Complete Poems (54 page)

The Mimiambs of Herodas

H
ERODAS
(the name also appears as “Herondas”) was a Hellenistic poet active around the middle of the third century B.C. He was known for his
MIMIAMBS
(“mime-iambs”), a genre that cast the southern Italian genre called mime (dramatic dialogues) in a meter known as “limping iambs” (an iambic line with two long syllables in the last foot which give the line a “limping” feel). These mimiambs, in which the poet richly evokes, through coarse language, humor, and spicy proverbs, the everyday life of ordinary city- and townspeople, were known only through fragmentary quotations until 1891, when the text of a papyrus in the
British Museum, containing seven complete poems and part of an eighth, was published to great excitement throughout the scholarly world.

Cavafy’s poem makes reference to four of the seven complete texts by Herodas (which Cavafy is likely to have been aware of from scholarly publications). In Mimiamb 1, a married woman called M
ETRICHE
is approached by a elderly bawd on behalf of a besotted young man; she refuses the old woman’s offer but kindly offers her a glass of wine. Mimiamb 2 (whose humor derives from its sly parody of legal rhetoric) is a monologue delivered by a brothel-owner, who rather shamelessly takes a merchant to court for having stolen one of his girls; lacking any hard evidence, he relies on an inflated courtroom style. In Mimiamb 4, set on the eastern Aegean island of Kos (for which reason Herodas is thought by some scholars to be a native of that island), two women visiting the temple of the god of healing, A
SCLEPIUS
, admire the various works of art on view—a vignette that is, among other things, a sly allusion to a similar scene in Euripides’
Ion.
The humor of Cavafy’s seventh stanza, based on Mimiamb 7, about M
ETRÔ
’s visit to a shoe or leather merchant, derives from the fact that when we first meet Metrô, in the sixth mimiamb, she is asking a friend where she got her dildo; it’s to acquire one of her own that she goes to the shop of the shoemaker, whose footwear business is merely a cover for a more risqué line of products.

In the same year that this poem was written Cavafy published a review of a volume of poetry in which he commented on the way in which philological and archaeological discoveries could become inspiration for poetry:

Azure Eyes

C
IRCASSIA
was a region in the northern Caucasus whose people were famed for their beauty. The loveliness of the women, in particular, which gave them prized status in Ottoman harems, became a conventional literary theme from the Levant to Western Europe. In his
On Inoculation,
Voltaire observed that

Similarly, Lord Byron’s
Don Juan
(4.114) contains a conventional tribute to Circassian beauty:

Alexandrian Merchant

In ancient times, the Aegean island of Samos, with its mountainous terrain and ideal climate for grape growing, was a leading producer of prized wines, which were usually known simply by the adjectival form “S
AMIAN
.”

The Lagid’s Hospitality

P
TOLEMY
IV P
HILOPATOR
(244–205 B.C.; reigned 221–205) was the great-grandson of the first Ptolemy, and is generally held to have presided over the beginning of the decline of the Lagid dynasty. Devoted to the orgiastic worship of Dionysus (he had an ivy leaf tattooed on his body) and exclusively bent on his literary and rather complicated erotic and romantic pursuits—one of his mistresses was the sister of one of his male lovers—he reigned at first under the influence of an ambitious adviser called Sosibius (see “Great Feast at the House of Sosibius”), who was able to bend the young king, indifferent to affairs of state, to his own purposes. The reign began with the murder of Ptolemy’s mother, an uncle, and his popular younger brother, who was scalded to death in his bath on Sosibius’s orders. (Another figure who met his death as the result of Sosibius’s machinations was the Spartan king Cleomenes III, who had come to Egypt to rescue his captive family during the reign of Ptolemy’s father, a subject treated in “In Sparta” and “Come Now, King of the Lacedaemonians.”)

Of particular interest for the present poem were Ptolemy’s literary pretensions (he wrote a play called
Adonis,
for which his lover Agathocles obligingly wrote a commentary) and especially a notorious anecdote about his treatment of a visiting
SOPHIST
, the Stoic Sphaerus. Knowing that a precept of Stoicism was that the wise man would never yield to a false appearance, Ptolemy presented the visiting sage with a table filled with ingeniously contrived wax fruits; when the poor philosopher found himself with a mouthful of wax, the king asked him whether this was not a case in which a wise man had yielded to false appearances. Cavafy surely knew this story, which renders the hopefulness of his fictitious sophist, in this poem, rather poignant.

A
mna
was a unit of currency equal to 100 drachmas. Most classicists estimate that, in Classical times in Athens, one drachma was equal to the daily wage of a skilled worker; a
mna,
then, would have been worth about four months’ wages. The tetradrachma (a single coin worth four drachmas) was, for the most part, the coin with the widest currency in Classical times, although Ptolemaic Egypt—the setting of this poem—produced gold and silver coins in denominations as high as fifteen drachmas.
Cavafy’s interest in ancient numismatics is evident in such poems as “Coins,” “Orophernes,” “Philhellene,” and the fragmentary “Bondsman and Slave” (see
here
).

In the Cemetery

The year 1893 produced two poems that show Cavafy’s marked interest in Christian forgiveness: this poem and the Repudiated Poem “Voice from the Sea.” In a note from 1909—which is to say, after the Philosophical Scrutiny—the poet referred to this poem as one of his “good poems in katharevousa,” along with “Walls” and “Ode and Elegy of the Streets.”

Priam’s March by Night

In Book 24 of the
Iliad,
the Trojan king, P
RIAM
, makes a secret nocturnal journey to the Greek camp in order to beg Achilles for the body of his son, Hector, whom Achilles has killed in single combat. For Cavafy’s interest in Homeric themes, and his other treatments of scenes from the story of the Trojan War, see the note on “Trojans,”
here
.

Epitaph

This is the earliest instance of a poem in the form of a funerary inscription, a device that Cavafy would return to in a number of poems of the mid-1910s: see, for instance, “Tomb of Lanes” (1916; 1917), “Tomb of Iases” (1917; 1917), “Tomb of Ignatius” (1916; 1917), and “In the Month of Hathor” (1917; 1917). The dates of these poems, all of them about young men who died in their twenties, suggest that the carnage of the First World War was at least part of Cavafy’s inspiration.

In 1925 Cavafy took up “Epitaph” once again and attempted to fashion a new work from it. In the rewritten version, which was never brought to a form that satisfied the poet, the original sonnet is “framed” by additional material which presents it as the work of a Hellenistic poet writing in the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. (See the note on “Epitaph of a Samian,”
here
).

Displeased Theatregoer

The setting would appear to be the first part of the second century B.C., at a performance of one of the comedies of the Roman playwright T
ERENCE
(Publius Terentius Afer, ?–ca. 158 B.C.). Born in Africa, most likely at the beginning of the century, and brought to Rome as a slave in the service of a senator, Terentius Lucanus, Terence was given a superior education and later freed by his master, who seems to have been impressed by his abilities. His first theatrical success took place in 166 B.C. From his work come two of the most famous lines in Western drama: “While there is life, there is hope,” and “Nothing human is alien to me.” He is said to have died either during, or returning from, a trip to Greece.

Of the two great Roman playwrights (the other being Plautus, his slightly older contemporary), Terence was considered to be the more refined. Even so, his work unabashedly owed much to the style, and indeed the content, of the Greek comic playwright M
ENANDER
(ca. 342–291), whose work Terence had translated into Latin. Menander was the great master of the New Comedy, the situational comedy that flourished in the fourth century B.C.; some of Terence’s comedies are essentially little more than pastiches of Menander’s works—a fact to which the fictitious speaker in this poem clearly has strong objections. The cultural snobberies of the speaker, who appears to be a Greek visitor to Italy, are made clear by his condescending reference to A
TELLAN
F
ARCE
, the native Italian comic theater that treated the lives of lower-class people and that, like New Comedy, featured certain stock figures (forerunners of those found in the Commedia dell’Arte).

Before Jerusalem

This poem appears in two versions: the first in katharevousa, and the second in a more demotic form.

Cavafy had a particular interest in the First Crusade (1096–1099), perhaps because, like so much of the history that fired his imagination, it was a perfect vehicle for subtle thinking about the clash between Western and Eastern cultures—and indeed, not only between Christian
Europe and Muslim Asia, but between the Catholics of Western Europe and the Orthodox Christians of Byzantium. According to one standard account of the origins of the first Crusade, the grand enterprise was set in motion when the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus sent desperate letters to the West appealing for aid against the Turks; considerable public interest in an eastward expedition was said to have been provoked by the circulation of what Gibbon refers to as the Byzantine emperor’s “plaintive epistles.” Gibbon’s phrase, however, drew the ire of Cavafy, who like Paparrigopoulos doubted the authenticity of the letters, and who in a marginal note in his text of the
Decline and Fall
testily observed that the epistles had long been considered spurious. Cavafy’s resistance to Gibbon’s description here no doubt had something to do with his comprehension that the Byzantine Greeks generally had more to fear from the European Christians than from the Muslim Turks: in his text of Gibbon, he marked the phrase, “the Greek and Oriental Christians, whom experience had taught to prefer the Mahometan before the Latin yoke.”

“Before Jerusalem” indeed demonstrates no little irony with respect to the motivations and the behavior of the European Crusaders. In June 1099—the moment in which the poem is set—the Frankish Crusaders, under Raymond IV of St. Gilles, reached Jerusalem and began their siege of the city; after just over a month, on July 15, they entered the city at last and undertook the wholesale slaughter of the entire Muslim and Jewish populations, a literal bloodbath (“the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles,” one contemporary historian recalled) that was the subject of a particularly indignant comment by Paparrigopoulos (4.12):

Second Odyssey

That Cavafy was preoccupied with the figure of Homer’s Odysseus in the early part of 1894 is clear not only from this poem, which owes
much to the rather revisionist vision of the restless hero found in Tennyson’s
Ulysses
(1842), but also from an essay that he wrote in April of that year called “The End of Odysseus.” That essay contains translations of passages from the Tennyson and also from the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s
Inferno,
the canto in which Dante and Vergil encounter Ulysses and Diomede. As these selections (which I reproduce below) suggest, what caught Cavafy’s imagination was the theme of perpetual longing: the unceasing yearning for new adventure that, in these two poetic adaptations, cause Ulysses to disdain home, Penelope, and Telemachus—all that the Homeric Odysseus so ardently seeks—and instead to long eternally for new voyages.