Complete Poems (34 page)

Born probably in 331 A.D., Flavius Claudius Julianus was the son of Constantine the Great’s half brother, Julius Constantius; as befitted a member of the newly Christian Imperial Family, the young Julian was raised as a Christian, and even ordained a Lector in the church (the office held by the title character in “Tomb of Ignatius”). His childhood
was marred by a trauma that had a great effect on his emerging character, which, for all of the young man’s intellectual precociousness (and, later, his undeniable military ability and administrative canniness), was secretive, distrustful, high-handed, and often contemptuous of opposition and criticism. In 337, on the death of his half uncle Constantine the Great, many members of Julian’s immediate family were executed, most likely on order of the new emperor, Constantine’s son Constantius II, who undoubtedly saw in the profusion of half uncles and half cousins a source of future rivalries. The six-year-old Julian and his twelve-year-old half brother, Gallus, were spared apparently only because of their extreme youth. (For their rescue by Christian priests, an act about which the adult Julian showed an appalling lack of gratitude, see the Unfinished Poem “The Rescue of Julian.”)

Julian’s childhood and adolescence were solitary: from the ages of eleven to seventeen he lived in exile on the royal estate of Macellum in Cappadocia, carefully watched over by Constantius’s agents. But an early exposure to the pagan classics by a beloved teacher provided the impetus for what would become a lifelong obsession with the pre-Christian Greek culture that he later sought to champion. The combination of the psychologically traumatizing loss of virtually his entire family, his precarious political position vis-à-vis his cousin, the Christian emperor, and the solace that the solitary, bookish youth clearly found in the Greek classics all help to explain Julian’s susceptibility, later in adolescence, to the less rational, more mystical branches of Neoplatonic teachings, with their emphasis on portents, signs, and divine magic or theurgy. By the time he was twenty, in 351, he seems to have been fully converted to paganism, although he successfully concealed his religious inclinations until his accession to the throne ten years later. This patient and calculating duplicity held particular fascination for Cavafy (as witness, for instance, “Julian in Nicomedia” and the Unfinished Poem “The Bishop Pegasius”)—not least, it seems safe to assume, because it resonated with the rather different but equally necessary caution and self-concealment with which Cavafy, as a homosexual, was painfully familiar, as many of his earlier poems witness.

This two-facedness served Julian well for the rest of his life. As a result of the intervention of Constantius’s wife, the empress Eusebia,
who seems to have had a soft spot for the young prince, Julian was recalled from exile, and late in 355, at the age of twenty-four, he was granted the title of Caesar by his cousin the emperor and given a military command in Gaul, where rebellious tribes had been a thorn in Constantius’s side for some time. Over the next several years he proved himself an able commander and resoundingly defeated the Germanic tribes of the Alammani and the Franks, restoring the Roman frontier on the Rhine. Made uneasy, no doubt, by his young cousin’s military successes and popularity with his legions—but also sorely pressed in his own military adventures against the Persians—Constantius early in 360 sent an emissary to Julian demanding that he send between one-third and one-half of his army to serve under Constantius in the East. This was the pretext for the open break with his cousin that Julian had been waiting for: in Paris, instigated very likely by Julian and his few intimates, the troops acclaimed him Augustus, but open civil war was avoided when Constantius II died in 361, as Julian was marching to meet him.

Julian’s reign was a short one: he was killed in battle in the spring of 363 as he was retreating from a major campaign against the Persians. But his rule nonetheless betrayed the single-minded ruthlessness and subtle duplicity that had characterized his youth and young manhood. Vigorous fiscal and bureaucratic reforms, while in many ways salubrious, were also cunningly contrived to deprive Christian prelates of property and power while reviving a model of civic administration based on that of the Classical Greek city-states; similarly, although his restoration of status and real power to pagan cults was balanced by an ostensible refusal to persecute Christians, his occasional solicitousness toward certain Christian clerics usually had purely political motivations; Christian professors were, moreover, forbidden to teach the classics, and certain Christian clerics were in fact persecuted.

Indeed, despite a nostalgic yearning for the culture of the great Classical past that would have seemed, at first glance, to make Julian a sympathetic figure in the eyes of Cavafy, the Apostate is a figure for whom the poet has no little disdain—even contempt. For Julian’s paganism was characterized by an asceticism and puritanical outlook that one might rather have expected from the early church fathers, and that was distinctly at odds with Cavafy’s own hard-won and humane celebration of
sensuality. For Cavafy, it was the pleasure-loving and indulgent Christians of the fourth century A.D., with their taste for luxury and leisure, for horse racing and the theater, who were the truer heirs to the pagan culture of the Greek east. The strange and sharp ironies of Cavafy’s use of this figure are well summed up in the evaluation of the scholar G. W. Bowersock in his biography of Julian:

The fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor J
OHN
VI C
ANTACUZENUS
(ca. 1295–June 15, 1383; reigned 1347–1354), the brilliant, talented, and ultimately failed “reluctant emperor,” has been much admired by historians since his own time, from his contemporary, the verbose but not unintelligent chronicler Nicephorus Gregoras (“he would have been one of the greatest of Byzantine emperors”) to Gibbon, who greatly respected his adherence to principle despite the enormous temptations of ambition, to John Julius Norwich, who in his 1995 study
Byzantium: The Decline and Fall
refers to Cantacuzenus as “a man of integrity, courage, high intelligence and a rare degree of political vision.” In Cavafy’s work he emerges as a representative of the kind of person for whom this poet consistently expresses admiration no matter what period he may have belonged to: someone who upholds the standards and values of his culture even as that civilization crumbles around him. He is the subject of four significant poems, two Published and two Unfinished, which together constitute an important cycle within the poet’s oeuvre: “John Cantacuzenus Triumphs” (1924), “Of Colored Glass” (1925), “The Patriarch” (February 1925), and “On Epiphany” (December 1925).

Cantacuzenus, the scion of a wealthy and powerful family who rose to the supreme political position of Great Domestic, was the loyal friend, closest adviser, and general of Emperor Andronicus III Palaeologus. When Andronicus died in 1341, he left a son (later John V), aged nine; his will directed that Cantacuzenus be regent for the minor sovereign. However, his regency was almost immediately challenged by a powerful faction at court led by the tremendously ambitious Admiral Apocaucus (“bold and subtle, rapacious and profuse,” says Gibbon) and the scheming Patriarch of the church, John XIV Calecas. (Cantacuzenus, ironically, had been responsible for the elevation of both men; in a letter cited by Nicephorus Gregoras in his chronicle, a source Cavafy was well familiar with, Cantacuzenus bitterly reminded Calecas that he had helped him secure the patriarchate in 1334.) These men together persuaded the widowed empress, Anna of Savoy, that her dead husband’s friend was planning to usurp the throne (something he could easily have done on Andronicus’s death, had he wished); after Anna claimed control of the boy herself, the three began a campaign of vicious harassment against Cantacuzenus and his party that ultimately resulted in the civil war of 1341–1347.

The interlude proved to be one of the most disastrous and demoralizing in the history of the empire: during the six years before Cantacuzenus returned in triumph and took the throne for himself, Anna and her party, who had no experience of governance and few ideas about how to rule the empire they had appropriated, laid waste the empire’s treasuries and seriously damaged the economy, made alliances with Genoa and Venice that would prove to weaken Byzantium considerably, and went as far as to pawn the crown jewels to the Venetians, for 30,000 ducats. (As a result of the latter outrage, Cantacuzenus and his queen were forced to wear regalia made of paste during their coronation, an episode that furnishes the material for “Of Colored Glass.”) Among the many grotesqueries to which the coalition of the weak empress and her power-hungry advisers descended was a desperate promise to the pope by the Italian-born Anna that she and they would embrace the Roman faith in return for his support—although this promise was made in letters that may well have been forged in Anna’s name by the impressively unscrupulous Apocaucus, with an eye to eventually discrediting her and seizing the throne for himself.

Although Cavafy, as we know from his reading notes to Gibbon, was often impatient with the latter’s disdainful view of Byzantium, the two men are united in their admiration for Cantacuzenus, who even as he was forced into open rebellion by the outrages committed against himself, his friends, and his family by Anna and her party, clung to the forms of law, insisting, when he was declared emperor in October 1341, that no crowning take place, and that he was merely protecting the rights of the young John. (“But even in this act of revolt, he was still studious of loyalty; and the titles of John Palaeologus and Anne of Savoy were proclaimed before his own name and that of his wife Irene.”)

In time, Cantacuzenus prevailed. He possessed enormous wealth of his own—sufficient, Gibbon reports, to equip a fleet of seventy ships out of his own funds—and was supported by powerful allies in central and northern Greece; eventually, he also had Serbian and Turkish troops at his disposal. In Constantinople, meanwhile, Anna was in trouble. In 1345 Apocaucus was murdered by some opponents whom he had had imprisoned; later, after discovering to her great rage that Calecas had been trying secretly to conclude a peace agreement with Cantacuzenus, Anna had the Patriarch deposed on trumped-up theological charges. She had at last achieved sole rule, but her triumph was short-lived: in February 1347, immediately after the deposition of Calecas, John Cantacuzenus stormed his way into the city and, with remarkable but characteristic evenhandedness, forced the empress to accept quite reasonable terms, which stipulated that he be crowned emperor, with her son, the fifteen-year-old John Palaeologus, as co-emperor. (“John Cantacuzenus Triumphs” takes the form of a monologue by a disappointed supporter of Anna and the Patriarch; to such former enemies Cantacuzenus showed admirable generosity.) His wife, the great noblewoman Irene Asenina—daughter of a powerful aristocrat, Andronicus Asen, granddaughter of the Bulgarian tsar John III, and great-granddaughter of Michael VIII, emperor and founder of the Paleologue dynasty—was crowned with him, and their daughter Helena was simultaneously married to the teenage John V. And so, as Gibbon dryly puts it, “Two emperors and three empresses were seated on the Byzantine throne.”

However, by 1352 relations between the two co-emperors had deteriorated (not least, Gibbon tells us, because “Constantinople was still
attached to the blood of her ancient princes; and this last injury accelerated the restoration of the rightful heir”), and another civil war broke out. This time, Cantacuzenus was defeated by John V, and in 1354 he was forced to abdicate. He thereafter became a monk, calling himself Joasaph, and during his monastic retirement devoted himself to matters theological (“he sharpened a controversial pen against the Jews and Mahometans,” Gibbon reports) and to writing his admirably meticulous and reflective (although inevitably self-justifying) memoirs in four books, the
Historiai,
or “Histories.” These were modeled, in part, on Thucydides’ work; the Unfinished Poem “On Epiphany” rather poignantly refers to them. The quality of having persisted in his political life with no little dignity against tremendous odds, and of then having retreated from the world stage with an equal decorum, clearly captivated Cavafy’s imagination. We might compare the poet’s apparent approval for the quiet abdication of Demetrius Poliorcetes in “King Demetrius,” and, by contrast, his disdain for the self-serving quality of the histories written by the scheming Anna Comnena in her forced retirement, in “Anna Comnena.”

The fact that all of the Cantacuzenus poems date to the mid-1920s suggests, to my mind, a final and particularly bitter layer of irony, one of which Cavafy, like any student of late Byzantine history, would have been well aware: for this date suggests that at some level, the Cantacuzenus cycle was, at least in part, inspired by the disastrous conclusion of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922. This war arose out of the irredentist concept of the
Megali Idea,
or “Great Idea,” the longstanding nationalist Greek dream (and a cornerstone of foreign policy almost since the establishment of the independent Greek state in the 1820s) of a “Greater Greece” encompassing large Greek Christian communities, such as that in Izmir (Smyrna), living under Turkish domination in Asia Minor. The war began with a massive Greek landing at Smyrna, and at first went well for the Greeks; but as Turkish resistance stiffened, the tide began to turn. The years 1921 and 1922 saw reverses for the Greeks, starting in the interior and moving toward the coast, a trajectory that culminated in the Turks’ recapture of Smyrna and their atrocious massacre of the Christian population of that city in September
1922. A month later an armistice was concluded, and the following year saw the harrowing exchange of populations between the two implacably hostile states. Cavafy’s friend Polis Modinos recalled how, a few days after the Smyrna disaster, he found the poet alone at home, sitting grief-stricken in his usual chair. Presently Cavafy exclaimed, “Smyrna is lost! Ionia is lost! The Gods are lost! …” Unable to go on, he simply wept in silence.