Complete Poems (47 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
An ancient legend concerning the great Hellenistic capital of A
NTIOCH
(for which sees the notes on “For Antiochus Epiphanes,”
here
, and “Julian and the Antiochenes,”
here
) held that the city was founded on the site of an earlier town called I
ONÊ
, which had been settled by Argives on the site where the mythic princess Io is said to have died. In the myth, Zeus loved Io, whose father, I
NACHUS
, was king of A
RGOS
; to protect the girl from his jealous wife, Hera, Zeus transformed her into a cow. Hera soon found out, however, and sent a gadfly to pursue the hapless girl, who thereupon wandered all through the known world until, in Egypt, she was restored to human form by a touch of Zeus’s hand. She thereupon bore the god a son, Epaphus (“Touch”), through whom she was the ancestress of the Egyptian maidens known as the Danaids, who in the myth fled to their Greek ancestral homeland to escape their brutish suitors. In more than one way, therefore, Io links Greek and non-Greek cultures together.
The poem, first printed in October 1927, was originally given the title “Days of 1900,” which was subsequently changed to “Days of 1898” before acquiring its final form.
Immediately prior to his departure for Antioch in the summer of 362 A.D., Julian the Apostate issued an edict known as the School Edict, in which he forbade the use of pagan texts by Christian teachers. (“If they want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark. Let them go back to their Church and expound on
them.
”) Widely condemned even by
pagans, who understood that the great literature of the pagan past was the common cultural heritage of all Hellenes, the edict was manifestly aimed at eventually eliminating Christians from the empire’s elite. The present poem is based on an incident, reported in Sozomenus’s
Ecclesiastical History,
in which Julian attempted to mock the efforts of Christian prelates to adapt Classical texts to Christian purposes.
The poem’s tart humor rests on an elaborate linguistic play. What Julian said to the Antiochenes was
anegnôn, egnôn, kategnôn:
“I read, I understood, I condemned”; in Greek, these three words constitute a subtle and multilayered pun, since all three words have the same root, the verb
gignôskô,
“to know” or “to understand.”
Anegnôn,
“I read,” is a past tense of the verb
anagignôskô
(from the prefix
ana-,
literally “up,” +
gignôskô
);
egnôn,
“I understood,” is a past tense of
gignôskô;
and
kategnôn,
“I condemned,” is a past tense of the verb
katagignôskô
(from the prefix
kata-,
“down,” +
gignôskô
). Hence although Julian’s meaning is straightforward, to the Greek eye his words look something like this: “I up-knew it, I knew it, I down-knew it.” Cavafy applauds the Christians’ swift and equally witty appropriation of the emperor’s remark.
The context of the poem is a complex and subtle opposition between the Classical and the Hellenistic that also contraposes mainland Greece and the greater Greek-speaking world of the Hellenistic era.
The Spartan king C
LEOMENES
III (c. 260–219 B.C.; acceded 235 B.C.) was a social reformer who—inspired, it would seem, by dreams of restoring Sparta to the greatness she enjoyed during her Archaic and Classical past—drastically reorganized the Spartan state during the 220s B.C., and embarked on ambitious military campaigns. Early military successes against Sparta’s Peloponnesian neighbors emboldened Cleomenes to seize total power, after which he canceled debts (mortgage indenture had been a crushing social problem), initiated redistributions of land, and increased the dangerously low number of full Spartiates by including resident aliens and inhabitants of neighboring areas in the citizen body.
Cleomenes’ dazzling successes in campaigns that ranged increasingly far north brought him, inevitably, into conflict not only with the Achaean
League (see the note on “Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League”
here
) but also with the great northern power, Macedon, and its king, Antigonus III. As a result, Cleomenes sought an alliance with Antigonus’s enemy, the Egyptian king P
TOLEMY
III E
UERGETES
(“Benefactor,” of the Lagid dynasty), who agreed to aid Cleomenes on the condition that the Spartan king’s mother, Cratesicleia, and his children be sent to Alexandria as political hostages. Cavafy’s poetic account of Cleomenes’ and his mother’s reactions to this demand very closely follows the version of these events that we find in Plutarch’s
Life of Cleomenes,
which was clearly the poet’s source:
For a long while Cleomenes did not dare to declare to his mother the Egyptian king’s demand; going frequently to her chamber to discuss it with her, he found that whenever he was on the verge of opening his mouth, he did not have the courage, and remained silent. Seeing his embarrassment, his mother became suspicious, and asked those who were in most regular contact with him, whether her son did not desire something of her that he dared not mention. When at last Cleomenes had pulled himself together and explained to her that matter as it stood, she began laughing with all her might. “What,” she said to him, “is that what you’ve so often wanted to say to me, and dared not reveal? Would that you would put me on a ship straightaway, and send me without delay wherever you think my body will be useful to Sparta, before old age comes to destroy it and use it up in inactivity and sloth.”
When all was in readiness for the voyage, they traveled by land to Cape Taenarus, accompanied by the entire army. When Cratesicleia was about to embark, she drew her son aside and led him, alone, to the temple of Poseidon. There she held him in a long embrace, and sensing that he was much dejected and so affected that he too had dissolved into tears, said to him: “Come now, King of the Lacedaemonians, so that when we leave the temple, no one might see us weeping, or doing anything unworthy of Sparta. For this alone is in our power; as for our fortunes, they will continue so long
as the god provides.” Having spoken thus, she dried her face, returned to the vessel holding her grandson in her arms, and ordered the pilot to leave without delay.
Ptolemy III, however, died soon afterward, and his son was unsympathetic to Cleomenes’ cause. The hostages soon found themselves prisoners, and after the failure of a daring rescue mission led by Cleomenes himself, all of the Spartans were executed.
The sad outcomes of the event alluded to in this poem should color our appreciation of the antique Spartan values so boldly asserted here in the face of Ptolemaic crassness. And yet the fact that the speaker in this poem, a king of Sparta, seems to be both fearful of and apparently ruled by his mother is itself, perhaps, meant as a melancholy marker of that city-state’s own decline from the standards of its Classical apogee. In this context, two historical items are of particular note. First, in pursuing his bold social schemes, Cleomenes was following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Agis IV, whose widow, Agiatis, he had married: clearly he was a man who listened to his women. Second, Ptolemy III himself had famously complicated maternal relations. His own mother, Arsinoë I of Egypt, was the first wife of Ptolemy II and a daughter of Alexander’s friend and general Lysimachus; she was exiled from Egypt for plotting to have her husband murdered. Ptolemy II then married his sister, Arsinoë II, who until her death presided over the most dazzling court in Ptolemaic history (see the note on “Tomb of Eurion,”
here
) and presumably, adopted Ptolemy III as her son.
The relationship between the Sparta that Cleomenes helped revivify and the rest of the Greek world, both mainland Greece and the Hellenistic Greater Greece, would come to preoccupy Cavafy in the final years of his life. In “In the Year 200 B.C.,” first published in 1931, the speaker’s mockery of Spartan isolationism during Alexander’s campaigns is itself subtly mocked by the fact that his exultant endorsement of pan-Hellenic world culture comes just a few years before the Roman triumph over the Hellenistic world. In one of the Unfinished Poems, entitled “Nothing About the Lacedaemonians” (1930; the title is an allusion to Alexander’s snub of the isolationist Spartans), the speaker smugly suggests that there ought to be limits to the high principles articulated by Cleomenes’ mother in “In Sparta”—a character whose noble
sacrifice for her country indeed reappears as the subject of another of Cavafy’s published poems, “Come, O King of the Lacedaemonians,” which was inspired by the second speech of Cratesicleia in Plutarch’s account, cited above.
In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C.
The date of 200 B.C. is a significant one for Cavafy, who uses it again in the title of another of the Published Poems, “In 200 B.C.,” and alludes to it in a number of other poems as well, including the Unfinished Poems “Nothing About the Lacedaemonians,” composed the same year as the present poem, and “Agelaus,” composed two years later. Coming a mere three years before the disastrous Battle of Cynoscephalae, in which the forces of Philip V of Macedon were routed by the Roman general Flamininus, and ten years before the Battle of Magnesia, which was the first of several crushing blows dealt by Rome to the independent Hellenistic kingdoms of Asia, this date suggests less (as the speakers in those poems smugly believe) an invincible acme of Hellenistic Greek civilization as, much more ironically, its imminent fall.
L
IBYA
was the Greek name for the entire continent of Africa; it is difficult to know where, precisely, Cavafy’s fictitious potentate, a short-term visitor to Hellenistic Alexandria, is supposed to come from. Although the intersection of Hellenic and non-Hellenic cultures is, of course, a major Cavafian preoccupation, this poem—with its subtle presentation, at once sympathetic and ironic, of a non-Greek who is enthusiastically philhellenic (and yet reveals himself as a philistine)—may be read with particular profit together with “Philhellene.”
Cimon Son of Learchus, 22 Years Old, Teacher of Greek Letters (in Cyrene)
C
YRENE
was the great commercial and cultural capital of what is now Libya, birthplace of such distinguished Hellenistic figures as the philosopher Aristippus and the scholar and poet Callimachus. It has a
special appeal, perhaps, to Cavafy because of a richly documented history that began in the Archaic period of Greece—it was founded as a colony of Thera in the seventh century B.C.—and continued turbulently through the Ptolemaic and Roman occupations.
M
ITHRIDATES
was the name of six rulers of the kingdom of Pontus, which stretched along the northern coast of Asia Minor below the Black Sea. The kings of Pontus, who claimed descent from Darius the Great, were eventually related by marriage to the Seleucid royal family—another of the numerous integrations of the Asian and the Greek that characterized the Hellenistic world.
M
ITHRIDATES
V E
UERGETES
(“Benefactor”) welcomed Hellenizing influences even as he pursued pro-Roman policies; in return for his support of Rome in the last Punic War, he received the province of Phrygia. This was just one of a number of instances of territorial expansions that marked Mithridates’ vigorous reign. In 120 B.C. he was murdered at S
INOPE
, his capital city, by his wife Laodice, who is said to have opposed his expansionist policies. (His son, Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysus, is the subject of “Darius.”)
Although the incident of the seer is invented, Mithridates V’s ancestor, M
ITHRIDATES
I, was indeed saved by his friend Demetrius (later Demetrius Poliorcetes: see “King Demetrius”), the son of Antigonus I “the One-Eyed,” who had been one of Alexander’s generals. Antigonus had already had Mithridates’ brother killed and was intending to kill Mithridates himself when Demetrius warned his friend to flee.
On the way in which Cavafy uses tensions between katharevousa and demotic in this poem to suggest the difference between the male courtesans of glorious Alexandria in days of old and the sordid life of the beautiful boy in the present, see the Introduction,
here
. In a self-comment dedicated to this poem, Cavafy elaborated on this difference in illuminating terms. Because (he writes) a beautiful youth of those earlier times did not have to contend with social prohibitions, and
because such relations weren’t considered aberrant or shameful, he was able to enjoy his fame “in broad daylight” and could afford to have his beauty immortalized in paint or stone—unlike the beautiful boy in the present day, burdened with rough work that soon ruins his looks.
This is the longest poem that Cavafy published.
The specificity of the date in the title places Myres’ death during the tumultuous joint reign of Constans and Constantius, the sons of Constantine the Great (the setting of “Dangerous,” the first explicitly erotic and homosexual poem that Cavafy published; see the note
here
). It was a period marked by internecine divisions within the state and within the church, and hence the ideal setting for the poem’s delineation of the speaker’s growing awareness of a division between himself, a pagan, and his dead beloved, a Christian.
Alexander Jannaeus, and Alexandra
Like “Aristobulus,” this poem has as its subtext the political and cultural tensions between the heritage of ancient Judea and the larger Hellenistic world that had absorbed it. The area known as Palestine had been under the control first of the Persians, then of Alexander’s empire; in the year 200 B.C. it became part of the Seleucid empire. By 167, the program of Hellenization that was part of a larger unifying effort by the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV “Epiphanes” (see “For Antiochus Epiphanes”) had helped to anger both religious and nationalistic sentiments in Jerusalem; in that year, Antiochus outraged both Jewish and patriotic sentiment by dedicating the Temple to Olympian Zeus and installing a garrison in the city. A popular uprising, led by J
UDAH
M
ACCABEE
, a member of the priestly house of Hashmon, and his brothers Jonathan and Simon, eventually led to the expulsion of the Syrian occupiers in the year 142, and for the next eight decades the Hasmonean dynasty ruled Judea independently and with great vigor.