Complete Poems (58 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Given the representation of Cleopatra here as an exotic figure given to making “oriental” gestures, it is worth noting that, in one of his marginal notes to Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall,
the poet heatedly defends the last of the Ptolemaic monarchs from Gibbon’s dismissive characterization of her as a “barbarian queen.” In chapter 3 of
Decline and Fall,
Gibbon paraphrases a speech of Augustus in which (Gibbon writes) the first Roman emperor declares that he could not in good conscience “abandon her [the Republic] to a degenerate Roman, and a barbarian queen”; footnoting this paraphrase, Gibbon cites the Greek historian Dio Cassius and the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus, preferring the latter
two as sources “for the general language of Augustus.” For Cavafy, who was acutely sensitive to gradations of Greekness, Cleopatra may have indulged in “Oriental” behavior, but she was no barbarian, as his note to Gibbon’s text amply demonstrates: “I should much like to know,” Cavafy wrote on a piece of paper which he inserted into his copy of Gibbon at this passage, “in which Greek or Latin author this extraordinary expression occurs.” As Diana Haas has noted in her article about Cavafy’s reading notes to Gibbon, Cavafy himself nowhere suggests that the last of the Ptolemies is anything but Greek; if anything, he is careful in this poem to distinguish the “Oriental” queen from the real “barbarians,” her slave-women. Haas points to the 1914 Unpublished Poem “Homecoming from Greece,” in which the hybrid nature of Greekness throughout Greater Greece is illuminated with some care:
we too are Greek—what else could we be?—
but with loves and with emotions that are Asia’s,
but with loves and with emotions
that now and then are alien to Greek culture.
This poem was inspired by the Denshawi affair, a 1906 clash between British military personnel and Egyptian locals. The Englishmen, traveling between Alexandria and Cairo, stopped in the village of Denshawi and shot some pigeons belonging to the villagers; after violence erupted, one of the Englishmen was hit in the head with a stone and later died, of sunstroke, after making his way back to the British camp. The English responded by trying and hanging five of the villagers for murder, a punishment that Sir Reginal Storrs, an acquaintance of Cavafy’s, referred to in his 1945 memoirs,
Orientations,
as “excessive and medieval.” Cavafy, who was violently opposed to capital punishment (“whenever I have the opportunity I declare this,” he wrote in a note of October 1902), was similarly revolted, although of course his sympathy in this poem has an erotic component.
One of the poet’s “Notes on Poetics and Ethics,” dated December 1905, articulates, in prose, many of the sentiments expressed in this poem:
The wretched laws of society—the result of neither sanitary nor critical judgment—have belittled my work. They have stifled my expression; they have prevented me from shedding light and emotion to those who are fashioned like me. Life’s harsh circumstances have forced me to toil in order to master the English language. What a pity. If I toiled equally in French—if circumstances permitted it, if French was equally useful to me—then perhaps in this language—because of the facility provided by pronouns, which both declare and obscure—I could express myself more freely. Finally, what am I to do? I go to waste, aesthetically speaking. And I will remain an object of speculation; and I will be understood more fully by what I spurned.
A prose articulation of another important theme in this poem—the idea that although Cavafy himself lived in constrained times, he was aware that others who came later would be able to speak more freely than he could—may be found in the note of October 1902 in which he talks about his opposition to capital punishment (see above on “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.”):
I criticize, for example, the death penalty. I declare this at every available opportunity, not because I think that the states will abolish it tomorrow because of my saying so, but because I am convinced that stating it will contribute to the eventual triumph of my view. No matter if no one agrees with me. My word will not be in vain. Someone might repeat it, and it may fall on ears which will harken and be encouraged. Perhaps someone of those presently disagreeing might remember it—in a favorable circumstance in the future, and, through the coincidence of other cases, might be persuaded,
or might harbor doubts about his initial conviction. So in various other social matters, and in some that primarily necessitate Action. I know that I am a coward and I cannot act. That is why I only speak. But I do not think my words are needless. Someone else will act. But my many words—those of my cowardly self—will facilitate his deed. They clear the ground.
“The Rest Shall I Tell in Hades to Those Below”
The title, which is in Classical Greek, is a quotation from the
Ajax
of Sophocles, first performed perhaps in the 440s B.C. In the play, the great hero of the
Iliad
commits suicide after he is tricked into disgracing himself by Athena, the divine protector of his archrival, Odysseus; the line that Cavafy quotes constitutes Ajax’s last words before his suicide. It should be noted that the dynamics of silence and speech, of revealing and concealing—something that would have been of great interest to Cavafy for his own reasons—are famously prominent both in Sophocles’ play and in other literary treatments of Ajax. Of the latter, the best-known and most often cited passage is to be found in Homer’s
Odyssey.
There, in Book 11, Odysseus visits the Underworld and glimpses the ghost of Ajax, but when he tries to talk to his former enemy—who is still enraged at Odysseus for having unfairly won the arms of the dead Achilles—Ajax merely glares silently at him and stalks off. (This powerful scene was later adapted by Vergil in the
Aeneid,
where the ghost of the spurned Carthaginian queen, Dido, maintains a contemptuous silence when Aeneas tries to talk to her.) It is inconceivable that Cavafy was not aware of the Homeric passage, which gives a further irony to the poem as a whole: for Ajax did not, in fact, speak “in Hades to those below.”
This poem is the first of several that indicate an increasing interest on the poet’s part in photography as he reached his sixties: the others are “The Bandaged Shoulder” (1919) and “From the Drawer” (1923). There
is also an unfinished draft, now one of the Unfinished Poems, called “The Photograph,” composed in 1924. The appeal that photography had for the aging Cavafy, its unmatched ability to preserve the beauty of bygone days that has been lost or eroded by time, is not hard to fathom.
Like “Philhellene” and “Potentate from Western Libya,” this poem explores, not without some irony, the subtle problematics of Greek identity in the post-Classical Mediterranean. It is clear from the context that the speaker and his (significantly) silent companion, Hermippus, are men with some intellectual attainments—or, at least, pretensions: H
ERMIPPUS
was the name both of a well-known literary biographer in the later 200s B.C. (famed both for an important biography of the head of the Stoic School, and for his sensational death scenes, he was an important source for Plutarch, a favorite of Cavafy’s), and of a distinguished public speaker and author of the second century A.D., the author of a book about dreams, among other texts. The Hermippus of Cavafy’s poem could be either of those men—or, indeed, neither, since the name is not an unusual one, and Cavafy’s poems are peopled by sophists, grammarians, rhetoricians and other intellectuals who are likely as not to be fictional.
The salient factor, in this poem, is that the unresponsive Hermippus in the poem and his companion, both of them apparently attached to some kind of philosophical school, are clearly meant to be from the Greek East (as were the two historical Hermippus’s); there is a strong suggestion that they have just been to Athens, the birthplace of the civilization of which these two intellectuals are the distant heirs. (The reference to rulers whose H
ELLENIZED
or M
ACEDONIAN
trappings ill-conceal their Arabian or Median [Iranian] backgrounds—like the tongue-tied eastern ruler in “Potentate from Western Libya”—indicates that their home is one of the farther reaches of the Greek world.) What is intriguing here is that the two characters would appear to have radically different feelings about their part-Hellenic, part-local cultural identities. For while the nameless narrator natters on about how relieved he is to be going home and how happily he accepts the “foreign,”
non-Greek aspect of his identity—more passionate, less coldly rational, we are meant to feel, than the Greek side (think of the “Oriental flailings” of Cleopatra in “The End of Antony,” sharply contrasted with Antony’s Stoic calm)—the silent Hermippus seems to have more complicated feelings about the issue. There is, indeed, a strong suggestion that, like a provincial academic returning from his first conference in a great metropolis, the “angry” Hermippus may be brooding precisely because he’s just been exposed to the first time to a level of culture that is (as he thinks) far superior to that of his native city.
The title characters are clearly Byzantine Greeks who have been exiled from Constantinople. Although there has been some controversy about the precise historical setting of the poem, the reference to the Roman Church (“rather Latin,” line 13) suggests to Savidis and others that the poem is set sometime after the banishment, in 867, of the Constantinopolitan patriarch Photius, well known as the author of the Schism between the Eastern and Roman Churches. Photius had become Patriarch in rather shady circumstances in 857, when his predecessor, Ignatius, was deposed and banished after refusing to give communion to Bardas, the regent for the child-emperor Michael III (see above, “Imenus”) because Bardas had been carrying on an incestuous relationship with his daughter-in-law. After being rushed through Holy Orders in six days, Photius was ordained Patriarch by a bishop who had himself been excommunicated by Ignatius. These nefarious doings were viewed with great disapproval by the pope and the Latin bishops in the West, but their extreme measures against Photius and his supporters, which came to a head in the pope’s threat to excommunicate the Patriarch, did nothing to shake him from his throne.
Photius reigned for ten years. In part because the pope and the Latin bishops had supported Ignatius against him, he was implacably opposed to Rome, and one of his last acts as patriarch was to excommunicate the pope and all the Latins. Then, in 867, Michael III was murdered by Basil I, who subsequently exiled Photius and his associates and restored Ignatius to the patriarchate. Photius spent the next seven years imprisoned
in the monastery of Stenos on the Bosporus, staying in touch with his exiled friends and doing his utmost to win over the new emperor, which, astoundingly, he eventually did: he was recalled to Constantinople in 876 and appointed tutor to the emperor’s son. On Ignatius’s death the following year, Basil successfully intervened with the pope in Rome to have Photius reappointed Patriarch. He died in 897, having been once again deposed from the patriarchal throne by Basil’s son and successor.
If the years of Photius’s exile are indeed the setting for this poem, the reference to N
ONNUS
has a particularly strong resonance. Nonnus, a native of Panopolis in Egypt (hence the epithet P
ANOPOLITE
), was an epic poet who flourished in probably the late 400s A.D.; he was known above all for the
Dionysiaca,
a hexameter epic in forty-eight books about the god Dionysus’s journey to India and back. (A good deal of other material of various sorts, including what one of his modern editors refers to as “his very inaccurate astronomical learning,” is, inevitably, treated: Nonnus was known for his florid style and abstruse interests.) But he was also the author of a verse paraphrase of the Gospel of St. John, a fact of interest because it indicates that at some point he converted to Christianity.
An early version of this poem was written at an unknown date and rewritten in March 1903 with the title “I’d Rather Die Than Live”; the current version was written in 1914 or afterward.
On May 29, 1453, the Byzantine empire came to an end with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman sultan, Mehmet II. By that time, the capital city was virtually all that remained of the once-sprawling empire, and in the months leading up to the city’s fall it was clear that resistance by the isolated forces of the last emperor, Constantine XI, could only achieve a symbolic significance at best. During the climactic battle for the city, Constantine’s cousin, T
HEOPHILUS
P
ALAEOLOGUS
, a scholar and mathematician, is said to have fought alongside him and uttered the words
thélo thaneín mállon ê zên,
“I’d rather die than live,” as he threw himself into the mêlée.
A Great Feast at the House of Sosibius
For Sosibius, the murderous chief minister of Ptolemy IV, see the note on “The Lagid’s Hospitality,”
here
.
The Christian martyr S
IMEON
S
TYLITES
(395–451) was the subject of an abiding fascination for Cavafy, and the object of great admiration. To Gibbon’s extended description of the life and sufferings of this remarkable figure, Cavafy appended a long note in English; both are worth quoting here, not least because Gibbon’s Enlightenment dismay at Simeon’s religious zeal stands in stark counterpoint to Cavafy’s admiration, which combines religiosity with something else—a taste for the rigor of solitude, and admiration for those who subject themselves to it.
Here is Gibbon:
The most perfect hermits are supposed to have passed many days without food, many nights without sleep, and many years without speaking; and glorious was the
man
(I abuse that name) who contrived any cell, or seat, of a peculiar construction, which might expose him, in the most inconvenient posture, to the inclemency of the seasons.
Among these heroes of the monastic life, the name and genius of Simeon Stylites have been immortalized by the singular invention of an aërial penance. At the age of thirteen, the young Syrian deserted the profession of a shepherd, and threw himself into an austere monastery. After a long and painful noviciate, in which Simeon was repeatedly saved from suicide, he established his residence on a mountain, about thirty or forty miles to the east of Antioch. Within the space of a
mandra,
or circle of stones, to which he had attached himself by a ponderous chain, he ascended a column, which was successively raised from the height of nine, to that of sixty, feet from the ground. In this last, and lofty, station, the Syrian Anachoret resisted the heat of thirty summers,
and the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his out-stretched arms, in the figure of a cross; but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meager skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it could not disturb, this
celestial
life; and the patient Hermit expired, without descending from his column. A prince, who should capriciously inflict such tortures, would be deemed a tyrant; but it would surpass the power of a tyrant, to impose a long and miserable existence on the reluctant victims of his cruelty. This voluntary martyrdom must have gradually destroyed the sensibility both of the mind and body; nor can it be presumed that the fanatics, who torment themselves, are susceptible of any lively affection for the rest of mankind. A cruel unfeeling temper has distinguished the monks of every age and country: their stern indifference, which is seldom mollified by personal friendship, is inflamed by religious hatred; and their merciless zeal has strenuously administered the holy office of the Inquisition.