Complete Poems (38 page)

The Steps

An early version was written in August 1893 and published in January 1897 under the heading “Ancient Days.” The poem was reworked in December 1908 and published in September of the following year.

The Roman emperor N
ERO
(Nero Claudius Caesar, 37–68 A.D.) was the son of Agrippina the Younger (15–59), the great-granddaughter of Augustus and sister of the emperor Gaius (“Caligula”), and of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, a member of the distinguished old clan of the A
HENOBARBI
. Soon after the birth of her son, Agrippina was banished by her brother, but when Gaius was assassinated she was recalled by the new emperor, her uncle Claudius, who then married her. Agrippina is said to have poisoned her husband in order to hasten the accession of Nero (54 A.D.), but she soon fell out of favor with Nero, and in the spring of 59 was murdered at the seaside resort of Baiae on his instructions.

Nero himself proved a disastrous ruler: notorious for his passion for all things Greek (he “freed” the province of Achaea, i.e., Greece, after
making a triumphant tour of it in 67), suspected of starting the fire that destroyed half of Rome in 64, moved by increasing paranoia to instigate numerous judicial murders of prominent Romans, he was finally chased from Rome during a widespread insurgency against him by generals in several provinces (including Galba in Spain: see “Nero’s Deadline”) and committed suicide on June 9, 68, at the age of thirty-seven.

In Roman religion, L
ARES
were very ancient tutelary deities associated with crossroads, farms, and (as here) houses; typically a Roman house contained a private chapel or shrine called the
lararium
(Cavafy uses the Greek version,
lararion,
in line 7), inside of which were small images of these deities, who were also associated with the spirits of the family’s ancestors.

Vengeance for the crime of matricide was, in Greek mythology, thought to be the province of creatures called E
RINYES
—“Furies”—winged apparitions who are described in Aeschylus’s
Oresteia
as having doglike faces dripping with blood, and who pursued matricides and drove them mad.

Herodes Atticus

H
ERODES
A
TTICUS
(L. Vibullius Hipparchus Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes), ca. 101–177 A.D., was one of the premier figures of the so-called Second Sophistic of the second century A.D., a rhetorical movement that flourished between about 60 and 250, and which was marked by a renaissance of interest in the Greek literature of the High Classical period (i. e., the First Sophistic). The son of an extremely wealthy and distinguished Athenian who served in positions of considerable power in Rome under the emperor Hadrian, Herodes Atticus followed his father’s example of exemplary public service, serving as a Roman senator, attaining the consulship in 143 A.D., and counting among his friends the emperors Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius, whose mentor he was. But Herodes was even more distinguished for his intellectual and literary career: although his letters and treatises do not survive (we have only one Latin translation of a short parable about grief, preserved in the
Attic Nights
of Aulus Gellius, who heard Herodes lecture at Athens), his work was said to rival those of the ancient classics in its elegance
and restraint. He was, indeed, a proponent of the archaizing Attic style in vogue among Greek writers during the Second Sophistic. A great philanthropist, Herodes was responsible for the magnificent concert hall, or odeum (Greek
odeon
), that stands at the base of the Acropolis in Athens, and which is still used for performances. The present poem is the only mature poem of Cavafy’s in which Athens is mentioned.

Herodes, as his epithet indicates, was a bona fide Attic (rather than Asiatic) Greek, one who successfully reached, and remained at, the pinnacle of Roman society. As such, he is the natural object of Cavafy’s interest—particularly since there was an ongoing intellectual and literary debate during the Second Sophistic about the merits of the purely “Attic” versus the “Asiatic” Greek style. The source of the subtle and humorous tension in the poem is, in fact, the implied competition between two claims to Greekness: that of Herodes “the Attic” and that of A
LEXANDER OF
S
ELEUCIA
, the representative of the great Greek culture bequeathed to Asia by the Hellenistic monarchies. The prestige of the provincial sophists may be inferred from the career of this Alexander, who, despite the unkind nickname bestowed on him (the “Clay Plato”), taught in cities from Egypt to Antioch to Rome, and visited Athens itself, as this poem makes clear. In his
Lives of the Sophists,
Flavius Philostratus (on whom see the note on Apollonius of Tyana,
here
.) tells us that Alexander appeared on an embassy on behalf of his native city before the emperor Antoninus Pius, and indeed went so far as to scold the emperor for not paying attention (Antoninus responded tartly with a dismissive comment about the eastern Greek’s effeminate finery). He eventually led the important ministerial office known as
ab epistulis graecis,
which dealt with the emperor’s Greek correspondence, under Marcus Aurelius.

The source for Cavafy’s poem is a passage in the
Lives of the Sophists
that suggests the cachet that went with being able to draw an audience of bona fide Greeks—and with being one as well:

We have Cavafy’s transcription of this passage into Modern Greek, and it is worth quoting because, in the subtle alterations it makes to the original, it sheds light on the process by which Cavafy transformed his source material into its final, poetic form:

The joke lies in Herodes’ implication that these “real” Greeks will not come without him.

Sculptor from Tyana

T
YANA
was a city in Asia Minor, a place significant in Cavafy’s work as the birthplace of the sage Apollonius. The sculptor-narrator is fictional; his subjects are both mythological and historical. The poem is organized around a series of subtle oppositions: the sculptor is of the Greek east, but seems to be living in Rome, where his clients are Romans; the mythic figures suggest his Greek roots, while the historical figures are, with one crucial exception, quintessentially Roman.

R
HEA
, the wife of Cronus, was the mother of Zeus, king of the gods; P
OSEIDON
, Zeus’s brother, was god of the sea, and also associated with horses; and H
ERMES
, Zeus’s son, often represented as a beautiful youth, particularly in Hellenistic art (as, for instance, in the famous statue by Praxiteles), was the messenger of the gods. P
ATROCLUS
in Homer is represented as the dear friend of Achilles, although later Greek tradition made the two lovers.

It is worth noting that the Romans whom the sculptor has portrayed are key figures in the history of the Roman Republic. M
ARIUS
(157–86 B.C.), of an equestrian rather than noble background and an uncle by marriage to the aristocratic Julius Caesar, rose to the consulship, and is widely seen as having contributed importantly to the decline of the
Republic by fostering the creation of client armies loyal to a single powerful military figure rather than the State. L
UCIUS
A
EMILIUS
P
AULLUS
M
ACEDONICUS
(d. 160 B.C.), a highly distinguished figure noted for his appreciation of Greek culture, was consul in 168, and in that year led the Roman forces to a decisive victory in the Third Macedonian War—the defeat that signaled the end to any mainland Greek resistance to Roman authority—against Perseus of Macedon, the son of Philip V (see “The Battle of Magnesia”) and brother of Demetrius, who lived as a hostage at Rome. S
CIPIO
A
FRICANUS
M
AJOR
(236–c. 183 B.C.), the brother-in-law of Aemilius Paullus and the brother of the Scipio who defeated Antiochus at the Battle of Magnesia, was, like Paullus, a great enthusiast for Greek culture who yet presided over Roman fortunes at a time when the autonomy of the Hellenistic kingdoms was coming to an end under Roman expansionism; Africanus Major was best known, however, for his crushing defeat of the Carthaginian leader Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C.

The statue could, on the other hand, be of S
CIPIO
A
FRICANUS
M
INOR
(185–129 B.C.), the son of Aemilius Paullus, who was later adopted by the son of Scipio Africanus Major. A key figure in the Third Punic War, against Carthage, he was also famous for his philhellenic outlook: while in Greece for the Battle of Pydna, in which he served with distinction, he befriended the historian Polybius. His deep admiration of Greek culture and literature were typical of the so-called Scipionic Circle, of which he was the preeminent member; that, along with his strict Roman virtue, political prestige, and military distinction, made Africanus Minor a figure much admired by Cicero, who made him a character in several of his works. C
AESARION
(see “The Glory of the Ptolemies” and “Caesarion”) stands out as something of an anomaly among this gallery of great Romans. He was the love-child of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar; born in 47 B.C., he did not live long enough to accomplish any deeds worthy of note before being murdered by Octavian (later Augustus) in 30 B.C.

Cavafy’s choice of his sculptor’s subjects is hardly casual, and indeed is highly suggestive in its implied comment on the relationship between Roman and Greek culture, and on certain political ironies. Aemilius Paullus and the two Scipios, all three famous for their philhellenism,
presided over Rome at the zenith of its consolidation of power throughout the Mediterranean, at the expense of the Hellenistic kingdoms whose culture the three so admired; Marius was responsible for a political development that would lead Rome herself into her Imperial phase; and Caesarion represents, in his parentage and his very person, the failed dream of a truly Greco-Roman political and dynastic unity.

Among the visual arts, sculpture enjoys special place in Cavafy’s work, which both refers often to actual statues and bas-reliefs and invokes statuary in its descriptions of ephebic beauty. For the former, see “The Retinue of Dionysus,” “In the Presence of the Statue of Endymion,” and “Maker of Wine Bowls”; for the latter, see “I’ve Gazed So Much,” “In the Entrance to the Café,” “That’s How,” and “Aristobulus.”

The Tomb of Lysias the Grammarian

Diana Haas has made the interesting argument that the “maybe” in line 6, which hints at a gently ironic attitude toward the possibility of an afterlife, connects this poem to “The Rest Shall I Tell in Hades to Those Below,” with its amused sophist half-smiling at the idea of an afterlife in which life’s secrets may finally be revealed.

Tomb of Eurion

The setting is, once again, the cultural melting pot of Hellenistic Alexandria; A
LABARCHS
were magistrates of the Jewish community there. While Eurion and his teachers are all invented, his interest in the province of A
RSINOÏTES
is perhaps suggestive: this area (present-day Fayûm, in Egypt) was named for the Ptolemaic queen Arsinoë II (ca. 316–270 B.C.), the daughter of Ptolemy I of Egypt and his queen, Berenice I, and a woman of extraordinary allure and cunning. Married at the age of about seventeen to the much older Lysimachus, a former comrade-in-arms to her father and a companion and Successor of Alexander the Great, she was widowed at thirty-six and eventually married her brother, Ptolemy II Philadelphus; their court represented Ptolemaic and Alexandrian culture at its zenith.

Just as the allure of Arsinoë hovers, perhaps ironically, over the desert district named for her, which is the object of Eurion’s dissertation,
so too Eurion’s own allure—ironically unknowable from the data given here about the appearance of his tomb or from the facts of his life, education, and intellectual enthusiasms—hovers still in the mind of the speaker.

That Is He

The title, repeated in line 9, is an allusion to a passage from the work of the second-century A.D. belletrist L
UCIAN OF
S
AMOSATA
. Born in 120 A.D. in the capital city of the kingdom of Commagene (modern southeastern Turkey), Lucian traveled extensively, living for a while in Alexandria, where he held an official position, and in Athens; he died around 180.

An accomplished lecturer, satirist, and essayist, Lucian was famous above all for his mordant wit and biting condemnation of the pretensions of the contemporary intellectual and literary scene, with which his travels had made him all too familiar. Among his seventy or so published works are treatises exposing a popular magician as a fake; an attack on the pretensions of the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus (who later demonstrated his humorlessness by setting himself afire at the Olympic games of 165); a
How to Write History
in which he recommends impartiality and adherence to the known truth and wittily lampoons historians who employ superficially Thucydidean devices; and the
Teacher of Orators,
in which Lucian tartly observes that would-be orators can achieve success by including claptrap and impudent remarks in their speeches. He was particularly interested in exposing the contemporary mania, among Greek-speaking littérateurs of the Roman Empire, for aping the Attic style of the great Greek writers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The Second Sophistic indeed saw a profusion of lexica of and guides to “acceptable” Greek words—acceptable, that is, because they could be found in the five-hundred-year-old works of Lysias, Demosthenes, Plato, and the like.