Complete Poems (33 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
I didn’t go to the funeral. I was sick.
All alone his mother mourned for him,
over the white coffin, pure of heart.
Fifteen years had already passed.
It was the first year of Theodosius’s reign.
In the salon of his father’s mansion
a young man, an Alexandrian, was waiting
for a visit from his beloved friend.
In order to pass the time more easily
he started to read the first book he came across.
It was by a rather tetchy sophist
who, as a slight to the Christians,
quoted the sentence of Julian.
“Certainly” the young Alexandrian murmured,
“Matthew first, first Luke.”
Still, as for the rest of Julian’s trivialities,
Homer and Hesiod, he merely smiled.
IMPORTANT CAVAFIAN
CHARACTERS
A small number of historical figures and families recur so frequently in Cavafy’s poetic landscape that readers would do well to get to know them before undertaking a reading of the poems—or, indeed, of these Notes. Accordingly, I have provided general introductions to this crucial handful of “Cavafian Characters” immediately below, before the Notes themselves. This is partly to give the reader a generous sense of who these people and dynasties are before he or she reads, in greater detail, about the specific incidents described in the poems and explained in the Notes; also, having an easily consulted concise biography of these characters will spare the reader having to scramble within the Notes to find the necessary information whenever one of these important and oft-encountered characters appears.
Otherwise, the Notes are straightforward. As the information about publication dates appears in the text of the poems itself, I have omitted discussion of the dates of composition and publication unless the details bear importantly on our understanding of the poem. The specific words or phrases from the text of a poem that seem to require explanation in the Notes—names of people or places, dates, etc.—appear in small capital letters.
All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated; translations of Cavafy’s “Notes on Poetics and Ethics” quoted in the Introduction and the Notes are by Manuel Savidis.
M
ARCUS
A
NTONIUS
(M
ARC
A
NTONY
), soldier, statesman, co-ruler of Rome during the turbulent times when the Republic was crumbling, friend of Julius Caesar and lover and then husband of Cleopatra of Egypt, and above all a Roman who was besotted with all things Greek—not least, the greatest metropolis of the Greek-speaking East, Alexandria—is the subject of seven of Cavafy’s poems. It is not difficult to see
why he exerted such a fascination on the poet. This remarkable figure, in whose biography a considerable personal brilliance contrasted with an ultimate failure in a way that particularly appealed to Cavafy (as witness his poems about the Byzantine emperor John Cantacuzenus, below), embodied the tensions between Greek and Roman culture, between the rising Europe of the West and the more sophisticated, often decadent and multicultural East, to which the poet would return so often, in so many ways. Cavafy’s special interest in what it meant to be Greek over the centuries was also excited by this complicated figure, a Roman who was irresistibly drawn to, and eventually absorbed by, Hellenistic culture.
Marc Antony was born in 83 B.C., as dramatic political and social upheavals in the Roman Republic were setting the stage for violent civil war that would result in the creation of the Empire—events in which Antony himself was to play a decisive role. After an apparently turbulent youth, he served in Palestine and Egypt in his mid-twenties, and soon after became attached to the staff of Julius Caesar, whose interests at home and abroad Antony vigorously supported. After the assassination of Caesar in 44 B.C., Antony shared supreme power at Rome with Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian (later the emperor Augustus), and Marcus Lepidus as one of the
triumviri,
the three supreme leaders of the state; as part of his duties, he oversaw the reorganization of the eastern portion of Rome’s empire.
It was during this phase of his career that Antony met Cleopatra, in the year 41 B.C., when she was twenty-eight and he forty-two. This remarkable, shrewd, ambitious, and brilliant queen had already been the lover of Julius Caesar, to whom she had borne a son, Caesarion (the subject of Cavafy’s “Caesarion”); with her Antony began a relationship soon after their meeting, and she bore him twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the year after they met. By 37 B.C., the alliance between Antony and Cleopatra had become political as well as personal: as Antony, supreme Roman leader in the East and increasingly enamored of Greek and Eastern ways, restored to Egypt certain portions of its former empire—even portions that belonged, properly speaking, to Rome—Cleopatra put Egypt’s resources at Antony’s disposal. In 34 B.C. the couple celebrated an elaborately symbolic ceremony known as the
“Donations,” during which Cleopatra and her children were recognized as the rulers of an empire comprising all the lands that had been conquered by Alexander the Great three centuries before. The ceremony (to which Cavafy returns in his poem “Alexandrian Kings”) was filled with religious and cultural symbolism, and suggested a revival of the Alexandrian vision of Greek empire in the East.
Following the Donations, relations between Antony and his fellow
triumvir
Octavian worsened dramatically, and the next year there was a bitter exchange of accusations between the two powerful men. Among other things, Octavian in Rome published the (alleged) contents of Antony’s will, in which the Roman soldier asked to be buried in his beloved Alexandria; this was taken, as Octavian knew it would be, as a gross insult to Roman sensibilities. Finally, in 32 B.C., Octavian declared war on Cleopatra—and, therefore, on Antony. After their defeat by Octavian and his fleet at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Antony and Cleopatra both committed suicide (in August of the following year). Ironically, Antony and Octavian would remain intertwined through their descendants: through his two daughters, both called Antonia, Marc Antony was an ancestor of the emperors Gaius (“Caligula”), Claudius, and Nero, and of Messalina, the adulterous wife of Claudius who was eventually executed for her sexual excesses.
The first-century A.D. sage and miracle worker A
POLLONIUS OF
T
YANA
(a town in the Roman province of Cappadocia, in central Asia Minor) was a figure of lasting fascination for Cavafy, who during his lifetime published three works about the remarkable Apollonius—“But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent” (1896; 1899; 1915), “If Indeed He Died” (1897; 1910; 1920), “Apollonius of Tyana in Rhodes” (?; 1925)—and left the draft of another, “Among the Groves of the Promenades,” now published as one of the Unfinished Poems. This cycle of poems makes clear the poet’s great intimacy with our primary source for the life of Apollonius, which itself is one of the most remarkable works of Greek literature under the Roman Empire: the sprawling, rather baroque
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
by the third-century littérateur Flavius
Philostratus, episodes from which provide the inspiration for all of Cavafy’s Apollonius poems.
An itinerant Neopythagorean philosopher who lived through much of the first century A.D., Apollonius is reported to have traveled widely, as far as Ethiopia and India; these travels inevitably give Philostratus’s
Life
much of its vivid,
Odyssey-
like color. After his death, Apollonius became renowned both for his defiance of Roman despots—the climax of the first half of the
Life
is a confrontation with Nero; the climax of the second half, a confrontation with Domitian—and for his magical powers, which were said to have included the ability not only to heal the sick and raise the dead, but to see into the near future. (Philostratus’s
Life,
composed as Christianity was rising to its ultimate power in Roman society, much later became a useful text for those seeking to present the philosophical and miracle-working Oriental Greek as a pagan rival to Christ.) For instance, the sage of Tyana is said not only to have had a telepathic vision of the assassination of Domitian (the subject of “Among the Groves of the Promenades”), but also to have predicted a plague that struck the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor. It was, in fact, this prediction that was later held against him when he was accused by an Egyptian enemy of various crimes and impieties, among them sorcery. Apollonius was subsequently tried before the notoriously cruel emperor Domitian (Titus Flavius Domitianus, 51–96 A.D.). In the
Life,
whose relationship to the historical truth is, to be sure, often casual, the trial scene—a grand occasion for displays of rhetorical pyrotechnics—takes up nearly all of the final book.
Already in an 1892 essay on Keats’s
Lamia
(a poem that takes its
donnée
from Philostratus’s tale of a lady vampire), Cavafy refers to the
Life of Apollonius
as a “storehouse of poetic material,” and indeed two of the four Apollonius poems can be confidently dated to the mid- to late 1890s, just a few years later. This was the decade in which, as the scholar Diana Haas has shown in great detail in her important study of the religious issues in Cavafy’s early work (
Le problème religieux dans l’oeuvre de Cavafy: Les années de formation [
1882–1905
],
Sorbonne, 1996), the poet was struggling to find a way to write meaningfully about religious belief, and the work of this period indeed betrays an interest in the supernatural, the uncanny, and telepathic knowledge that was to last his
entire life. (They are also phenomena that recur in the fin-de-siècle Continental poetry—Symbolist, Esoteric, Decadent—that influenced him so strongly in those years.) That interest is evident not only in the many poems treating those themes (and hardly only in connection with Apollonius: see, for example, “Theodotus,” “Since Nine—,” “Caesarion,” and the Unfinished Poems “Athanasius” and “From the Unpublished History”) but also in his taste for tales of the fantastic (cf. his own ghost story, “In Broad Daylight”) and in his belief, greatly influenced by the Parnassians and articulated with particular emphasis in a number of the early poems, that the poet was a kind of seer gifted with second sight. (See, for instance, the Unpublished Poem “Correspondences According to Baudelaire.”)
Cavafy’s religious crisis of the 1890s suggests a further explanation for the origins of his interest in Apollonius during those years. This was when he was trying to arrive at a unified vision of Hellenic identity from the Hellenistic monarchies through the fall of Constantinople to his own day—a vision, ultimately, that would allow him to synthesize Greek history, the Orthodox faith (from the early Christian era to his own time), and also a pagan homoeroticism. It is in this context that we do well to recall the Italian historian Arnoldo Momigliano’s observation that the supernaturally gifted pagan hero of the
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
was, in fact, a figure whose literary influence can be felt in St. Athanasius’s
Life of Saint Anthony,
the prototype for the Christian hagiography. Apart from his considerable inherent interest, then, Apollonius is a crucial figure because, as Cavafy surely understood, he is yet another link in a chain that binds the pagan and Christian Greek worlds.
It should be said, too, with respect to the
Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
that the biographer was of as great an interest to Cavafy as the subject was. Flavius Philostratus (ca. 170–240 A.D.) was a distinguished man of letters, of Greek origin, and a favorite of Julia Domna, wife of the emperor Septimius Severus; it was at her request that the
Life
was written. Cavafy’s championing of Philostratus may therefore be seen as deeply connected to his sense of himself as a “Hellenistic” figure—an inhabitant of Greater Greece, a passionate heir to Greek culture living far from mainland Greece itself. An almost prickly impatience with the cultural snobberies of the European intellectual establishment (with its
almost exclusive focus on “high” Classicism and Athens) is, indeed, evident in the
Lamia
article:
Foreign scholars generally speak condescendingly about Philostratus and his works, just as they speak condescendingly about many writers of the decadent phase, as they are accustomed to call it, of Greek literature.
The Roman emperor J
ULIAN
(331?–363 A.D.), called “
THE
A
POSTATE
” because of his efforts to restore the newly Christianized Roman Empire to pagan worship, is the figure who more than any other preoccupied Cavafy’s creative mind throughout his career. In the work he prepared for publication, there are six Julian poems: “Julian, Seeing Indifference,” “Julian in Nicomedia,” “A Great Procession of Priests and Laymen,” “Julian and the Antiochenes,” “You Didn’t Understand,” and “On the Outskirts of Antioch”; the Unpublished Poems give us “Julian at the Mysteries”; and the publication, in 1994, of the texts of the poet’s Unfinished Poems adds to this already substantial cycle an extraordinary trove of four more works, which can be confidently dated to between 1920 and 1926: “Athanasius,” “The Bishop Pegasius,” “The Rescue of Julian,” and “Hunc Deorum Templis”; there are also fragments of an untitled poem beginning “Fifteen years had passed … ,” which also has Julian as its theme. Twelve poems in all, then, devoted to one complex and enigmatic figure who evoked in Cavafy an unflagging if negative fascination. Given Cavafy’s supreme preoccupation with the character of Greek identity as transmitted from the pagan ancient world through Byzantine Christianity to the present day, his preoccupation with the apostate emperor, struggling to reimpose pagan worship, is not difficult to understand.