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Les Misérables vocabulary
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Sardanapalus
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Definition:the legendary epicurean archetype of 7th century Greece.---[He] exceeded all previous rulers in sloth and luxury. He spent his whole life in self-indulgence. He dressed in women's clothes and wore make-up. He had many concubines, female and male. He wrote his own epitaph, which stated that physical gratification is the only purpose of life.[...]To avoid falling into the hand of his enemies, Sardanapalus had a huge funeral pyre created for himself on which were piled "all his gold, silver and royal apparel". He had his eunuchs and concubines boxed in inside the pyre, burning himself and them to death.text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike
painting: By Eugène Delacroix - http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/delacroi/p-delacroix22.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38990
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Uses:
For more than three years I remained the victim of a most singular and diabolical illusion. Poor country priest though I was, I led every night in a dream—would to God it had been all a dream!—a most worldly life, a damning life, a life of Sardanapalus.
Théophile Gautier. Clarimonde.
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Sardanapalus again as we have it in Athenæus, gave a præmium to any one that invented and served him with some novel cate;
The Master-Cooks of King Richard II. The Forme of Cury, Samuel Pegge's Introduction (1780)
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You have been Sardanapalus, you have been Vincent de Paul— it makes no difference. That is the truth.
Victor Hugo. Les Misérables
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Sardanapalus—see Diodorus—maintained himself seven in Nineveh; but to no purpose. Troy expired at the close of the second lustrum; and Azoth, as Aristaeus declares upon his honour as a gentleman, opened at last her gates to Psammetichus, after having barred them for the fifth part of a century....
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