors, he had soon reason to repent; for she having first brought over to her interest the principal men of the state, next prevailed on the infatuated Ninus to invest her five days with the sovereign power. A decree was accordingly issued, that all the provinces should implicitly obey her during that time; which having obtained, she began the exercise of sovereignty, by putting to death the too indulgent husband who had conferred it on her, and so securing to herself the kingdom.

Other authors have denied that Ninus committed this rash, or Semiramis this execrable deed, but all agree that she succeeded him at his death, in whatever manner it happened.

Seeing herself at the head of a mighty empire, and seized with the ambition of immortalizing her memory, she proposed to do something that should far surpass all that had been done by her predecessors: in pursuance of this scheme, she built the mighty city of Babylon; which being finished in the space of one year, greatly exceeded in splendour and magnificence any thing the world had ever seen. Two millions of men are said to have been constantly employed on it, during the time it was erecting. After her death, her statue was erected in the famous temple at Hierapolis, and every day resorted to by a numerous croud of adorers, who paid her divine honours; as it was customary at that time to deify any great character, under the idea that they must have been demigods at least.

Semiramis is supposed to have lived in very different æras. Sir Isaac Newton places her about 760 years before Christ