Complete Poems (61 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
The dossier consists of only two sheets, the first bearing the title and the date, the second containing the text of the poem, written with some haste and often difficult to make out.
The following variant readings are worth noting; the last one, an alternate for the final line, indicates that Cavafy had at some point completely revised his idea for the setting of this poem.
The setting of the jetty as a site for illicit erotic meetings links this poem to the earliest of the Unfinished drafts, “The Item in the Paper.”
Four sheets, the first bearing the title and the date. Sheet 2 contains the text of the poem; sheet 3 features the poet’s transcription of his source material (a passage from E. L. Butcher’s
Story of the Church of Egypt
); sheet 4, a variant reading of the final three lines, along with a note by the poet indicating that he had not successfully located the source of Butcher’s story.
A
THANASIUS
, bishop of Alexandria (ca. 295–373), was a vigorous leader of the Egyptian church during the ideologically and politically turbulent fourth century; among other things, he was a great scholar of the concept of the Incarnation and an implacable foe of the hugely controversial Arian heresy (named for the Alexandrian priest Arius [250–336], who insisted that the person of Jesus was not consubstantial or coeternal with God the Father, a position that set him at odds with the Nicene Creed). Born in Alexandria, Athanasius was ordained by the Alexandrian patriarch, Alexander, when he was in his early twenties, and likely served as Alexander’s secretary at the Council of Nicaea in 325. He succeeded Alexander as patriarch in 328, despite his extreme youth and, even more, despite strong opposition from Arius and his supporters, some of whom were powerful bishops, such as Eusebius of Nicomedia.
Conflict with the Arian faction was to plague Athanasius throughout his reign—one that was, too, intricately bound up with the tumultuous imperial politics of the era of Constantine the Great and his successors. In 335 he was deposed by an Arian cabal and later on, having been rather fancifully accused by his enemies of interfering with the Egyptian grain supply, he was banished to the Rhineland by the emperor Constantine. On Constantine’s death in 337 he returned to Alexandria, only to be banished once again the following year by the late emperor’s son, Constantius II, who was an Arian. (Indeed, after Constantius slaughtered most of the family of his young cousin Julian during the dynastic power struggle precipitated by Constantine’s death—the subject of the Unfinished Poem “The Rescue of Julian”—he insisted on an Arian religious education for Julian, whose teacher was none other than Eusebius of Nicomedia.) Athanasius returned again to Alexandria in 347 with the backing of Constantius’s brother and co-emperor Constans, who was
based in Rome, but he was banished yet again on the death of Constans, in 350.
During these upheavals he managed to write powerful treatises against Arianism, in one of which, perhaps understandably, he likens Constantius to the Antichrist. (He also composed his
Life of Saint Anthony,
which proved enormously influential on the development of the Christian hagiography.) It was on Constantius’s death in 361 that Athanasius, who by this time had become something of a folk hero in Egypt, was allowed at last to return once more to Alexandria under an amnesty granted by the new emperor, Julian the Apostate, to exiled bishops; no doubt his experience of the preceding years informed the impassioned call for Christian unity that he issued on his return to his native city. In the next year, however, Julian, who was bitterly disappointed in his hopes that Athanasius would foster dissension among the Christian factions, had Athanasius banished from Alexandria to Upper Egypt. (A detailed note on Julian’s life and career and their significance for Cavafy’s work can be found
here
.)
Until Julian’s death in battle in 363, Athanasius often lived in fear for his life; it is in this period that the present poem is set. As is already clear from his several poems about Apollonius of Tyana (for instance, the Published Poems “But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent” and “If Indeed He Died,” or the Unfinished Poem “Among the Groves of the Promenades”), incidents of supernatural perception on the part of profoundly gifted or spiritual men exerted a particular fascination on Cavafy, and we may add the present poem to what constitutes a kind of cycle of poetic explorations of this abstruse supernatural theme. (Apollonius, in fact, exemplified the literary type of the supernaturally gifted miracle worker, which influenced Athanasius’s depiction of St. Anthony in the
Life.
) Cavafy’s original source material for this poem was a passage from Butcher’s
Story of the Church of Egypt
(1895), which he transcribed onto one of the sheets that make up the dossier for this poem:
Athanasius stayed some time in Hermopolis and Antinoë, preaching and openly performing his duties, as if on an ordinary visitation tour; but at midsummer he received fresh warning that he was in danger, and Theodore came again with another abbot to entreat him to conceal himself in
Tabenna. He embarked in a covered boat with the 2 monks; but the wind was against them, and it became necessary to tow the boat with painful slowness. Athanasius was for some time absorbed in prayer, and did not observe the faces of his two companions. At length he turned to them and began “If I am killed”—but broke off as a curious smile passed between the two monks, who thereupon informed him that even while he prayed they had received a supernatural intimation that Julian was no more. Julian was, in fact, slain on the field of battle on June 26, 363.
A note, dated November 1929 and attached as the fourth sheet in the dossier for this poem, suggests the impressive scholarly rigor characteristic of Cavafy’s method. In it, the poet indicates that over the course of the decade since the composition of this poem, he had attempted, and failed, to find a primary source for Butcher’s colorful anecdote in J. P. Migne’s
Patrologia Graeca,
an immense mid-nineteenth-century collection of the Greek writings of the Church Fathers. The note ends with the poet’s instruction that if the story found in Butcher could not be authenticated by a primary source, the poem “could not stand.” The scholar Glen Bowersock has since completed the poet’s work, locating the source of the story in
Patrologia Graeca
(volume 26, columns 980C–81C).
A variant to the last line reads as follows:
… what was happening in Mesopotamia.
The vile Julian, in that very moment,
The vile Julian had ceased to live.
Cavafy wrote the date on the covering sheet for this dossier of five sheets, which also bears the title, one of the two he considered for this poem. The text of the poem appears on sheet 2 (on the back of which are written the two titles: “The Bishop Pegasius” and “The Temple of
Athena”), with a few lines and words appearing as well on sheet 3. Sheets 4 and 5 contain references to and citations from sources for the incident described in the poem.
The poem refers to an event that took place in the autumn of 355. En route to see his uncle, the emperor Constantius, in Mediolanum (that is, Milan, where Constantius would bestow on him the title of
caesar
on November 6, 355), the twenty-one-year-old Julian took time to visit the city of Ilion, near the coast of Asia Minor—the site of the ancient city of Troy. After he had become emperor and begun his work of restoring pagan worship, Julian addressed a letter to a pagan priest, dating perhaps to 362, in which the emperor defends a certain pagan called P
EGASIUS
(who, a former Christian bishop, had had his pagan bona fides questioned). Julian describes how he had been taken to see the ancient temples by Pegasius when the latter was bishop of Ilion, and how the two men, both secretly pagan, had subtly tested each other:
Pegasius came to meet me, and as I wanted to explore the city—for this was my pretext for visiting the shrines—he became my guide and took me round everywhere. Listen now to his deeds and words, from which you might reckon that he did not lack the proper attitude toward the [pagan] gods.
There is a hero’s shrine of Hector where a bronze statue of him stands in a little temple. Opposite this, they’ve set up a great figure of Achilles, in the unroofed courtyard. If you’ve seen the place, you’d recognize it from my description.… Finding that the altars were still lighted, indeed one might say ablaze, and the statue of Hector had been anointed till it gleamed, I said, with a look at Pegasius, “What’s this, then? Do the people of Ilion offer sacrifices?”—carefully probing him to see what his thoughts were. And he replied, “And what’s unusual in worshiping a brave man, one of their own countrymen, just as we worship our martyrs?” The comparison was hardly sound; but judged by the standards of those times, his opinion was a cultured one. And the rest? “Let us proceed now,” he said, “to the temple of Athena of Ilion.” After which he took me there with the greatest
eagerness and opened up the temple and, like someone producing a piece of evidence, showed me all the statues in perfect condition, nor did he do any of the things that impious men were wont to do, tracing the sign [of the cross] on their foreheads; nor did he whistle, as such men would do, to himself. For those two things are the height of their theology, whistling at spirits and making the sign of the cross on their foreheads.
Julian goes on to note that although it was true that Pegasius, while bishop, had done some damage to some of the gods’ temples, this was merely a blind, to throw off those who might suspect his secret paganism. This elaborately contrived secrecy, betraying as it did a terror of being exposed, together with the cautious, probing phrases, the double entendres and veiled allusions, inevitably recall the charged atmosphere of secret homosexual encounters familiar from poems that have a contemporary setting, such as “In the Window of the Tobacco Shop” (1907; 1917) and “He Asked About the Quality” (1930; 1930).
Ten years after he began work on this poem, Cavafy was evidently still pondering the fraught encounter between the secretly pagan prince and the secretly pagan bishop. Among the notes in the dossier for this poem there is a lengthy citation of a description of the Julian-Pegasius encounter by the French historian Joseph Bidez, whose
La Vie de L’Empereur Julien
was not published until 1930, fully ten years after the poet had penned this draft.
The word I have translated as “princeling” in line 3 is
igemoniskos,
a diminutive of
igemonas
(related to the English
hegemon
), meaning “ruler” or “potentate”; the diminutive has a certain contemptuous force. A variant for this line describes Julian as
prinkips,
which is a Greek transliteration of the Latin
princeps,
and is a more neutral way of referring to a member of the imperial household. A variant to the fourth line reads as follows:
upon the ruin of the pagan rite
they looked with deep emotion
The covering sheet, bearing the date and the title, includes a note indicating that Cavafy considered the title to be provisional. Sheet 2 contains the text of the first three stanzas, and sheet 3 the text of the final stanza, along with material related to the earlier stanzas, including the variant for line 4.
This remarkable poem rather startlingly unites a shimmering eroticism with an equally charged, almost yearning evocation of the last days of Byzantium. Always in Cavafy’s evocations of Byzantium—the civilization that for Greeks such as the poet represented a cultural conduit linking ancient times to the present day—there is a quality of wistful yearning, which, as the scholar Diana Haas noted, is often represented by the emotionally charged use of the possessive pronoun “our” when speaking of the Byzantine culture or its people. We find it, for instance, in “In the Church” (1892; 1901; 1906; 1912?), where he has the striking phrase
o endoxos mas Vizantinismos,
“our glorious Byzantinism,” or in the 1914 Unpublished Poem “Theophilus Palaeologus,” where the possessive pronoun is explicitly linked to the word for “yearning,”
kaïmos,
in the phrase
poson kaïmo tou yenous mas,
“how great a yearning of our race.” The special kind of longing that contemplation of Byzantine civilization inspired in Cavafy—rich yet exhausted, glorious yet doomed, proudly attempting to uphold great traditions even as it disintegrates—is made concrete in the present text in the almost voyeuristic appreciation of the lissome beauty of the youths coming from their swim; that erotic yearning is then explicitly linked to Byzantium by the revelation that the young men are, in fact, students of the great Byzantine scholar G
EORGIUS
G
EMISTUS
P
LETHON
.
Gemistus (ca. 1355–1452) was a leading Neoplatonist, a principal figure in the revival of Classical learning in Western Europe and a man of remarkably broad learning and curiosity. Although he taught philosophy at Constantinople, he studied Zoroastrianism and other abstruse teachings with the Jewish scholar Eliseus. A rare champion of the Platonic (as opposed to the far more prevalent Aristotelian) philosophical vision, he is said to have taken the additional surname
Plêthon,
an archaizing synonym for
gemistos,
“full,” because it sounded like “Plato.” He was the author of,
among other works, a tract on the differences between Plato and Aristotle, and a pamphlet urging Manuel II Palaeologus (a son of the emperor, John VIII, and the ruler of the Peloponnesian province of Morea) to reorganize the social structure of the Morea along the lines of Plato’s
Republic.
This grandiose vision of an application of Classical philosophical principles to real life moved Paparrigopoulos, the nineteenth-century historian of Greek culture so important to the poet, to compare Gemistus to a figure of particular interest to Cavafy: Julian. “The man, Paparrigopoulos wrote, “seems to have fallen into the error of Julian the Apostate, and on behalf of this doctrine maintained beliefs inimical to Christianity”—a comparison of which the poet, always alert to anything to do with Julian, is sure to have taken note.