[Sardanapalus,] king of [the] Assyrians, [born] from Ninus and Semiramis.[1] He lived in Nineveh, spending his time generally indoors in the royal palaces, keeping away from weapons and not going out to hunt, like the ancient kings, but colouring his face and making up his eyes and competing with the concubines both for beauty and for hairstyle, and acting overall with feminine disposition. And in accordance with prior orders the satraps of the other nations, when they headed the armies, showed themselves to him in front of the gates.
This man was slaughtered by Perseus; and the flatterers and the imitators of his voluptuousness and gluttony and passion wrote this on his grave, as if written by him: 'I possess only etc.'[2] But those who wrote this wrote falsely: for a dead man does not possess what he ate and drank, but all those things have vanished into stinking destruction, and he possesses only the stench of his unlawful life, which constantly pains and distresses his miserable soul, which knows in itself the very worst things [and] can remember what the wretch did, unlawfully and licentiously.