Complete Poems (46 page)

Although we clearly find here the “detail” that inspired Cavafy’s poem, the last line of the passage in question also betrays considerable tension between the source material and the poem itself: whereas Gregoras feels “shame” about the lowly state to which the once-illustrious court had been reduced, Cavafy emphasizes that he sees nothing cheap or unseemly about it, focusing instead on the genuine nobility of the man who was forced to wear those fake jewels; and indeed sees the fake jewels as a symbol for the poignant ironies of history. (Gibbon, for his part, introduces the story of the fake jewels with the pithy remark that “the festival of the coronation and nuptials [of Cantacuzenus’s daughter Helena and the co-emperor, John V] was celebrated with the appearance of concord and magnificence, and both were equally fallacious.”)

In the context of Cavafy’s overt editorializing in this poem about the meaning of the vignette he is relating, it is worth noting that whereas Gregoras rejected a deterministic view of history, John VI Cantacuzenus, in his own historical memoirs, the
Historiai,
saw—unsurprisingly, given the disappointing outcome of his rule—“Fate” (
Tyche
) and “Necessity” (
Anankê
) as the great forces at work in human affairs. The Unfinished Poem “On Epiphany” (1925) similarly contrasts the respective histories of Gregoras and Contacuzenus to pointed effect.

The repetition of the phrase “A
NDRONICUS
A
SEN’S DAUGHTER
” as an epithet for Cantacuzenus’s wife, Irene Asenina Cantacuzene, is pointed:
at the beginning of the Civil War, in 1341, Irene’s father shockingly joined her husband’s enemies, Anna of Savoy, Apocaucus, and the patriarch Calecas, in declaring John Cantacuzenus a public enemy—the act that marked the climax of a concerted campaign of harassment against John and his family, and which sparked the beginning of civil strife.

The 25th Year of His Life

Savidis notes that the poem was likely composed in June 1918 with the title “The 23rd Year of My Life, in Winter,” and was first published in June 1925. Of particular note is the shift from the first person, in the first version, to the third person, in the title of the finished work.

On an Italian Seashore

The poem alludes to the aftermath of the Roman triumph over the Achaean League in 146 B.C., the final chapter in the story of Rome’s ascent over Greece during the third and second centuries B.C. (See “Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League.”) After crushing the Greeks, who had labored under the command of the incompetent Diaeus, the Roman consul and general Mummius sacked C
ORINTH
, as an example to Greeks contemplating future resistance. The population of the famously luxurious and pleasure-loving city was put to the sword, and the city was stripped of its great treasures, which were then shipped to Italy. I
TALIOTE
refers to an ethnically Greek inhabitant of southern Italy—a person of typically Cavafian mixed identities and loyalties (see, for example, “Poseidonians,” in which this specialized term can also be found).

Apollonius of Tyana in Rhodes

The incident narrated in the present poem is, like other anecdotes about Apollonius, taken from Philostratus’s
Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
and indeed Apollonius’s response to the Rhodian is cited, in this poem, in the original Classical Greek of that text. Part of the effect of the poem is the contrast between the “high” Classical Greek of Philostratus (whose hero, Apollonius, here admires the “high” art of pagan Greece) and the
demotic diction of the rest of the poem—a contrast meant, perhaps, to reflect that between gold and clay.

In antiquity, the most famous cult images of pagan Greek temples (for example, the great statue of Athena in the Parthenon, and that of Zeus in the temple of Zeus at Olympia) were chryselephantine: that is, composed of gold and ivory plates hung on a wooden core.

Cleitus’s Illness

The milieu is Alexandria at a time when pagan and Christian forms of worship flourished side by side—the same setting as those we find in poems such as “Dangerous,” “Priest of the Serapeum,” and “Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D.” For this reason, we are probably meant to imagine the action taking place around the fourth century A.D.

The motif of mortal prayers that go unanswered by inscrutable deities clearly had a gentle hold on Cavafy’s imagination; the present poem seems to be a culmination of sorts. He had treated it thirty years earlier in “Prayer” (1896; 1898), in which a woman prays to the Virgin for her son’s safe return from sea; and a decade before composing the present poem he had written “Safe Haven” (1917; 1918), in which the death of a young man far from home is contrasted, with similar poignancy, to the ignorant hopes of his parents. The setting of the present poem allows Cavafy to juxtapose the Christian and the pagan prayers—all of them, in this case, futile.

In a Municipality of Asia Minor

For the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra and the reaction to it, see the note on “The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria,”
here
. Apropos of this poem, C. M. Bowra observed that “He shows the fundamental indifference of the ruled to their rulers. No doubt he had observed this in Egypt.”

Priest of the Serapeum

Since its importation to Alexandria by Ptolemy I in around 300 B.C., the cult of the god S
ERAPIS
was vigorously promoted by the Ptolemaic
monarchs of Egypt, who saw its potential as a vehicle for cultural unity. Although the god himself was thought to have originated as an amalgam of two Egyptian deities, the death god Osiris and the bull god Apis, responsibility for the creation of the formal cult in Alexandria belonged, almost exclusively, to Greeks; it is no accident that the deity combined aspects of many Greek deities: Zeus, Hades, Asclepius (who was thought particularly to be a healer), Dionysus, Helius. As such, the god—a native deity overlaid with Hellenic characteristics—was an apt symbol of the hybrid cultures of the Hellenistic kingdoms after Alexander. Worship of Serapis was extremely widespread throughout the Mediterranean and the Greek East.

The temple of Serapis, or S
ERAPEUM
, at Alexandria was considered one of the wonders of the world. Gibbon, in chapter 28 of the
Decline and Fall,
gives a vivid description of the destruction, in 390 A.D., of this fabulous edifice, on the orders of the archbishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, for whose religious fanaticism the Enlightenment historian does not hide his contempt.

In the Taverns

The milieu of the poem is the cosmopolitan ancient Levant. An E
PARCH
was the governor of a large district, or
eparchy.

A Great Procession of Priests and Laymen

An early version of this poem, entitled “The Cross,” which may have been written in September 1892, was included in the group of poems entitled “The Beginnings of Christianity.”

J
ULIAN
the Apostate died of wounds he received in battle on June 26, 363, at the age of thirty-one. He was succeeded by his contemporary J
OVIAN
(Flavius Jovianus), who had served on the Persian campaign, and who on his elevation to the throne immediately concluded an unpopular peace with Persia. In stark contrast to Julian, Jovian—who died within a year of becoming emperor, before he reached Constantinople—was a devout Christian. The procession referred to in the poem is invented, although the Christian Antiochenes’ hostility to Julian
is well documented, and is the subject of the poems “Julian and the Antiochenes” and “On the Outskirts of Antioch.”

Sophist Departing from Syria

For A
NTIOCH
, see the note on “For Antiochus Epiphanes,”
here
.

Julian and the Antiochenes

From July 362 A.D. to March 363, when he went off on the campaign against Persia in which he would perish, Julian resided at Antioch—a visit that was in every way disastrous for his relations with his Christian subjects. His restoration of numerous pagan shrines and temples and desecration of Christian shrines hardly endeared him to the Antiochenes, and his ostentatious asceticism and arcane and antipopulist philosophical program made him an object of ridicule in the eyes of the notoriously pleasure-loving local population (whose frivolity had, over the centuries, indeed aroused the contempt of observers as different as the emperor Hadrian and St. John Chrysostom). Local wags openly wrote satiric verses about him. His response was to compose a long and bitter diatribe entitled M
ISOPOGON
(“Beard Hater”), which takes the form of a satire of himself—the title refers to the much-despised affectation of growing a philosopher’s beard—but is really a vehicle for expressing his derision for the Antiochenes, whose decadence he contrasts with his unkempt simplicity: his beard crawling with lice, his breast as shaggy as a lion, his fingers stained with ink. This lengthy and extraordinary composition, which also bore the title
Antiokhikos,
“Antiochene Speech” (the form of the title normally denotes a speech given in praise of a city) and which Julian caused to be displayed outside the imperial palace in Antioch, has been called by one classicist “one of the most incredible things that a Roman emperor, supposed to be in his right senses, ever did.”

The epigraph to this poem is a citation from that work. Julian has just roundly chastised the citizens of Antioch for their incessant frivolity and insulting behavior toward him; he then addresses their sardonic observation that, compared to Julian—with his renovations of the pagan temples
of Antioch and his desecrations of Christian shrines (outrages to which “On the Outskirts of Antioch” refers)—neither his predecessor, the Christian emperor Constantius (represented by the letter
K,
“
KAPPA
,” the first letter of his name as spelled in Greek), nor Christ himself (represented by the letter
X
, “
CHI
,” the first letter of the Greek spelling of
Christ
) had harmed their city. Citing this witticism, Julian seeks to undermine the Antiochenes’ admiration for both Constantius and Christ, alluding to the avarice of the former and suggesting that Christ was a weak god, since he was unable to save the Christian shrines of Emesa, which were destroyed by a pagan mob.

This poem stands as one of the most cogent expressions of Cavafy’s vision, so important for our understanding of his intellectual and poetic attitude concerning Greek identity, of Christian Byzantium as a truer expression of the cosmopolitan Greek spirit and élan than Julian’s drearily puritan paganism was. Cavafy’s choice of the theater, with its combination of the erotic and the aesthetic, as the particular symbol of the Hellenic spirit in this poem is hardly accidental: in the
Misopogon,
Julian singles out theatergoing for particular scorn in a passage that well conveys the prissiness that his enemies derided, and which may well have been in the poet’s mind when he composed this poem:

Anna Dalassene

A
NNA
D
ALASSENE
(1025–1102) was the sister-in-law of Emperor Isaac I Comnenus, and the mother of A
LEXIUS
I C
OMNENUS
(1048–1118), who acceded to his uncle’s throne in 1081. In that year, Alexius departed for a military campaign and entrusted his mother with full imperial powers in his absence. In the Byzantine state bureaucracy, documents
containing imperial decrees of special importance bore a solid gold seal, or
CHRYSOBULL
(Greek
khrysoboullon
); the word
CHRYSOBULL
came, in time, to denote the document itself.

The final line of Cavafy’s poem is a quotation from the
Alexiad,
the verse epic about Alexius I Comnenus written by his daughter, Anna Comnena (see “Anna Comnena”). About her father’s relationship with his mother, Anna Comnena writes as follows: