Complete Poems (35 page)

The bitter relations between Greeks and Turks in the 1920s, the failed fantasy of a pure Greek territorial dominion over Greeks, the specter of Ottoman control over European Christians: Cavafy the historian in the twentieth century would have acutely understood the ironic significance that John Cantacuzenus’s story, in the fourteenth century, had for these themes. For in order to gain the upper hand against Apocaucus’s forces, Cantacuzenus had successfully concluded an alliance with the Ottoman emir Orhan (cemented by a controversial marriage between his daughter, Theodora Cantacuzene, and the Muslim leader); but the use of many thousands of Turkish troops, who successfully fought for John in his war against Anna and Apocaucus in the early 1340s and then again, a decade later, helped John in his campaign in the Balkans, was the step that led to the establishment of a permanent Turkish presence in the European continent, and eventually resulted in the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Hence John, whom Cavafy warmly describes in one of the poems in this cycle as “the glory of our [Byzantine] race,” may be seen as being ultimately responsible for the defeat of that race—a conclusion to which Gibbon had also bitterly come:

That fall was the cultural, ideological, and historical disaster which the “Megali Idea” was meant, in some large sense, to correct: a great idea
which, as we know—and as Cavafy knew, when he was working on these poems—ended in the dreadful disaster that “lost Ionia.”

A significant number of Cavafy’s poems treat, in some detail, monarchs belonging to the various royal houses of the Hellenistic era (conventionally dated from the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 B.C., after which those monarchies were established, to the death of Cleopatra, in 30 B.C., at which point the last of the independent dynasties, that of Egypt, was absorbed into Rome). Detailed comment about individual characters can be found in the Notes to the poems themselves, but any reader who wishes to read the poet’s work with comprehension should have at least a general grasp of this complex and convoluted era. For Cavafy, the Hellenistic world, in which local cultures across the breadth of Asia had been hybridized with Greek influences, and which eventually would come into conflict with the emerging power of Rome to the west (which would ultimately defeat and absorb those cultures), was a rich matrix of material that allowed him to explore, first, the meaning of Hellenic identity, and also to reflect on the nature of power, the vagaries of fate, and the ironies of history.

When Alexander died in Babylon at the age of thirty-three, he had neither left a son nor indicated clearly who among his loyal generals his successor was to be. (In response to the inevitable question of succession, he is said on his deathbed to have uttered the words
tôi kratistôi,
“to the strongest”; it being highly improbable that he wanted to incite the rivalries that would, indeed, later tear his empire apart, it seems far likelier that what he actually said was
tôi Kraterôi,
“to Craterus,” his loyal general.) Within a year, the first of three Wars of Succession that would radically change the political map of the world over the next two decades had begun. When the last of those struggles was over, three new realms had been carved out of the carcass of Alexander’s world empire, ruled by three dynasties: the Antigonids, who first controlled the eastern portions of Asia Minor and part of Syria, and eventually became the ruling house of Macedon itself, Alexander’s homeland; the Seleucids, who ended up controlling most of Alexander’s Asian conquests,
from Anatolia in the west to India in the east; and the Lagids, the dynastic name of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt (because its founder’s father had been called Lagus: the ending
-id
in Greek means “son of” or, more broadly, “descendant of”).

The A
NTIGONIDS
were so-called because they were descended from Alexander’s general Antigonus the One-Eyed (382–301 B.C.). Antigonus had been made governor of much of Asia Minor during Alexander’s lifetime; after the latter’s death, he received even more of that vast territory. During the next decade, Antigonus made several spectacular bids to take control of even more of the former empire, from Egypt to central Asia; he was killed, at the age of eighty-one, in one of the many battles he waged to this end. Eventually, however, his descendants did become the rulers of Macedon. Among them were Demetrius Poliorcetes (“the Besieger”), the subject of the poem “King Demetrius”; Philip V, who would support the Romans against the Seleucid emperor Antiochus III, the subject of “The Battle of Magnesia”; and Perseus, whose defeat by the Romans in 168 B.C. brought an end to the Antigonid house and to Macedonian independence, and who is referred to in a number of poems, including “For Antiochus Epiphanes.”

The S
ELEUCIDS
were descended from Seleucus (ca. 358–281 B.C.), an officer in Alexander’s army who had become the commander in chief of the army of Alexander’s general Perdiccas. The ruthlessly ambitious Seleucus later helped to assassinate Perdiccas in a bid for power for himself; under a treaty concluded with the other Successors in 320, he received the territory of Babylon but, as a result of both military aggression (including a defeat of Antigonus the One-Eyed) and canny diplomacy, he eventually expanded his empire to include a vast stretch of territory from Asia Minor and Syria (including the territory that would later become Judea) in the west, to India in the east—the largest by far of the successor states. The descendants of Seleucus (later given the epithet
Nicator,
“Conqueror”) include a number of monarchs named Seleucus, Antiochus, and Demetrius, several of whom are the subjects of Cavafy’s poems: see, for instance, “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” “Of Demetrius Soter,” “For Antiochus Epiphanes,” and the Unfinished Poem “Antiochus Cyzicenus.”

The L
AGIDS
were the ruling dynasty of Egypt from 305 B.C., when
the house was founded by Alexander’s general (and, according to some, half brother) Ptolemy I (367–283 B.C.), until the suicide of his distant descendant Cleopatra VII. All of the pharaohs of the house bore the name Ptolemy; their queens, who in the Egyptian tradition were often also their sisters, most often were named Cleopatra and Berenice. Ptolemy I had been named ruler of Egypt immediately following Alexander’s death; alone among the Successors, his ambitions never got the best of him, and during the Wars of Succession he showed himself content to secure his power base in Egypt and the surrounding areas. In 305 B.C. he declared himself pharaoh; but his bid for supreme power had begun two decades earlier, when he hijacked the funeral cortege that was meant to take Alexander’s body back to Macedon. Ptolemy eventually placed the meticulously embalmed body in a magnificent mausoleum in Alexandria, the great Hellenic city that Alexander had founded and which would become a second Athens, the leading city of the Hellenistic world. The dynasty founded by this shrewd old man would become distinguished for the spectacular corruption and ruthlessness showed by its incestuous members. Many of Cavafy’s poems are devoted to the Lagids, particularly those who figured in the complex power plays between Rome and the Successor states: for example, “Envoys from Alexandria,” “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” and “Caesarion.”

The City

Cavafy wrote an early version of this poem (entitled “In the Same City”) in 1894 and worked on it for the next fifteen years; it was finally published in the magazine
Nea Zoe
in April 1910.

It is easy to see why the poet, in arranging his first printed collection, chose this poem and the one that follows, “The Satrapy,” as the portals through which readers must pass in order to encounter his work: between them, they embrace his important themes, which would be developed, teased out, varied, and elaborated in the poems that follow. “The Satrapy,” like so many historical poems, contemplates the meaning of success and failure in life through the (often ironic) perspective of historical hindsight. In “The City,” the problem of the unfulfilled or failed life also emerges as a central preoccupation, but one perceived through the lens not of time but of place: here, the individual is seen within the frame of the metropolis and its overpowering aura. A comment by the poet concerning this important poem has been preserved:

A note from April 1907 makes it clear that the importance of the city in question lay in the dense network of emotional associations that it conjures in the poet’s mind—something that could be as true of a marginal city such as Alexandria in the early twentieth century (however frustrating
its provincialism could be) as it was of the great contemporary metropolises:

If anything, the circumscribed life of a provincial city had its artistic advantages. Another crucial and related theme in “The City” is what Cavafy, in a letter to his friend Pericles Anastassiades that accompanied an autographed copy of the poem, referred to as “ennui”:

George Seferis, in his journals (whose title in Greek,
Meres,
“Days,” self-consciously echoes the title of many of Cavafy’s poems), recalls a conversation that took place in April 1939, when he and Constantine Dimaras, later the century’s great scholar of Modern Greek literature, were attempting to characterize Cavafy’s poetry to André Gide, who was unfamiliar with it. Dimaras said it was “lyric”; Seferis claimed it was “didactic.” Dimaras then read “The City” aloud to Gide, who turned to Seferis and said, “Now I understand what you meant by the word ‘didactic.’ ”

The Satrapy

S
ATRAPY
was the technical term given to the large administrative districts, comprising whole provinces, into which the Persian Empire was divided; in the time of Darius the Great, who reigned in the fifth century B.C. and was the Persian ruler who invaded Greece in 490 B.C. (as described in Herodotus’s
Persian Wars
), the empire was divided into twenty satrapies.

S
USA
was the capital of Persia under the Achaemenid dynasty, to which Darius belonged; the dynasty ruled Persia from the mid-sixth century B.C. until the death of Darius III in 330 B.C., following his defeat in battle by Alexander the Great.

A
RTAXERXES
was the name given to several important Persian monarchs, beginning with Artaxerxes I (reigned 464–424 B.C.), who was the grandson of Darius the Great: his father, Xerxes, Darius’s son, led the second major invasion of Greece, also described by Herodotus.

Cavafy himself, in one of his “Self-Commentaries,” asserted that the addressee of this poem is meant to be an artist or even a scientist, and not a public figure:

Still, the context of the poem and its reference to Artaxerxes strongly suggests that the poet had at least, at some point, been inspired by the later history of the fifth-century B.C. Athenian politician Themistocles
(ca. 528–462 B.C.). As commander of the allied fleet during the Second Persian War, Themistocles scored stunning victories over Xerxes at the battles of Artemisium (480 B.C.) and Salamis (479 B.C.), which put an end to Persia’s ambitions in mainland Greece. Despite these successes, Themistocles was forced to leave Athens in 471, as a result of the machinations of his political enemies, and after a brief sojourn in Sparta escaped to Persia, where he was welcomed by the king, Artaxerxes I, who made Themistocles the satrap of Magnesia-on-Meander.

Cavafy makes another reference to the poem in one of his private notes, dated November 29, 1903: