Complete Poems (40 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
The poet himself left a note in Greek explaining the “empty room” in this poem, the climactic placement of which, at the end of this collection, suggests the great significance it had for him:
It’s the life—or rather a few years, 8, 10, in the life of certain men—in which pleasure, eroticism hold sway so violently that it’s like an “illness,” and they dominate and remove or annihilate everything else so that the room of life ends up completely empty, and nothing remains apart from the chandelier itself (everything else in life takes place
en passant,
unconsciously, mechanically).
The consequences aren’t always terrible. Often they are, but in the end it is a fearless [the poet has written “fearful” here, but this is clearly a slip] body that is willing to achieve such a life. And that won’t, out of fear—languishing in
désir
—remain outside the life that it wants, that it seeks.
The poem was first written in 1917 with the title “Half Past Twelve.”
The appearance of nocturnal apparitions is a motif that recurs significantly in Cavafy’s work, from his early ghost story “In Broad Daylight”
(ca. 1895), in which a black-clad male figure appears to a character in the dead of night, right through his mature period. The mid- to late 1910s in particular saw a striking preoccupation with this theme: “Theodotus” (<1911; 1915), in which the poet warns that the “invisible, immaterial” specter of the rhetorician Theodotus of Chios, threatening doom, might appear at any moment even in the tidiest, most well-organized lives; “Caesarion” (1914; 1918), in which the poet, after a restless night of intensive scholarly study, seems to see the murdered son of Caesar and Cleopatra; and the Unfinished Poem “It Must Have Been the Spirits” (1919), in which the speaker imagines one night that his furniture vanishes, to be replaced by the figure of a youth he had met years before in Marseille.
The poet’s interest in supernatural apparitions goes back to his earliest youth. In the travel journal he kept from his 1882 trip to Constantinople, he wrote that
For my own part, I am apt to join in opinion with those who believe that
all
the
regions
of
Nature swarm
with
Spirits;
& that we have
multitudes
of
Spectators
on all our actions when we think ourselves most alone.
For Cavafy’s “self-comment” on the theme of the invisible that is not, however, “immaterial,” see the note on “Theodotus,”
here
. Savidis, in his commentary on the Published Poems, notes that the poet’s apartment did not have electricity, and was lighted by oil lamps or by candles.
In the Presence of the Statue of Endymion
For the poet’s interest in statuary and sculpture, see the note on “Sculptor from Tyana,”
here
.
Mount Latmus in Asia Minor, near the opulent ancient city of Miletus, was one of several cult sites dedicated to E
NDYMION
, a handsome mortal youth beloved in myth of the moon goddess, Selene. A marginal note on the text of Apollonius of Rhodes’s
Argonautica
(a Hellenistic epic which elaborately retells the story of Selene and Endymion in the context of the poem’s larger narrative about Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts)
indicates that the myth of the love-struck goddess and her mortal beloved had been treated already by Sappho. A cave in Mount Latmus was said to be the spot where Endymion sleeps eternally and is visited periodically by the goddess.
The title is usually rendered as “Before the Statue of Endymion.” But the Greek preposition that Cavafy uses,
enópion,
has a slightly stronger flavor than that suggested by “before”; its root is, in fact, the word for “face.” The subtlety is one about which Cavafy clearly cared: an earlier title for this poem, subsequently discarded by the poet, was
Pro tou agalmatos tou Endimíonos,
the preposition
pro
there conveying precisely what the English “before” does.
Like so many of Cavafy’s historical poems, this one alludes to a bitter rivalry between Hellenistic kings, although in this case the two kings are brothers: Ptolemy VI Philometor (“the mother-loving”) of Egypt’s royal Lagid house, and his younger brother, Ptolemy VIII Euergetes (“the Benefactor”): the latter, and his epithet, are the objects of no little derision in the Unfinished Poems “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor)” and “The Dynasty.” In 164 B.C., after he was expelled from Alexandria by his ambitious younger sibling, the elder Ptolemy appealed to Rome for assistance in winning back his throne—the incident to which “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” also alludes. The Romans backed him, dispatching the younger sibling to rule Cyrene, in North Africa. The intervention of Rome, an empire on the rise, is thus starkly contrasted, as often in these historical poems, with the decline and disarray of the Hellenistic powers.
The allusion to the Delphic oracle (which also makes an appearance in “Nero’s Timetable”) adds a further layer to the restrained yet mordant ironies of this poem. From the earliest period in recorded Greek history down to the end of pagan worship, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi (in Central Greece) had enjoyed the greatest prestige—and political power. Envoys of states from all over the Greek world brought lavish gifts to the oracle (which were housed in elaborate “treasuries,” each state constructing its own) in the hopes of receiving favorable responses to the questions they posed about the conduct of their domestic or
international affairs. The interpretation of the usually vague oracular utterances could have important real-world ramifications. (Most famously when, during the Persian Wars, the Athenians asked the oracle how they should deal with the looming invasion by Persia; the oracle’s response—that they take refuge “behind wooden walls”—was interpreted by most as an injunction to build a wall around the city, but others, led by the general Themistocles, persuaded the citizenry that the oracle was instructing them to build a powerful navy. The great Athenian naval victory over Persia that ended the war in 479 B.C. seems to bear out the latter interpretation—hindsight, of course, being the best-known aid to interpretation.)
Therefore, although there is no record of the two warring Ptolemies having appealed to Delphi for a settlement of their familial and political dispute, the dramatic situation represented in this poem is entirely plausible and dovetails nicely with the known facts. The dispute itself; the lavish gifts offered by each brother in the hope that he will receive a favorable response; the uneasiness of the priests (who clearly don’t intend to leave things to the god) as to how they might word the response, given that one or the other of the two brothers (and benefactors of the shrine) must prevail; and then the unexpected and ironic revelation that Roman
Realpolitik,
rather than Apollo, has determined the outcome of the dispute—these threads come together beautifully in the last word in Cavafy’s poem.
Moirasia
means, literally, “the allotment of portions,” but the word
moira
that is at the heart of
moirasia
means, in Classical Greek, “fate” or “destiny.” (It is helpful here to think of the similarly twofold connotations of the word “lot” in English.) Hence the destinies of the two Ptolemies are apportioned not by the Greek oracle, as in days of old, but rather “divvied up” crassly by the powers that be in Rome.
The poem refers to a particularly grisly instance of dynastic maneuvering in ancient Judea, a territory whose history in the first century B.C. was, even by the standards of late Hellenistic times, embittered and complex; a tiny political entity in which nationalistic impulses raged
against more than one occupying great power. During the mid-first century, both Rome and Parthia played for power in Judea, each empire designating its own choice of king: the Parthians selected Antigonus, a member of the old Judean royal family, the Hasmoneans; Rome, in the person of Marc Antony, had chosen Herod (73–74 B.C.; later Herod I the Great), the son of an ambitious vizier from the region of Idumaea. With Roman military assistance, Herod successfully established his rule in Judea. A great philhellene, he undertook ambitious building projects that included an artificial harbor at Caesarea, an amphitheater and theater for Jerusalem, and the rebuilding of the Temple, which he cannily entrusted to the priests. (Local opposition to foreign occupiers was traditionally ignited by pagan attempts to defile the Temple.)
Despite his shrewdness as a ruler, Herod was less skilled at managing domestic intrigues—which were numerous, to say the least, given that he had ten wives. One of these was M
ARIAMNE
, the daughter of the Hasmonean throne princess, A
LEXANDRA
(who was the granddaughter of the Alexandra in the poem “Alexander Jannaeus, and Alexandra”). Mariamne’s brother was A
RISTOBULUS
(53–35 B.C.), who was famed particularly for his beauty; according to the historian Josephus, the young prince’s good looks caught the eye of his mother’s great friend, Marc Antony. At the time of the incidents narrated in this poem, Aristobulus had recently been appointed by Herod as High Priest of the Temple at his mother’s insistence; his popularity among the common people inevitably aroused the suspicions of the paranoid Herod, who, egged on by his mother, C
YPROS
, and his sister, S
ALOME
(later the subject of Oscar Wilde’s play; the name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable), ordered the eighteen-year-old Aristobulus to be drowned while he was swimming in a pool at Alexandra’s palace in Jericho. This savagery toward members of his own family was by no means unusual. Herod went on to order the execution of Mariamne herself six years later; her mother, Alexandra—the morally outraged figure in Cavafy’s poem—is said to have testified against her daughter in order to save her own life, and was herself executed soon after. In the year 7 Herod ordered the executions of his two sons by Mariamne as well; a few days before his death, in 4 B.C., he ordered the murder of his eldest son.
The source for the events alluded to in this poem is Josephus’s
Jewish
Antiquities,
15.3.53–61, where we find a similar emphasis on Alexandra’s rage and on her frustration at not being able to reveal the true cause of her son’s death:
Upon all this, Herod decided to carry out his plan against the young man. And so when the holiday was over, and he was feasting at Jericho with Alexandra, who had invited them there, he acted very kindly toward the youth, and took him aside to a deserted spot, showing himself perfectly willing to play with him and act the child with him, in a way that delighted the boy. It being rather hotter than usual in that place, they suddenly all went out en masse, as if gripped by a frenzy, and standing around the fishponds (those around the courtyard, which were large) they cooled themselves off from the midday heat. At first they merely watched Herod’s servants and friends as they swam; but presently the youth, egged on by Herod, went into the water along with them, and as dusk fell those of Herod’s friends to whom he had given the command dunked him as he was swimming, plunging him under the water as if it were being done in good fun; they didn’t stop until the boy was completely drowned. This is how Aristobulus was murdered, having lived not quite eighteen years, and having occupied the high priesthood for only a year; an office that Ananelus now assumed again.
When this calamity was related to the women they were immediately plunged into mourning, as they beheld the body that was laid out in front of them, and their grief knew no limits. As the news spread the entire city mourned excessively, each household making the calamity its own, as if it had not happened to someone else. But Alexandra was far more deeply affected, knowing as she did that it was murder; and yet while her grief was greater than that of the others, owing to her knowledge of how the murder had been committed, she had nonetheless to bear up, anticipating as she did even greater evils to come. Often she meant to cut her life short by her own hand, but she desisted in the hopes that she
would live long enough to avenge the unjust murder that had been plotted; indeed even more, she resolved to try to live even longer, never letting on that she might think that her son had been slain on purpose, so that she might take vengeance when she thought the moment propitious. Herod, meanwhile, made every effort to ensure that no one abroad imagined that the boy’s death had been the result of any plot of his.
The first version of this poem, written in 1914, had the title “Of Ptolemy Caesar”—the latter being one of the names of Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor (47–30 B.C.), the last monarch of the Lagid dynasty founded by Ptolemy I; better known as C
AESARION
(“Little Caesar”), he was the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.
In the “Donations” of 34 B.C., when he was only thirteen years old (see “Alexandrian Kings”), Caesarion was grandly declared the “king of kings” by his stepfather, Marc Antony. A year after the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Octavian (later Augustus) had Caesarion put to death; as he gave the order for the murder, one of his advisors is said to have complained sardonically of the dangers of
polykaisariê,
“too many Caesars.” The Greek,
polykaisariê,
is a punning allusion to the Homeric coinage
polykoiraniê,
“too many rulers,” which appears in Homer’s
Iliad,
2.203–6. In this famous passage, Odysseus berates the mutinous Greek troops who wish to abandon the siege of Troy and return home:
Not all of us Achaeans can be masters here;
too many rulers [polykoiraniê] is no good thing; let one man rule,
one king, to whom the crooked-minded son of Kronos gave
the scepter and royal rights, that he may use them to be king.