Complete Poems (52 page)

That Cavafy’s inspiration for this poem came from his reading of Gibbon seems certain, given that the poet made a marginal note, in his copy of
Decline and Fall,
to the following passage (the phrase he marked appears here in italics):

This passage is followed by a detailed description of the emperor Tacitus’s death, which is almost certainly the source of Cavafy’s poem:

In particular, Gibbon’s references to “the soft retirement of Campania,” “the fatigues of the body,” “the unaccustomed hardships of a military life” appear to have made an impression on Cavafy and reappear, as it were almost verbatim, in his poem.

The following note by the poet, preserved in the Cavafy Archive, suggests the reasons why this poem was rewritten ten years after it was first composed late in 1896:

The Eumenides’ Footfalls

This poem was written in August 1893 and rewritten in December 1908 with the title “The Steps.” The summer of 1893 marked the beginning of a period in which Cavafy composed six other poems on Greco-Roman themes: “Sculptor’s Workshop” (later retitled “Sculptor of Tyana”); “Displeased Theatregoer,” “Horace in Athens,” “ ‘The Rest Shall I Tell to Those in Hades Below,’ ” and two works that have been lost, “A Hellenizing Patrician” and “Cato the Censor.”

For N
ERO
, see the note on “The Steps,”
here
.

The Tears of Phaëthon’s Sisters

Best known from Ovid’s retelling of it in Book 2 of his
Metamorphoses,
the myth of Apollo’s son Phaëthon goes back well into Greek antiquity, and indeed was the subject of a lost play of Aeschylus,
The Heliads.
Phaëthon, the son of Apollo, demanded as a proof of his divine paternity that Apollo allow him to drive the chariot of the sun. But the heavenly steeds proved impossible for the mortal youth to manage, with the result that the chariot veered wildly off course, burning some parts of the earth while freezing others; to prevent further damage, Apollo was forced to kill his child, who was flung from the chariot and plunged headlong to earth. On hearing of their brother’s death, Phaëthon’s sisters grieved so interminably that they were finally turned into weeping willow trees, crying tears of amber.

Ancient Tragedy

In addition to references to the three principal tragedians of the Classical Greek theater, the poem makes an allusion to the playwright A
GATHON
(448–400), a younger contemporary of Euripides who was known for his innovations; Aristotle, in the
Poetics,
remarks that he wrote plays that were not based on mythological subjects. Agathon appears as a character in Plato’s
Symposium,
discoursing on love; his delicate effeminacy is mocked in Aristophanes’
Thesmophoriazusae.

Horace in Athens

This poem was first published in the anthology
Ethnikon Imerologion … tou etous
1898 (1897) along with “The Horses of Achilles” and “An Old Man”; interestingly, “An Old Man” bore, as a subtitle, a quotation from Horace: the Latin words
Eheu fugaces,
“Alas the fleeting [years],” appear in the first line of
Odes
2.14.

H
ORACE
(Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 B.C.) was the greatest lyric poet of Roman literature. A former slave’s son who ended his life as the intimate friend of the emperor Augustus, he brought Roman verse to new heights of sophistication and subtlety by adapting the Latin tongue to intricate and refined Greek meters. This technical feat, which marked the apogee of Latin lyric expression, was twined with a distinctive philosophical agenda: throughout Horace’s work, the passions and agonies celebrated in Greek lyric were replaced by a benign, almost avuncular geniality barely concealing a practical Roman hard-headedness. Life is short, he says again and again, so we must seize the day and enjoy the modest pleasures that a well-balanced existence affords us. (The phrase
carpe diem
is, in fact, a quote from Horace.)

Horace’s intimate familiarity with Greek literature, so evident throughout his distinctive work, was polished during the years in his early twenties when he studied, as well-off Roman youths often did, in Athens. It was in Greece that the youthful Horace had his one bruising experience with high political passions and grandiose world events: while there, the twenty-year-old student learned of Julius Caesar’s assassination and subsequently joined the doomed republican forces of Cassius and Brutus against those of Octavian. Horace barely escaped from the Battle of Philippi with his life, slinking back to Rome “with clipped wings,” as he wrote in one of his poems. Whatever his youthful republicanism, Horace would go on to flourish under the patronage and friendship of the man he had once fought against, Octavian, who went on to become the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar.

Voice from the Sea

The early 1890s found Cavafy preoccupied with mortality and the fear of death, an anxiety that seems to have caused him to embrace the consolation offered by Christian compassion. The decade began, indeed, with the publication of an essay about Shakespeare (“
O Sakespiros peri tis zoïs,
” “Shakespeare on Life”), which focuses on the terror of death expressed by Claudio in
Measure for Measure
(3:116–32), lines which Cavafy took pains to translate into Greek, and which conclude with this cold statement:

The embrace of the consolatory message of Christianity may be seen in the present poem and also, for instance, in “The Hereafter” (1892), “In the Cemetery” (1893), and “Vulnerant Omnes, Ultima Necat” (1893), with its culminating embrace of the “rekindling” and “birth” promised by the church.

The Tarentines Have Their Fun

This poem was first published in the anthology
Ethnikon Imerologion … tou etous
1899 (1898), in which the first published version of “The Funeral of Sarpedon” (see note
here
) also appeared.

The poem alludes to a historical incident of the third century B.C. In the late 280s, Rome had been consolidating its power throughout southern Italy, attacking a number of Greek colonies there—a state of affairs that caused no little alarm in Tarentum, then the largest Greek colony in that area. Fear of a Roman attack was exacerbating political factionalism, too, since the democratic party was bitterly anti-Roman, while the outnumbered aristocrats hoped that a Roman intervention might restore them to power. In the summer of 282, the Tarentines, who happened to be gathered in their seaside theater, saw a number of Roman
ships sailing into their harbor. As this was a violation of an agreement the two cities had signed, the Tarentines sent some ships to attack the Roman fleet, and the Greeks were successful in sinking several of the Roman ships and killing a number of sailors. The outraged Romans sent a delegation of officials demanding reparations, but they had the bad luck to arrive in the autumn, during the local Dionysiac festival, which was also held in the theater. The Romans were led to the stage of the theater and asked to state their purpose, and when the chief envoy, the senator L. Postumius, addressed the crowd, his awkward Greek was ridiculed by the Tarentines, one of whom later threw garbage at the Roman’s toga. “Laugh now,” he is said to have declared to them then, “but this toga will not be cleansed until it is washed in your blood.” The Romans later attacked and plundered Tarentum.

It is certainly significant that this incident is cited in Julian the Apostate’s
Misopogon
(see the note on “Julian and the Antiochenes,”
here
), a text with which Cavafy was familiar:

In November 1903, just as Cavafy was engaged in the intense “Philosophical Scrutiny” of his work, Gregory Xenopoulos, an Athenian writer whom the poet had met during his 1901 trip to Athens, published an article in which he recalled how the poet, who had sent him a selection of poems the previous year, asked him to return one of those poems; the reason Cavafy gave was that the poem, which was “The Tarantines Have Their Fun,” wasn’t “worthy of the honor” of being in Xenopoulos’s hands. “I was very sorry,” Xenopoulos wrote, “but as I respect the idiosyncrasies of poets, I sent it back.”

The Funeral of Sarpedon

Savidis believes that the earliest version of this poem was written in November 1892, thus making it the first of a total of seven poems with Homeric themes, the other six being “Priam’s March by Night,” “Second Odyssey,” “Achilles’ Horses,” “Trojans,” “Betrayal,” and “Ithaca.”

For S
ARPEDON
, the son of Zeus whose death in battle is recounted in Book 16 of Homer’s
Iliad,
see the note on the Published Poem “The Funeral of Sarpedon” (
here
), which was the final version of this poem, rewritten in 1908.

The Beyzade to His Lady-Love

“Beyzade” (Greek
beïzades,
Turkish
beyzade
) was a ceremonial title given to the young sons of great figures of the Ottoman court. Cavafy composed the poem during the period of his stay in Constantinople, from July 1882 to October 1885.

Dünya Güzeli

The title is a Turkish expression meaning “the most beautiful sight in the world.” Savidis suggests that at an earlier phase this poem was called “Harem.”

When, My Friends, I Was in Love …

Cavafy grouped this poem, together with “La Jeunesse Blanche,” under the heading “Fleeting Years.”

Nichori

“Nichori” (Turkish
Yeniköy;
the Greek name derives from
Neokhorion,
“New Village”) was a Greek neighborhood on the western shore of the Bosporus, where Cavafy’s maternal grandfather had a country house in which the poet and his family lived during their flight from Alexandria. Cavafy left a note describing this poem as “autobiographical.”

Song of the Heart

A note to the poem indicates that it was written on the morning of February 12, 1886.

To Stephanos Skilitsis

S
TEPHANOS
S
KILITSIS
(or “Stephen Schilizzi”) was one of Cavafy’s two closest friends from the days when he, his widowed mother, and his two immediately older brothers, John and Paul, returned to Alexandria from England in the autumn of 1877. The building in which they lived on Rue Mahmoud Pacha el Falaki boasted a garden, and it was here that Cavafy first met both Skilitsis and his other close friend from those days, Michael Ralli. That the youths were very close is evident from the number of letters (in English) that survive from them to him in the Cavafy Archive; although none of the poet’s letters to his friends survive, those from his friends shed light on his adolescent days. Not least among these is a letter from Skilitsis to Cavafy during the latter’s stay in Constantinople from 1882 to 1885, which suggests that the adolescent Cavafy was reticent about his private life even with his two closest friends:

In response to a letter in which Cavafy had mentioned (perhaps as a sop to his friends, or perhaps as a conveniently misleading reference to his first homosexual experiences, with his cousin George Psilliary, in 1883) his “bonnes fortunes” in the “demi-monde,” Skilitsis displayed an amused curiosity: