Complete Poems (43 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
At least part of the irony of Cavafy’s poem is that “history” is here represented by the greatest of the poets recited in that Sidonian salon: the Athenian tragedian Aeschylus, who was born at Athens ca. 525, and died in the city of Gela, in Sicily, in 456 B.C. The actor in Cavafy’s poem chooses to recite not a passage from one of Aeschylus’s great dramas, such as those to which the agitated youth alludes, but rather Aeschylus’s own verse epitaph, which, according to the later Greek authors Athenaeus and Pausanias, was composed by the playwright himself and (according to the largely apocryphal
Life
of Aeschylus) inscribed on the tomb erected for him by the people of Gela at their own expense. The epitaph, in four lines consisting of two elegiac couplets (alternating dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter), has been preserved, and runs as follows:
Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian, beneath this
tomb, dead in wheat-bearing Gela.
His valour far-renowned the Marathonian lea may proclaim
—
and the flowing-haired Mede, who knew it well.
The lines allude to the Athenian playwright’s service during the Persian Wars of 490–479 B.C., and specifically at the Battle of Marathon in 490, the decisive encounter at which the Greeks defeated the Persian army; the Persians fought under the Median general D
ATIS
and under A
RTAPHERNES
, the brother of Darius I, the king who had instigated the war. It was in this battle that Aeschylus served and his brother was killed.
The implicit contrasts that run through this poem—between history and literature, between art and life—thus also include, subtly, the tension between the great Hellenic past and the later Mediterranean cultures, such as that of Late Antique Sidon, that were the heirs (the perhaps debased heirs) to high Hellenism.
In her critical presentation of Cavafy’s work, the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar comments on the uncanny motif of the conjuration of ghosts, apparitions, and lost loved ones that persists throughout his poems (see the notes on “Theodotus,”
here
, and “Since Nine—,”
here
), and which in this poem includes a suggestion of occult magic:
This is what gives him his strange quality of a genuine, which is to say well-concealed, esoterism. Hence, in “That They Come,” and in “Caesarion,” the darkness both allegorical and real, the image of the taper and of the extinguished lamp, seem to pass from the domain of literary ornament or even erotic fantasy into the domain of the occult; we cannot help but think of the sorcerer’s formula
extinctis luminibus
[“with lights extinguished”].
Cavafy sets his poem in the city of A
MISUS
in Pontus, a kingdom constituting the northern part of Asia Minor and extending as far south as the area known as Cappadocia, in central Asia Minor, during the reign of its last independent king, M
ITHRIDATES
VI E
UPATOR
D
IONYSUS
(“the Great”), who was born about 132 B.C. and was another of Cavafy’s doomed Hellenistic rulers living in the growing shadow of Roman supremacy. The scion of a dynasty that traced its roots to Persia, Mithridates was, indeed, the last Hellenistic monarch to be a serious threat to Roman power in the Mediterranean and Near East. By the time he was in his late forties, his own expansionist policies had made him the master of most of Asia Minor, much of Greece, and of the Aegean islands except for Rhodes—and thus a formidable foe of the Romans, with whom he fought three major wars, the so-called Mithridatic Wars, between 88 and 67 B.C. Like many of the Hellenistic figures who captured Cavafy’s imagination, he straddled the non-Greek and Hellenic worlds: at once savage and incomprehensibly “barbarian” in many of his habits (he provoked the first Mithridatic War after massacring eighty thousand Roman citizens while overrunning Pontus in 88; after his final defeat he ordered his own harem to be killed), and Greek, an admirer and (in his coinage) imitator of Alexander the Great. He was said, too, to have a prodigious memory, and is famous for having attempted to make himself immune to poisons by taking sublethal doses of a variety of known toxins.
Mithridates’ descent from associates of D
ARIUS THE
G
REAT
of Persia
(549–486 B.C.), the king who instigated the Persian Wars with the Greeks from 490 to 479 B.C., provides the occasion for the epic that the poet in Cavafy’s poem is writing. The name Phernazes is Persian; as the fictional poet tries to imagine the lust for power that motivated the ancient Persian ruler to seize the throne, he learns that the contemporary, Persian-descended king has decided to make war on the Romans. The event described is most likely the onset of the Third Mithridatic War, in 74 B.C., in which Mithridates occupied Bithynia, a neighboring province, in response to a move by Rome to annex it. He was eventually driven out of Pontus by the Roman general Lucullus, and defeated at the Battle of Nicopolis by Pompey in 67 B.C. A few years later he was murdered, at the age of sixty-eight, by a guard while plotting to renew his anti-Roman activities.
The distinctive framing device found in this poem—that is, a Hellenistic poet’s attempt to write a work about the Classical past—recurs most notably in the Unfinished Poem “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor)”; but a number of other poems take the form of fictional verses embedded in later historical frames: see for example “Imenos,” “For Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League,” and the Unfinished Poem “Epitaph of a Samian.”
A
NNA
C
OMNENA
(1083–1146) was the eldest daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus. After failing to usurp the succession on behalf of her husband, Nicephorus Bryennius, from her brother J
OHN
, who subsequently became emperor as John II, Anna retired to a convent and there wrote the A
LEXIAD
, an epic poem in fifteen books about the life of her father. The direct quotations from Anna’s work that appear in Cavafy’s poem come from chapter 4 of the Prologue; it is perhaps an intentional irony on the poet’s part that the object of the lyric laments that he quotes is not, in fact, Anna’s father, but rather her husband, Bryennius, whose premature death she mourns in terms that are hyperbolic, to say the least. (“The calamities of the past,” she goes on to say, “in the face of this infinite disaster, I regard as a mere drop of rain compared with the whole Atlantic Ocean or the waves of the Adriatic Sea.”) Our sympathy for Anna’s copious tears may, however, be mitigated
by the knowledge that she bitterly decried her husband’s failure to help her seize the royal power on Alexius’s death (see below).
Although Anna’s encomiastic work and high-flown style have come in for favorable reappraisal in recent years, the general tenor of Cavafy’s attitude toward his subject, at least, seems to reflect the censorious conclusions of Gibbon, who writes as follows about Anna Comnena and her paean to her father’s virtues:
The life of the emperor Alexius has been delineated by a favourite daughter, who was inspired by a tender regard for his person and a laudable zeal to perpetuate his virtues. Conscious of the just suspicion of her readers, the princess Anna Comnena repeatedly protests that, besides her personal knowledge, she had searched the discourse and writings of the most respectable veterans; that, after an interval of thirty years, forgotten by, and forgetful of, the world, her mournful solitude was inaccessible to hope and fear; and that truth, the naked perfect truth, was more dear and sacred than the memory of her parent. Yet, instead of the simplicity of style and narrative which wins our belief, an elaborate affectation of rhetoric and science betrays, in every page, the vanity of a female author.
Cavafy’s decision to cite actual lines from Anna’s
Alexiad
seems indeed to stem from an ironic impulse: her low and raw motives, after all, stand in stark contrast to the famed elevation and refinement of her Greek. Still, about this elevation and refinement there is little dispute, however varied the assessment of Anna herself. In a footnote to his rapturous description of the prosperous and cultivated reigns of the Byzantine emperor Basil and his son and successor Leo the Philosopher, Gibbon, referring to the “general knowledge” of the enlightened age that was Byzantium in the twelfth century, declares that
Anna Comnena may boast of her Greek style (
) and Zonaras, her contemporary, but not her flatterer, may add with truth,
[“she did indeed possess an Attic diction”].
The princess was conversant with the artful dialogues of Plato; and had studied the tetrakús, or quadrivium of astrology, geometry, arithmetic, and music.
And yet as Cavafy’s poem makes clear, Anna’s devotion to learning did not preclude a passion for power as well. This passion is exquisitely conveyed by Gibbon, whose description of the aftermath of Alexius’s death (including his wife Irene’s denunciation of the dying emperor as a “hypocrite”) is vivid and witty:
It was the wish of Irene to supplant the eldest of her surviving sons in favour of her daughter the princess Anna, whose philosophy would not have refused the weight of a diadem. But the order of male succession was asserted by the friends of their country; the lawful heir drew the royal signet from the finger of his insensible or conscious father; and the empire obeyed the master of the palace. Anna Comnena was stimulated by ambition and revenge to conspire against the life of her brother, and, when the design was prevented by the fears of scruples of her husband, she passionately exclaimed that nature had mistaken the two sexes and had endowed Bryennius with the soul of a woman.
The final sentence in particular is worth keeping in mind when we evaluate Cavafy’s decision to quote Anna on her inconsolable grief at her husband’s death. Although her plot against her brother merited death, John commuted the sentence; Gibbon pointedly notes that one achievement of John’s beneficent reign was to abolish the death penalty throughout the empire.