Complete Poems (37 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
This poem, along with “Monotony,” the early version of “The City” (entitled “Back in the Same City Again”), and the Unpublished Poem “Vulnerant Omnes, Ultima Necat” (1893), all reflect the disillusionment with progress that marked the later nineteenth-century Continental, and particularly French, poetry that influenced the young Cavafy.
D
EMETRIUS
P
OLIORCETES
(“the Besieger of Cities”) assumed the throne of Macedonia in the tumultuous years of dynastic struggle soon after the death of Alexander the Great. Born in 336 B.C., the son of Alexander’s comrade Antigonus the One-Eyed, who later became king of Phrygia in Asia Minor, Demetrius distinguished himself in arms in the internecine wars between Alexander’s Successors (the “Diadochi”), although the grueling yearlong siege of Cyprus in 305–304 B.C., to which he owes his epithet, was resolved finally in diplomatic negotiations. In 294 B.C. Demetrius, whose wife was the daughter of Macedonia’s onetime regent, intervened in the dynastic intrigues in Macedon and declared himself king after murdering the young Alexander V.
Demetrius was given to displays of royal grandeur, and encouraged the kind of ruler-cults associated with the East. Determined to reconquer his father’s former empire, he prepared a vast expedition against Asia Minor in 288, but failed to achieve his ambitions when two of the other Successors, Ptolemy I of Egypt and Seleucus of Babylonia, offered vigorous military resistance to his plans. Demetrius was eventually expelled from Macedonia, and his final struggle to maintain power ended in disgrace when his troops, tired of serving his overweening imperial ambitions and taste for luxury, deserted him to join the enemy leader, P
YRRHUS
. After a bit of further intriguing with Ptolemy, Demetrius eventually surrendered himself to Seleucus, and spent his final few years in captivity, where, embittered, he drank himself to death.
The epigraph, in Classical Greek, is taken from Plutarch’s
Life of Demetrius,
44.6, and describes Demetrius’s departure from his camp after it became obvious that his men were deserting him en masse. It is worth noting that this Greek figure is paired, in Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives,
with the Roman Marc Antony, a character dear to Cavafy: in Plutarch’s
words (1.3), both men “bore witness in particular to Plato’s saying that the greatest natures exhibit great vices as well as great virtues. Both were great lovers, great drinkers, warlike, munificent, grandiose, overweening, and in their fortunes bore corresponding resemblances to each other.”
In this poem, as in “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” Cavafy uses shifts in register between katharevousa and demotic to underscore—with a particularly pointed irony in this case—the theme of a great ruler’s sudden demotion in status (see the discussion in the Introduction,
this page
). The words used to describe the king when he “left” and cast aside his “clothes,” in lines 5 and 6, are demotic; the two words used to describe the same action and the same object, in the case of the mere actor to whom the great king is being compared, are katharevousa. Hence my translation of the latter by means of the more elevated “departs” and “attire.”
For the dynastic names L
AGID
and S
ELEUCID
, see the note on the Hellenistic dynasties above,
here
. Although the identities of the monarchs in question are not clarified, the entire Hellenistic period was characterized by vicious rivalries and wars among the ruling houses founded by Alexander’s generals. As the present poem suggests, an ongoing theme in Cavafy’s poetry about the Hellenistic world is another, nonmilitary competition among the various rulers: the sometimes pathetic, often poignant yearning, by these many, increasingly distant heirs to Alexander and his generals, to lay claim to Greek culture itself.
In the Greek, the poem is set in rhyming couplets. The last word of the poem is pronounced with the accent on the final syllable.
Cavafy’s interest in craftsmen—sculptors, potters, jewelers, artists—an inheritance from his early involvement with the Parnassians, with their emphasis on formal beauty divorced from political and social content
and Romantic self-dramatization, is evident in a number of poems, including “Maker of Wine Bowls” (1903; 1912; 1921; 1921), “Sculptor from Tyana” (1893; 1903; 1911), “In Stock” (1912; 1913), and “Painted” (1914; 1915).
The poem concerns two rulers and the two great battles in which they fought, conflicts that effectively put an end to the political and military supremacy of the culturally Greek kingdoms of Alexander’s Successors, and firmly established Roman domination over the Greek-speaking Hellenistic world. P
HILIP
V (238–179 B.C.), an expansionist king of Macedonia, was soundly defeated by the Romans under Flamininus at the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197, a victory for the Romans that effectively made Greece a province of Rome. (For Philip as a leader of a short-lived Hellenic coalition against the Romans, see the Unfinished Poem “Agelaus.”) Seven years later, the Romans under the Scipio brothers defeated the equally aggressive expansionist Seleucid king, A
NTIOCHUS
III (“the Great”), at the B
ATTLE OF
M
AGNESIA
, after which his Seleucid empire (which included present-day Syria) ceased to be a major Mediterranean power. By this time, however, Philip, who had once allied himself with Antiochus—a secret treaty between the two kings was aimed at divvying up the overseas possessions of their mutual rivals, the Ptolemies in Egypt—had turned against his former ally, because the latter had failed to provide assistance to Philip at Cynoscephalae. Indeed, Philip, who had been confined to Macedon after his defeat by the Romans, and forced to pay an enormous indemnity to them and to give up his younger son as a hostage, had recently won favor for himself (and remission of both the indemnity and the son) by giving assistance to the Scipios as they crossed through northern Greece en route to Asia to make war on Antiochus. These historical details enhance our perception of the palpable aura of gloating that hovers over this poem, and which barely conceals the more pathetic emotions associated with Philip’s shattered dreams.
Philip’s request for roses to adorn his banquet was the subject of an amusing anecdote told by Cavafy’s friend I. A. Sareyannis (who was a
botanist) in his
Notes on Cavafy.
Here Sareyannis remarks that after around 1911 (when Cavafy was publishing regularly) the poet ceased any kind of systematic reading of contemporary literature, and instead devoted himself to reading the historical works from which he drew the matter for his poems—or which he might consult to confirm this or that detail of history (as does the narrator, Sareyannis notes, of “Caesarion”). Sareyannis recalls that in 1929, as he was composing a note on “The Battle of Magnesia,” he wrote to Cavafy to say that he’d spotted what he thought was an error: given that the Battle of Magnesia took place in December—and given how speedily news could in fact travel at that point in Mediterranean history—Philip’s banquet would likely have taken place late in December or early in January, months during which roses were, so Sareyannis thought, unlikely to be available. Cavafy replied with alacrity, crisply informing his abashed friend that there was in fact export of roses from Egypt to Italy during the winter, and indeed that in the first century A.D. Italy had begun to cultivate its own late-blooming winter roses,
Rosae hibernicae.
Like “The Battle of Magnesia,” this poem has as its subject the decline of Greek cultural and political supremacy during the rise of Rome. The Greeks are here represented, as often in Cavafy’s work, by members of the various dynasties founded by Alexander’s Successors: in this case, D
EMETRIUS
I Soter (“the Savior”) of the royal S
ELEUCID
house of Babylonia, the grandson of that Antiochus III who figures in “The Battle of Magnesia”; and P
TOLEMY
VI Philometor of the L
AGID
dynasty in Egypt (the epithet, a conventional one, means “mother-loving,” used here because Ptolemy ascended the throne at the age of six with his mother as co-ruler). The two men were virtually coevals: Demetrius was born in 187, and Ptolemy the year before, and both died in 150.
The dramatic date of the poem is 164 B.C., when Demetrius was living as a political hostage in Rome, where he had to sit passively as his father’s empire passed first to his uncle, Antiochus IV, and then to his cousin. In that year, the twenty-two-year-old Ptolemy was expelled from Alexandria by his younger brother, also called Ptolemy (later Ptolemy VIII Euergetes, “the Benefactor”), with whom he had been
jointly ruling along with their sister Cleopatra II. After coming to Rome to “beg” for help, the elder Ptolemy returned to Egypt the following year as sole ruler, his younger brother having been sent by the Roman Senate to rule the North African province of Cyrene. (The conflict between these two brothers, and Rome’s settlement of their dispute, is the subject of “Envoys from Alexandria.”) Eventually, the older Ptolemy was elected king of the Seleucid empire and ruled jointly with Demetrius II, son of the Demetrius mentioned here; the elder Demetrius eventually returned home from Rome, and both he and Ptolemy were ultimately killed in the same battle, against Alexander Balas, a pretender to the Seleucid throne.
The baroque family entanglements of the Ptolemies provided Cavafy with subject matter for several poems in addition to “Envoys from Alexandria”: see also “Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League,” “In Sparta,” and the Unfinished Poems “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor)” and “The Dynasty.”
For dicussion of the technical features of this poem, see the Introduction,
this page
and
this page
.
O
ROPHERNES
played a small but intriguing role in the complex dynastic struggles that vexed the Seleucid dynasty in the second century B.C. He was (falsely) alleged by his mother, Antiochis, the daughter of Antiochus III “the Great,” to be her son by her husband, Ariarathes IV of C
APPADOCIA
(by whom Antiochis had another, legitimate son, Mithridates, who later ruled as Ariarathes V). It is worth noting, because Cavafy alludes to it (line 6), that the house of Ariarathes was a rather grand and ancient Persian one: the founding ancestor, Ariarathes I, was the Persian king Darius III’s satrap, or provincial governor, when Alexander the Great overran Asia in the 330s B.C.; for resisting Alexander, this first Ariarathes was put to death at the age of eighty-two. Because Orophernes is illegitimate, such pedigrees—as, indeed, his alleged descent from S
TRATONIKE
, the daughter of Demetrius Poliorcetes, who famously wedded her own stepson—are important to him.
Orophernes’ supposed father, Ariarathes IV, had sided with Demetrius I Soter in his final stand against the Romans at Magnesia (in 190
B.C.; see “The Battle of Magnesia”), but after Demetrius’s defeat Ariarathes wisely, to say nothing of opportunistically, switched his allegiance to the Romans. When conflict between his chosen son, Ariarathes V, and Orophernes arose, Rome intervened and divided Cappadocia between them, but eventually Ariarathes prevailed and Orophernes was expelled and took refuge with his protector Demetrius, whose throne he eventually tried to usurp.
The ceremony to which the poem refers was the propagandistic “Donations” of 34 B.C., organized by Marc Antony to promote the imperialistic claims of his alliance with C
LEOPATRA
. The elaborate titles given to her children were, of course, wholly symbolic, although they do suggest the scope of the couple’s ambitions: all of the lands once ruled by Alexander the Great were, at least in name, distributed to the young royals. A
LEXANDER
Helios and P
TOLEMY
Philadelphus were Cleopatra’s children by Antony; as his nickname suggests, C
AESARION
’s father was said by Cleopatra to have been Julius Caesar, who had been her lover before his assassination ten years before the events narrated in this poem. (The child’s official name was Ptolemy XV Caesar.) Antony and Cleopatra also had a daughter, Cleopatra Selene, Alexander’s twin, who during the Donations was named queen of Cyrenaica in North Africa; interestingly, she does not figure in this poem.
At the time of the Donations, Caesarion would have been thirteen, Alexander six, and Ptolemy two years of age. A year after his parents’ suicides in 31 B.C., Caesarion was murdered at the orders of Augustus. (See also “Caesarion.”)
A remark Cavafy made to Timos Malanos confirms the poet’s meticulous preoccupation with historical accuracy: “I dressed him in pink silk because at that time an ell of that sort of silk cost the equivalent of so-and-so many thousand drachmas.”
Here as in other poems, such as “Potentate from Western Libya,” Cavafy explores the fraught relationship of a non-Greek character to Greek
culture—a relationship made more complex in this poem by the fact that the Greek civilization to which the speaker aspires had long since fallen under Roman domination. In this dramatic monologue, a princeling who rules some unnamed but clearly remote Eastern possession of the Roman Empire—Z
ÁGROS
is the major mountain range of present-day Iran, and in ancient times constituted the border between Media and Mesopotamia; and P
HRÁATA
was the summer seat of the Parthian kings—issues orders for new coinage to be struck. Here as in many other poems, a certain tension between Greek cultural aspirations and Roman political realities is evident: the philhellenic ruler’s swagger is undercut by the fact that he has to kowtow to the Roman proconsul (compare, for instance, “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” and “Envoys from Alexandria”). But even his relationship to Greek culture, which he is so eager to advertise on his coinage, seems rather vexed. On the one hand, the speaker refers dismissively to the Hellenized intellectuals who occasionally visit his court as “devotees of puffery”; on the other hand, he uses the elevated Purist forms for the words “unhellenized” and “we are” in the last line—a hint, once more, at his desire to appear properly Greek.