The plot is taken from De Dea Syria ("On the Syrian Goddess", attributed to Lucian) concerning an incident from the history of the Seleucid dynasty which ruled much of the Middle East during the Hellenistic era of the ancient world.
Hoffman designated Stratonice as a comédie héroïque, meaning a drama with a happy ending (contemporary French critics generally avoided the term "tragicomedy" as this suggested a work mixing tragic and comic elements).
"[7] Hoffman's choice of Classical subject was unusual for the Opéra-Comique and Méhul's music was similarly innovative, more influenced by the serious tradition of tragédie lyrique than the lighter opéra comiques of Grétry which had been fashionable up to that point.
Méhul studied Gluck and Salieri for their approach to musical drama, as well as Haydn's orchestration and the melodies of Sacchini and Piccinni, Italian composers who had written tragic operas for the French stage in the 1770s and 1780s.
According to the critic Elizabeth Bartlet, this quartet made a great impression on the artist Ingres, a music lover who owned a copy of the score, and later painted a work entitled Antiochus and Stratonice, depicting this very moment.