When Percy Bysshe Shelley first wrote “Ozymandias” in 1817, he did so as part of a competition with his friend and fellow poet, Horace Smith. The two men each agreed to write a sonnet on the subject of Ozymandias, which is the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian king otherwise known as Rameses II. The inspiration for this subject came from a quote by a Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus, who had written in the first century BCE of the largest statue in Egypt. According to him, this statue bore the following inscription: “I am Ozymandias, king of kings; if anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits.” An altered version of this quote stands at the center of Shelley’s unusually structured sonnet, which features a nested series of three speakers. The main speaker quotes “a traveller from an antique land” (line 1), who in turn quotes the words of Ozymandias carved on an empty pedestal in the Egyptian desert. Despite the survival of these words, the statue they were meant to accompany has long since toppled, indicating the ephemeral nature of power in the face of time’s relentless passage.

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