Complete Poems (36 page)

But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent

This is the first poem that Cavafy wrote about Apollonius of Tyana, and its publication history sheds light on the growing importance that the sage and mystic had for him. An early version, entitled “Imminent Things,” was written in February 1896 and published in December 1899. That poem also bore the epigraph from Philostratus’s
Life,
but the poet’s decision, later on, to use a citation from that work as the title of the revised poem marks a special desire to draw attention to the ancient text itself. The passage in question comes from Book 8 of the
Life,
a scene in which Apollonius defends himself to Domitian against charges of sorcery. Here the seer protests that his ability to perceive imminent disasters is due to the elevated state—what he calls a “subtlety of the senses”—that he is able to achieve through his ascetic regimen and diet, derived from the teachings of Pythagoras.

The poem occupies a strategic place in Cavafy’s arrangement of
Poems
1905–1915 (and indeed in its precursors). It is the first of four that share a common theme: that is, the way in which men are called upon, and sometimes fail, to perceive crucial messages coming from outside their world. That this theme was of particular importance is evident in the placement of this set of four—the present poem, “Ides of March,” “The Gods Abandon Antony,” and “Theodotus”—immediately after the two opening poems, which, as George Savidis observed, constitute the portal through which the reader is meant to enter into these collections.

Ides of March

Julius C
AESAR
was assassinated on the I
DES
(the 15th) of March in 44 B.C. As Caesar made his way that morning to the Senate, where he hoped to hear himself declared king of Rome, a Greek scholar called A
RTEMIDORUS
tried to place a letter into his hand warning him of the plot to kill him, but was rebuffed. This poem, like “Theodotus,” uses Caesar’s career as a vehicle for pondering the vagaries of fortune.

The God Abandons Antony

The title of this poem, in Classical Greek, is a quotation from Plutarch’s
Life of Antony,
chapter 75. Here Plutarch describes the last night of Marc Antony’s life, when his troops had deserted him for Octavian and all Alexandria knew that Antony’s cause was totally lost:

Of special interest here is the emphasis on the faculty of hearing as the vehicle for apprehending the true significance of what is taking place, a connection that strongly links this poem to “But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent,” the first in this series of four poems about the wise man’s preparedness—or lack thereof—for the uncertainties of life.

Theodotus

This poem was written prior to 1911; Savidis identified that early version with a poem listed in one of Cavafy’s chronological catalogues with the title “Victory.” This final version was first published in 1915.

T
HEODOTUS
of Chios, a rhetorician at the court of the Ptolemies in Alexandria, is said to have urged the murder of P
OMPEY
(Gnaius Pompeius Magnus, 106–48 B.C.), the powerful rival of Julius Caesar. Pompey had once ruled Rome alongside Caesar, but his relationship with his onetime colleague disintegrated, and eventually the two met in a pitched battle at Pharsalus, where Pompey was defeated in 48. He then fled to Egypt, where he was stabbed to death on landing there, in September 48 B.C. Caesar was said to have been disgusted when his supporters, thinking to please him, brought him the severed head of the man whom, although a deadly rival, he admired greatly. It was at the foot of a statue of Pompey, erected in the Roman Senate, that Caesar himself was assassinated in 44 B.C. (the subject of “Ides of March”).

Cavafy wrote a “self-commentary” in which he ponders the motif, which recurs strikingly throughout his work, of invisible and immaterial apparitions and their relation to the visible and material worlds. This motif was of interest not least because it was connected, in turn, to his larger interest, heavily influenced by his youthful reading of the Parnassian poets and the Symbolists, in the exalted status of poets, seers, and sages, and their special, privileged knowledge of the world’s mysteries. Cavafy discussed these themes in connection with the present poem:

For more on the motif of invisible apparitions, see the note on “Since Nine—,”
here
.

Monotony

The poem was first written in July 1898, with the title “Like a Past”; it was published with the present title in 1908. Like many of the poems written in the 1890s—particularly the Unpublished Poems “Builders” (1891) and “The Bank of the Future” (1897)—it offers a particularly bleak vision of future progress.

Ithaca

An early version was written in 1894; the present version was composed in October 1910 and published in November of the following year.

The addressee of the poem is Homer’s Odysseus, the quintessential Greek wanderer with a quintessentially Greek mind: curious, avid, hungry for knowledge and experience. In the
Odyssey,
the monsters that Odysseus encounters on his ten-year voyage home from Troy include man-eating giants called L
AESTRYGONIANS
, as well as Polyphemus, one of the race of C
YCLOPS
(primitive, cannibalistic giants), whom Odysseus blinds in a famous episode recounted in Book 9 of the poem. Because Polyphemus is actually a son of the sea god P
OSEIDON
, Poseidon vengefully pursues Odysseus thereafter, causing storms and shipwrecks,
and punishing those who help the hero on his way home. The poverty of the rocky island kingdom of Ithaca was proverbial in the Homeric poems, and ruefully alluded to by its inhabitants; and yet (as Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, remarks in Book 4 of the
Odyssey
) beloved of its people.

For more on Cavafy’s early interest in the figure of Odysseus, see the note on “Second Odyssey,”
here
.

Trojans

The epic poems of Archaic Greece, among them Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
recall the ten-year-long siege of Troy by the invading Greeks, which ended in the utter destruction of the Trojans. The greatest of the Greek warriors was A
CHILLES
, and the greatest of the Trojans was Hector, the son of Troy’s king and queen, P
RIAM
and H
ECUBA
. The elderly royal couple lived long enough to see their son cut down by Achilles on the battlefield; the poignant scene in which the broken old king travels in secret to the Greek camp in order to beg Achilles to return his son’s body to him for burial (
Iliad,
Book 24) is the subject of the Unpublished Poem “Priam’s March by Night.” Achilles himself did not survive to see the end of the war, but was killed by Hector’s brother, Paris, who, aided by the Trojans’ supernatural ally, Apollo, shot Achilles in the heel with an arrow. Troy nonetheless eventually fell, and during the brutal sack of the city by the Greeks, old King Priam was murdered, at an altar where he’d taken refuge, by Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus. Hecuba was given as a slave to Odysseus, one of many Trojan women who were awarded as booty to the various Greek leaders.

To the early period of Cavafy’s poetic production belong seven poems based on Greek myth. It is noteworthy that fully five of these are devoted to episodes or characters familiar from Homer’s
Iliad:
the present poem, “Priam’s March by Night,” “The Horses of Achilles,” “Suspicion,” and “The Funeral of Sarpedon.” This predilection is not without interest for our understanding of Cavafy’s developing poetic consciousness, since the
Iliad
is traditionally identified as the more “historical” of the two Homeric epics; so we might say that in his early years of writing, Cavafy turned naturally to the canonical text that would best suit his already fixed interest in thinking poetically about history.