Complete Poems (60 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Cavafy had twice spent some time in M
ARSEILLE
. In the early 1870s, following the premature death of his father, his mother, financially pressed and hoping to obtain support from her brother-in-law in England, traveled with her younger sons from Alexandria first to Marseille, then to Paris, then to London, and finally to Liverpool. The present poem
seems clearly to evoke a memory of the poet’s second trip to the port city—the first stop on the trip to France and England that he took in May and June 1897, when he was thirty-four, accompanied by his brother John, who would translate a number of his poems into English. Among the many souvenirs that the poet saved from this adventure was a handout from a brothel.
The first of the three sheets in this poem’s dossier gives the title and the date. The text of the poem is clean and clear, with few corrections.
The title is a quotation from a work by the satirist Lucian of Samosata (120–180? A.D.) An accomplished lecturer, essayist, and observer of literary trends, Lucian was a caustic critic of the Second Sophistic, the rhetorical movement that flourished between about 60 and 250 A.D., and which was marked by a renaissance of interest in the Greek literature of the high classical period (i.e., the First Sophistic). In his treatise
Teacher of Orators,
Lucian is particularly interested in exposing the contemporary mania among professional orators and
SOPHISTS
for aping the Attic style of the great Greek writers of six centuries earlier. Among the archaizing, atticizing clichés that he mocks is the reflexive invocation of the heroism of the Athenian C
YNEGIRUS
, who died at the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. In chapter 18 of his treatise, Lucian sarcastically suggests that any would-be orator wishing to make an impression should refer “above all [to] Marathon and Cynegirus.”
Cynegirus was the brother of the great playwright Aeschylus; his death, during the rout of the Persians who fled to their ships after the battle (in which the Greeks were led by the general M
ILTIADES
), is graphically recalled in Herodotus’s
History
(6.114):
As the Persians fled, the Greeks followed them, hacking at them, until they came to the sea. Then the Greeks called for fire and laid hold of the ships. At this point of the struggle the polemarch [a senior military officer, Callimachus] was killed, having proved himself a good man and true, and, of the generals, there died Stesilaus, son of Thrasylaus. And Cynegirus, the son of Euphorion, gripped with his hand the poop of one
of the ships and had his hand chopped off with an axe and so died, and many renowned Athenians also.
This noble gesture was lovingly recalled by various authors of the Second Sophistic, but there can be little doubt that the one Cavafy had in mind here was M. Antonius Polemo, a sophist who was not only based in Smyrna, as is the unnamed lecturer in this poem, but was also the author of an elaborate display speech about the virtues of Cynegirus, which is extant and would have been available to Cavafy in a number of editions. The speech, which conventionally presents both sides of a debate (this one between the fathers of Cynegirus and Callimachus, as to which son was the greater hero and thus more deserving of receiving a funeral oration), is precisely the kind of grandiose exercise ridiculed by Lucian in his
Teacher of Orators.
A degree of grandiosity seemed to have been a hallmark of Polemo’s personality as well as his style. Born around 88 A.D. to a family of considerable wealth and political attainments, he reached the apogee of his success and influence during the reign of his great patron, Hadrian (ruled 117–138). He served as a representative of Smyrna on important embassies, and tirelessly used his considerable influence to bring greater glory for the city. Known more for his stylistic panache than for any deep intellectual attainments, Polemo was a man of no little swagger even when off the podium; his grandiose habit of traveling in great state and with a considerable retinue trailing behind him provoked the jealous ire of some. That he did not underestimate his own importance to the art of rhetoric was clear. When he was close to death (probably in 144 A.D.), he is said to have asked to be buried alive in the family tomb; while the entrance was being walled up he cried out “Hurry! Hurry! Lest the sun see me reduced to silence!”
Polemo was nonetheless enormously gifted. Widely admired by other sophists, including the great Herodes Atticus (for whom see “Herodes Atticus,”), he was acclaimed for his verbal polish, his penchant for literary allusion—he is said to have endorsed invoking prose authors “by the armful” and poets “by the wagon-load”—and above all for the theatricality of his delivery. This aspect of his professional technique is made much of in the biography of Polemo found
in the
Lives of the Sophists
by Philostratus, a work well known to Cavafy, who wrote about it in one of his early articles and indeed used it as a source for other poems, including “Herodes Atticus.” In a passage that likely influenced the present poem’s reference to the “gesticulations” and excessive emotionality of the sophist lecturing on Cynegirus, Philostratus describes how Polemo, in reaching the climaxes of his arguments, “would jump out of his chair, such was the pitch of excitement that he reached”; at other moments, he would “stamp the ground like the horse in Homer.”
Two further elements in Philostratus’s text seem to have kindled Cavafy’s imagination here. The first is the following description of the students at Polemo’s school in Smyrna:
young people flowed into it from both continents and the islands—nor were they dissolute and promiscuous, but a choice lot and genuinely Hellenic.
The second is an anecdote about a how Polemo got the best of a conceited, spoiled, and vain youth of his acquaintance, who is described as “living a life of dissipation in Smyrna”; although this young man is Ionian, he bears the Roman-sounding name of Varus. It is tempting to think that, coming across these lines, Cavafy might have begun to imagine what a dissolute, promiscuous, and not at all “Hellenic” youth—a real Roman, in fact—might have been daydreaming about while the great orator discoursed about the sterling virtues of the long-dead Athenian hero.
In its dramatic setting, this 1919 poem looks forward to “From the School of the Renowned Philosopher,” which was written and published two years later. That poem similarly features a smug young student whose narcissistic daydreams take him far from the world of his master’s teachings: as the poem progresses we witness a similar segue from the great world of politics and ambition to the private world of erotic activity:
He remained Ammonius Saccas’s student for two years;
but of philosophy and of Saccas he grew bored.
Afterward he went into politics.
But he gave it up. The Prefect was a fool;
and those around him solemn, pompous stiffs;
their Greek horribly uncouth, the wretches.
… … … … … … … … … … …
Still, he had to do something. He became an habitué
of the depraved houses of Alexandria,
of every secret den of debauchery.
The figure of the beautiful young man whose physical allure gives him an inflated sense of himself, a swagger that manages perhaps to be touching even as it irritates, is one to which Cavafy returned in one of the last poems he wrote, “Days of 1908” (1932; 1935). Here, the culminating image of the naked boy, godlike in his loveliness, is preceded by an opening description of his contempt for the low-level job he can’t bear to hang on to:
A job, at three pounds a month, at a little stationer’s,
had been offered to him.
But he turned it down without the slightest hesitation.
It wouldn’t do. It wasn’t a wage
for him, a young man with some education, twenty-five years of age.
A variant of the first line makes the Italian boy twenty-two years old, rather than twenty. In almost all of the poet’s works focusing on the beauty of appealing young men, the young men in question are in their twenties.
The dossier consists of four sheets, the first giving the title and the date. Sheet 2 contains the text for the first stanza, and sheet 3, the text for the second. An alternate title, “Antiochus Grypus” (the epithet means
“Hook-nose”), appears above the text on sheet 2. Sheet 4 contains the poet’s transcription, with some abbreviations, of a passage about Antiochus the Cyzicene from the ancient historian Diodorus Siculus, from the 1846 Teubner edition (Leipzig).
In this poem Cavafy returns to Syria of the second century B.C., when the mighty Seleucid empire was collapsing—a grand Hellenistic disintegration of the kind that had always fired his imagination, as is evident in such poems as “Orophernes” (1904; 1916), “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” (1910; 1916), and “Demetrius Soter” (1915; 1919), and to which he would return at the end of the 1920s in two Published Poems, “Alexander Jannaeus and Alexandra” (1929; 1929) and “Should Have Taken the Trouble” (1930; 1930). (For a discussion of the history of the Hellenistic monarchies of Macedon, Asia, and Egypt, and their significance in Cavafy’s work, see the note
here
.) If anything, the short life and career of A
NTIOCHUS
IX “
THE
C
YZICENE
” is an ideal case study both for the fantastically tortured, endlessly internecine conflicts that plagued the history of the last century of the Hellenistic Mediterranean, and for the pathetic inadequacy of the later Hellenistic monarchs to live up to the grandeur of their legacy from Alexander and his generals—a favorite theme to which Cavafy returns in other Unfinished Poems, as witness the present poem, “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor),” and “The Dynasty.”
Antiochus was born around 137 B.C. to the Seleucid emperor Antiochus VII and his wife, Cleopatra Thea, a daughter of Ptolemy VI of Egypt whose extravagant marital career had included prior marriages first to the pretender Alexander Balas (see “Demetrius Soter (1915; 1919) and “Favour of Alexander Balas” (1916?; 1921), and then Antiochus VII’s brother, Demetrius II. Antiochus IX was called “the Cyzicene” because upon his father’s death in 129, when his uncle Demetrius reclaimed the throne, his mother sent him for safekeeping in Cyzicus, a city on the Sea of Marmara. After Demetrius II’s death in 126, his son by Cleopatra Thea, Antiochus VIII Grypus (“Hook-nose”)—which is to say, Antiochus the Cyzicene’s half brother—assumed the throne jointly with his mother: a step that was taken, it should be noted, only after she had killed her other son by Demetrius, the ill-named Seleucus V Philomator (“Mother-loving”). Inevitably, a civil war broke out between the two
brothers, although eventually the two divided the kingdom between them, a move that only contributed to the disintegration of the once-great Seleucid realm.
As a result of the power vacuum created by civil war, many Syrian cities declared themselves independent, and ambitious strongmen throughout the region made themselves monarchs of short-lived kingdoms. The ongoing chaos in Syria—which had formerly controlled Judea with an iron grip—inevitably furthered the political aims of men such as the Judean aristocrat J
OHN
H
YRCANUS
, a son of the high priest and freedom fighter Simon Maccabee (brother of Judah), and the father of Alexander Jannaeus (see “Alexander Jannaeus”). In particular, Hyrcanus took advantage of the unstable reign of Demetrius II to overrun and raze Samaria and to invade Idumaea (the Edom of the Hebrew Bible).
As he often like to do, Cavafy derived his poem from two sources, one ancient and one modern. The latter was A. Bouché-Leclercq’s
Histoire des Seleucides (
323
–
64
avant J. C.)
(Paris, 1913–1914), which in turn uses an anecdote about the monarch that occurs in the text of the first-century B.C. historian Diodorus of Sicily (ca. 90–30 B.C.). (Diodorus’s
Historical Library,
liberally culled from the works of other historians and originally published in forty books—of which fifteen have survived—sought to trace the history of the world from the Trojan War through the middle of the first century B.C.; which is to say, the historian’s own time.) In the passage that Cavafy copied out onto the fourth of the sheets in the dossier for the present poem, taken from the thirty-fifth book of Diodorus’s work, the ancient historian comments, not without sarcasm, on Antiochus’s insatiable love of amusement, particularly theatricals of all sorts:
Once he had gained the throne, Antiochus the Cyzicene fell into habits of drunkenness and luxurious excess and enthusiasms utterly inappropriate to a king. He took great pleasure in mimes and pantomime performers and all sorts of show people, and he eagerly devoted himself to learning their various crafts. And he took up puppetry as well; and so learned to maneuver silver-plated and gilded animal figures five cubits high, and many other such devices. But he did not possess
any “city-takers” or other machinery for besieging cities, which might have brought him great glory, and would have been a distinction that was actually worthy of note. He was immoderately fond of hunting at odd hours, and often, at night, keeping it a secret from his intimates, he would slip out into the countryside with two or three of the household and would hunt lion and panther and wild boar. And in grappling so closely with savage beasts he often put himself in the very greatest danger.
The strange and distinctive collocation of high-stakes international political gamesmanship and ostensibly innocuous theatrical entertainments—the idea of a king who is also merely a “player”—clearly appealed to the poet, with his strong sense of the foibles that lay beneath royal pretensions: see, for instance, “King Demetrius” (1900; 1906).