GreatInsights

Ozymandias, King of Kings

"... I have occasionally imagined Ozymandias fully aware of the joke..."

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Title: "Ozymandias, King of Kings". Image generated at imagine.art: Model = Imagine V4, Prompt = "Ozymandias, King of Kings. A massive statue of a pharaoh in the desert."

This article contains the script of Episode 4 of the GreatInsights Minicast, which you can listen to here:

Alternate link: Rumble
https://rumble.com/v4e4qlw-ozymandias-king-of-kings.html

Minicast Script

Welcome to the GreatInsights Minicast. My name is StJohn Piano, and I am a Blockchain Researcher @ Tela Network.

The topic of this short episode is "Ozymandias, King of Kings". Here follows a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said - "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Ozymandias" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London.

Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith, who wrote a sonnet on the same topic with the same title.

Their inspiration came from a passage from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in Bibliotheca historica, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work." In Shelley's poem, Diodorus becomes "a traveller from an antique land".

The poem explores the worldly fate of history and the ravages of time: even the greatest men and the empires they forge are impermanent, their legacies fated to decay into oblivion. "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" exemplifies the arrogance and hubris of a leader who believed his dominion would endure indefinitely.

Ozymandias was a Greek name for the pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt from 1279 to 1213 BC, and is possibly the pharaoh referred to in the Book of Exodus in the Bible.

As a personal aside, I have occasionally imagined Ozymandias fully aware of the joke, understanding perfectly well his position, the passing nature of his empire, the tragicomic aspect of such overwhelming ambition, and yet playing his role as best he could, conducting himself as an emperor should.

I hope you found this interesting and insightful. Thank you for listening.

This episode was sponsored by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Please direct any complaints about the "Marvin" class android to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaint Department, which is the only part of the company to still turn a profit and currently occupies all major land masses on three planets in the Sirius system.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, you can contact me on Tela. My contact link will be in the description below.

That's the end of this episode. I'll sign off with a Latin expression: ab uno disce omnes, which means "from one, learn all", and refers to situations in which a single example indicates a general truth.