In addition to the Diodorus passage, Shelley must have recalled similar examples of boastfulness in the epitaphic tradition. Smith produced a now-forgotten poem with the unfortunate title “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.” Shelley’s contribution was “Ozymandias,” one of the best-known sonnets in European literature. Stimulated by their conversation, Smith and Shelley wrote sonnets based on the passage in Diodorus. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.” (The statue and its inscription do not survive, and were not seen by Shelley his inspiration for “Ozymandias” was verbal rather than visual.) Diodorus reports the inscription on the statue, which he claims was the largest in Egypt, as follows: “King of Kings Ozymandias am I. Shelley and Smith remembered the Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a statue of Ozymandias, more commonly known as Rameses II (possibly the pharaoh referred to in the Book of Exodus). The power of pharaonic Egypt had seemed eternal, but now this once-great empire was (and had long been) in ruins, a feeble shadow.
In the wake of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798, the archeological treasures found there stimulated the European imagination. One evening, they began to discuss recent discoveries in the Near East. Shelley’s friend the banker Horace Smith stayed with the poet and his wife Mary (author of Frankenstein) in the Christmas season of 1817.
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