Complete Poems (45 page)

Like “Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League” and many others, this poem explores the melancholies and ironies associated with the decline of Hellenistic Greek culture and political power during the last two centuries B.C., when Rome rose to Mediterranean preeminence. A
NTIOCHUS
IV E
PIPHANES
(ca. 215–163 B.C.) was the third son of Antiochus III “the Great,” the ruler of the Seleucid empire who was defeated by the Romans at the Battle of Magnesia in 190 B.C. (See “The Battle of Magnesia” and “Temethus, Antiochene: 400 B.C.”). The Treaty of Apamea (188 B.C.), concluded after Magnesia, imposed harsh indemnities on the Seleucids, which prevented further military adventures in the West; it also established Antiochus III’s second son, Seleucus IV, as co-ruler. Although Seleucus observed the treaty’s terms following the death of his father, he did maintain good relations with the two Hellenistic dynasties that had not yet succumbed to Roman rule, the kingdoms of Macedon and Egypt; his daughter Laodice was given as a wife to Perseus, the son of the Macedonian king Philip V.

Following Seleucus IV’s death in 175, his younger brother acceded to the throne as Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Antiochus IV followed a policy of urbanization and Hellenization, which made for more efficient rule throughout his territories; unfortunately for his subsequent reputation, these policies aroused great hostility in Judea, where the Jews rebelled against him. (His desecration of the Temple in Jerusalem led to events commemorated by the holiday known as Hanukkah.) Although he refrained from becoming involved in the West—particularly the consolidation of Greek power and expansionist policies of the Macedonian king Perseus, his nephew by marriage, which eventually precipitated war with Rome—Antiochus did have ambitions in both Egypt and the East, and died while on campaign in Parthia in 163. His son, Antiochus V, ruled briefly, until he was deposed by Demetrius I Soter upon his return from Rome (see “Of Demetrius Soter”).

In 168 B.C., Perseus was defeated by the Roman general Aemilius Paullus at the Battle of P
YDNA
, after which Greece became a province of Rome known as Achaea.

The youthful favorite of Antiochus IV in Cavafy’s poem is fictional; he may be the “Emonides” who, in “Temethus, Antiochene: 400 A.D.,” is mentioned as being Antiochus’s favorite, and whose name is used as the
title to a poem about homosexual love. That this youth comes from Antioch is no minor detail: A
NTIOCH
, the capital of the Seleucid empire, was founded in 300 B.C. by Seleucus I, and became one of the great metropolises of the ancient Near East, remaining a wealthy and sophisticated urban center for nearly a millennium, until the Persian and Arab invasions. Built on the banks of the Orontes River, about fifteen miles from the sea (its port, Seleucia, appears in “One of Their Gods”), it owed its great wealth to its situation on the important trade route connecting Asia to the Mediterranean, at the edge of a fertile plain that produced abundant wine and olives; its wealth in turn generated a cosmopolitan culture that boasted great intellectual and artistic activity. As a culturally and ethnically rich urban center—its original settlers were Athenian and Macedonian veterans of Alexander’s campaigns, but it also boasted a large and privileged Jewish community—the city bore a strong resemblance to that queen of Hellenistic capitals, Alexandria, and for this reason features prominently in Cavafy’s work as an urban model of the cultural diversity of the Hellenic diaspora. “After the great, the wonderful Alexandria,” Cavafy wrote, “this center of Hellenism attracts my imagination.”

In an Old Book

The original title of this poem was “The Book.”

Julian, Seeing Indifference

This poem strikingly contains direct quotations from a primary source, a device that Cavafy also uses in “Apollonius of Tyana in Rhodes” and a number of other poems. The text in question is a letter from the emperor Julian to the high priest Theodorus, in which Julian appointed Theodorus “governor of all the temples in Asia, with power to appoint all the priests.” The letter’s references to what Julian saw as the sad state of neglect into which worship of the pagan gods has fallen provides a vehicle for a rather self-important discourse about religion and piety—the kind of humorless severity in the emperor for which Cavafy has such disdain—that culminates in a lengthy encomium of the Jews, for
whose piety and willingness to die rather than break their laws Julian professed great admiration. The passage quoted in this poem comes immediately prior to the reference to the Jews:

Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene

For the significance of C
OMMAGENE
, see the note on “Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D.,”
here
. Formerly part of the Seleucid empire, Commagene became independent in 162 B.C., after the empire had been considerably weakened following defeats at the hands of the Romans. Several subsequent rulers of this principality were called Antiochus; the most likely candidate for the subject of this poem is A
NTIOCHUS
I, the ruler who brought Commagenian independence to an end when, in 64 B.C., he submitted to the Roman general Pompey in return for territory in Mesopotamia. A quarter century later, he was probably deposed by Marc Antony in favor of his brother, Mithridates.

Antiochus’s role as the puppet of Roman triumvirs is just one factor that gives, perhaps, a certain poignancy to the claims of the fictional epitaph in Cavafy’s poem. Another would be the fact that the real Antiochus is known not so much for his modesty but, rather, for the grandiose funerary monuments he erected: one for his father at the royal burial place at Arsameia (Eski Kahta in present-day Turkey), which
features the lengthiest funerary inscription in western Turkey; and one for himself on Mt. Taurus (Nemrut Dagi, “Mt. Nemrud,” in present-day Turkey). The latter featured statues of the dead monarch seated among colossal images of the gods, still visible today. This monument was, moreover, not at all purely Hellenic, but, with its blend of Persian and Greek elements, reflected the hybrid nature of Commagenian cult.

The word I have translated as “Hellenic,”
ellinikos,
is a particularly resonant one for Cavafy, with subtle and complex overtones. It suggests, as I have tried to convey, a person of broad Greek culture—not, that is, merely someone who is Greek by nationality, which could easily have been suggested by the word
Ellin,
the usual Greek word for “Greek.” Not “a Greek,” then, but “Hellenic,” in outlook, culture, and taste; a state of mind rather than a nationality. In a famous comment reported by Cavafy’s early biographer Timos Malanos in his 1935 book
Peri Kavafis
(
On Cavafy
), the poet is said to have remarked, “I, too, am Hellenic [
ellinikos
]. Mind you, not Greek [
Ellin
], nor Grecified [
Ellinizon
], but Hellenic.”

Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.)

For S
IDON
, and for the significance of the date, see the note on “Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.),”
here
.

“T
HOSE WHO WEAR GRAY CLOTHES
” is a reference to Christians.

Julian in Nicomedia

The poem is set in the second of the two periods that Julian spent in the port city of N
ICOMEDIA
, the capital of the Roman province of Bithynia, in the northwest part of Asia Minor. Julian had lived there between the ages of five and ten, after he was orphaned by the assassinations of his family; he returned there as a young man of nineteen in 351 A.D., the year in which this poem is set. This was the period in which Julian began to show a marked interest in pagan worship, although he was obliged to hide this illicit enthusiasm both from his uncle, the emperor C
ONSTANTIUS
II, and from his half brother, G
ALLUS
, who were Christian. Julian’s attraction to pagan practices was fostered by the Neoplatonic
philosophers C
HRYSANTHIUS
and Chrysanthius’s friend M
AXIMUS
of Ephesus, who initiated Julian into theurgic rites. M
ARDONIUS
, a eunuch, served as Julian’s tutor.

The theme of the young Julian’s hypocrisy—here, his willingness to play-act at being a Christian in order to avoid suspicion—recurs in Cavafy’s negative portrayal of the emperor; the theme of a devious young man and the morally vacant fluidity with which he moves between pagan and Christian activity recalls “Dangerous,” another poem that Cavafy set during the reign of Constantius.

The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria

After Octavian (later Augustus Caesar) resoundingly defeated the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., the couple fled to Alexandria, where Cleopatra, in an attempt to keep the news of the disaster from her people, appeared in a triumphant victory parade. The reaction to the news of Antony and Cleopatra’s defeat, as a vehicle for pondering the unexpected vagaries of Fate, reappears in the poem “In a Municipality of Asia Minor.”

John Cantacuzenus Triumphs

The narrator of this poem on Byzantine historical themes is an aristocratic supporter of the ultimately failed coup d’état of Admiral Apocaucus, Patriarch John Calecas (the “
BISHOP
”), and the scheming dowager empress A
NNA
of Savoy, widow of A
NDRONICUS
III; their grab for power precipitated the Civil War of 1341–1347, in which the noble J
OHN
C
ANTACUZENUS
, “the reluctant emperor,” ultimately prevailed. The poem should be read in the light of two salient facts that, in hindsight, undercut, with different degrees of irony, the narrator’s anxiety. The first is that the leniency for which the narrator hopes (either from John himself or from his wife, I
RENE
) was, in the event, forthcoming: John Cantacuzenus was indeed far more lenient than might have been expected by Anna and her party, and Gibbon reports of his accession that “a general amnesty quieted the apprehensions, and confirmed the property, of the most guilty subjects.” Hence the narrator’s foolishness
in supporting the vicious and venal Apocaucus and his party is, if anything, the more clear. The second is that, as we know, Cantacuzenus’s triumph was to be fairly short-lived, since after only five years as co-emperor with John V, he would be forced to abdicate after yet another civil conflict—one in which, this time, he did not “triumph.”

To the student intimate with Byzantine history, this poem’s opening allusions to the narrator’s great wealth will inevitably call to mind a crucial aspect of the Civil War of 1341. After John declared himself emperor in Thrace, in October 1341, his enemy Apocaucus, back home in Constantinople, incited an ugly mob to sack and destroy the properties of Cantacuzenus and his family; the staggered mob’s glimpse of the fantastic luxuries to which aristocrats such as John and his mother were accustomed gave a nasty economic twist to the civil unrest that was to follow, and which would involve mob attacks and confiscations all over the empire against the upper class. The specific possessions to which this poem’s narrator refers as he anxiously surveys his intact estate (land, chattels, plate) were—as Cantacuzenus himself records in his memoirs—the very items that aroused such rage on the part of the poor when they broke into both his mother’s estate in Constantinople, where hoards of gold and silver plate and jewelry were discovered, and his own. (The former emperor records that the expropriation of his estates in Macedonia alone during the Civil War cost him five thousand head of cattle, one thousand draft animals, fifty thousand pigs, seventy thousand sheep, and two hundred camels.) But, as we know, John refrained from inflicting comparable expropriations on those who supported his enemies, such as the poem’s narrator.

Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.

With the exception of A
NTIOCHUS
E
PIPHANES
, the Seleucid ruler who lived from 215 to 163 B.C. (see “For Antiochus Epiphanes” and note
here
), the characters here—both the poet Temethus in 400 A.D. and Emonides, Antiochus’s favorite more than five centuries earlier—are fictional. (“Emonides” is pronounced with the accent on the third syllable.) The reference in this poem to a favorite of Antiochus suggests a self-conscious connection to “For Antiochus Epiphanes,” in which
Cavafy describes a “young man of Antioch” who is the king’s favorite; for all we know, that young man could be Emonides. S
AMOSATA
was the principal metropolis of Commagene, founded in 150 B.C. by King Samos.

“Y
EAR ONE-THIRTY-SEVEN OF THE
G
REEK’S DOMINION
” refers (if we count from the establishment of the Seleucids at Babylon in 312 B.C.) to the year 175 B.C., during Antiochus’s reign—the same year, it’s worth noting, in which “Maker of Wine Bowls” is set; a moment, in other words, well after the end of Seleucid supremacy. Here as elsewhere in Cavafy’s work, 400 A.D. is a date whose significance lies in the fact that it falls not long before the onslaught of the barbarians who would put an end to Greco-Roman culture: see also “Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)” and “Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.).”

Of Colored Glass

After the Civil War of 1341–47, J
OHN
VI C
ANTACUZENUS
was crowned emperor of Byzantium in the B
LACHERNAE
Palace, the chief residence of the imperial family, on May 21, 1347, with the fifteen-year-old John V Palaeologus, son of Cantacuzenus’s friend the late emperor Andronicus III, as co-emperor. The
DETAIL
to which Cavafy refers is related in Book 15 of the thirty-seven-book
Roman History
by the polymath and historian Nicephorus Gregoras (ca. 1293–1360), a contemporary and supporter of Cantacuzenus and his family, whose history serves as an important witness to the first half of the fourteenth century. In a long passage devoted to the emperor’s coronation, Gregoras describes the sorry state of the imperial household after the deprivations of the Civil War, during which John’s archenemy, the widowed empress A
NNA OF
S
AVOY
, emptied the treasuries and sold off the palace treasures in order to finance her schemes: