Sophonisbe (tragedy)

Her former fiancé Massinisse (Massinissa) defeats and kills Siphax with the help of the Romans and wants to marry Sophonisbe; Scipion (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus) however wants her sent to Rome.

[2] The material for the plot derives from accounts by Titus Livius, Polybius and Appian, which had already been adapted into stage plays by a number of writers including Gian Giorgio Trissino (1514), Jean Mairet (1629), Pierre Corneille (1663) and Nathaniel Lee (1675).

[4] The failure of both this and his other play Don Pèdre, roi de Castille depressed him, and he took a break from writing tragedies until 1777, when he wrote Irène and Agathocle.

The work was published with the title Sophonisbe, Tragédie de Mairet, reparée à neuf, Veuve Duchesne, Paris, 1770.

[2] Voltaire added an explanatory preface in which he claimed that Mairet's work had been adapted by a certain Jean-Baptiste Lantin, who had died fifty years previously, but this is certainly spurious.