Epponina
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Epponina was the wife of Julius Sabinus.
The story of the couple of Julius Sabinus and Epponina, with emphasis on the loyalty of Epponina (known as "Éponine"), became popular in France during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Epponina then lived a double-life for many years as his widow, while also on one occasion even visiting Rome with Sabinus disguised as a slave. She even gave birth to two sons by her "deceased" husband.
Eventually, the deception became too obvious to continue unnoticed. In AD 78 Sabinus and Epponina were arrested and taken to Rome to be questioned by the emperor Vespasian. Her pleas for her husband were ignored. She then berated Vespasian to such an extent that he ordered her execution along with her husband. Plutarch later wrote that "In the whole of his reign no darker deed than this, none more odious in the sight of heaven, was committed."
Their sons were separated, one sent to Delphi and the other to Egypt.
Cultural references
The modernised French version of Epponina's name, Éponine, became familiar in revolutionary France, because of its connotations of wifely virtue, patriotism and anti-imperialism. Even before the revolution there were several French works about Sabinus and Éponine. Michel-Paul-Gui de Chabanon's tragedy Éponine was performed in 1762. It formed the basis for Sabinus, an opera in five acts composed by François-Joseph Gossec, premiered at Versailles on 4 December 1773. After the revolution Eponine et Sabinus (1796) was performed at the Lycée theatre. De Lisle de Salles' novel Éponine led to his imprisonment during the Reign of Terror, as it was interpreted as an attack on the Committee of Public Safety.
In his novel Les Misérables, the French author Victor Hugo used the name for a character who also aspires to die with her own beloved in a revolution. Epponina also appears as "Éponine" in Baudelaire's poem "Little old Ladies" from Les Fleurs du Mal in a verse dedicated to Hugo:
These dislocated wrecks were women once,
Were Eponine or Laïs! hunchbacked freaks,
Though broken let us love them! they are souls.
There were several paintings of the couple, including works by Nicolas-André Monsiau and Etienne Barthélémy Garnier. These usually depict them hiding in a cave, a reference to a myth that a cave near Langres was the place in which Sabinus had hidden. It is still locally known as "Sabinus' cave" (Grotte de Sabinus). Joseph Mills Hanson, who visited it shortly after World War I, described it as a "cave in the rock having two entrances, the one looking south, the other east. The interior is very irregular in outline but it is perhaps fifty feet deep, twenty feet wide, and seven feet high. Near the east entrance is a rough pillar, left evidently by the cutting away of the surrounding stone." A statue of the Virgin Mary was placed there, along with graffiti left by American soldiers in the war.
