Complete Poems (62 page)

It was, indeed, Gemistus Plethon’s particular preference for Plato, perceived as a covert paganism, that aroused the ire of church authorities. Eventually his Aristotelian rival, Georgios Scholarios (who later, as Gennadius II, would become the first P
ATRIARCH
of Constantinople after the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453), persuaded the emperor Manuel II Palaeologus to exile Gemistus to the fortress-city of Mistras in the Peloponnese on suspicion of heresy; the order may have been carried out by Manuel’s son, A
NDRONICUS
. In his final work, the
Book of Laws,
an attempt to synthesize Neoplatonism and belief in the Olympian gods, the elderly Gemistus flatly stated that Zeus was the supreme god. The treatise was burned by Scholarios.

Gemistus’s extraordinary influence on the rebirth of interest in Plato in Western Europe stems from his early association with the emperor John VIII Palaeologus, whom he accompanied as a delegate to the Councils of Ferrara in 1438 and of Florence in 1439, which were devoted to discussions of a reunion of the Western and Eastern Churches. It was during this stay in Italy that Gemistus gave lectures on Plato to interested Italians, thereby reintroducing Platonic thought to a Europe that had been familiar primarily with Aristotle. The influence of his teachings in Florence was so great that Cosimo de’ Medici was inspired to found the Accademia Platonica, whose first director referred to Gemistus as “the second Plato.” (The fall of Constantinople in the year following Gemistus’s death furthered the renaissance of Classical learning in Western Europe, as Byzantine scholars sought refuge in the West.) Gibbon, in his description of Gemistus’s activities in Italy, has nothing but admiration for his “sublime
thoughts”: “sometimes adapted to familiar conversation, and sometimes adorned with the richest colours of poetry and eloquence.”

Two alternate readings are worth noting because they suggest the extent to which Cavafy was debating how much to emphasize the erotic elements in this poem, which so unexpectedly reveals itself as a “historical” poem. For lines 4–5 Lavagnini notes the following variant:

This variant suggests quite strongly the physical reality of the erotic desire in question; in this variant we find, too, the important Cavafian word
idoni,
“pleasure” (in the participle
idoni
zomeni,
“taking pleasure”). The aesthetic and erotic resonances of this scene—the naked youths, the emphasis on the beauty of limbs freed of the constraints of clothing at the seaside bathing spot—powerfully recall the final stanza of the Published Poem “Days of 1908,” with its narrator’s reverie about a working-class youth:

In her important study of the problems of religion in Cavafy’s early work (
Le problème religieux dans l’oeuvre de Cavafy: Les Années de formation [
1882
–
1905
],
Sorbonne, 1996), Diana Haas has offered the intriguing suggestion that one reason Cavafy might have laid this draft aside without finishing it was that a mere month after its composition, in July 1921, he began work on an early version of “Days of 1908,” which bore the title “The Summer of 1895” and may have expressed more directly
the themes with which he was preoccupied at that moment, which seem ultimately to have been more erotic than historical.

In this context it is particularly interesting to note that, in an earlier form of the last line, the poet had described Gemistus first as a “lover,”
erastis,
of “Hellenic letters,” only to cross out that line and replace it with “an admirer of the Greek’s way of life,” which he subsequently deleted in favor of the last form, reproduced here.

Birth of a Poem

Of the two sheets in this folder, one bears the title and the date; the second contains the text of the poem, the title “Birth of a Poem,” and an alternate title, “A Vision All Its Own.”

Lavagnini observes a connection between this poem and “In a Town of Osrhoene” (1916; 1917), in which an apparition revealed by moonlight is the spur to strong emotion:

If that poem links moonlight to a concrete instantiation of beauty, another poem that Cavafy saw fit to publish in 1917, “I’ve Gazed So Much” (1911, 1917), looks forward to the present poem in the way it connects corporeal loveliness recalled at nighttime to the inspiration for, and requirements of, poetic art:

There is a variant reading of line 4, crossed out on the manuscript:

Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor)

The dossier for this poem contains nine sheets, in which Lavagnini has detected fully five versions of the poem, three of which with significant variants (reproduced below).

P
TOLEMY
VIII (182–181 to 116 B.C.; he is sometimes numbered VII, the numbering of the incestuous and parricidal Ptolemies being notoriously problematic), the son of Ptolemy V and Cleopatra I, gave himself the grandiose epithets Euergetes (“B
ENEFACTOR
”) and Tryphon (“Magnificent”); the Alexandrians, famous for their sardonic wit, redubbed him “Kakergetes” (“M
ALEFACTOR
”) and, because of his notorious girth, “Physkon” (“P
OTBELLY
”).

From his earliest youth, Ptolemy VIII was in conflict with his older brother, Ptolemy VI (186–145 B.C.). (This Ptolemy VI was the father of Cleopatra Thea, mother of Antiochus IX of Syria, the subject of the Unfinished Poem “Antiochus the Cyzicene.”) After the elder brother’s death in 145, the younger, who had been expelled from Egypt, returned to Alexandria as Ptolemy VIII. In the following year he married his brother’s widow, Cleopatra II, who was also the sister of both men. Almost immediately he killed her son by Ptolemy VI (the boy is sometimes referred to as Ptolemy VII), and two years after his succession he married her daughter by Ptolemy VI, Cleopatra III. By Cleopatra III, who was both his stepdaughter and niece, he fathered Ptolemy IX and Ptolemy X, brothers whose internecine rivalry in many ways replicated that between their father and uncle (see the Published Poems “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” and “Envoys from Alexandria,” and the Unfinished Poem “The Dynasty,” with notes).

Even by the decayed standards of the later Ptolemies, Ptolemy VIII Euergetes stands out as having been particularly loathsome: according to all reliable sources he was physically repellent (contemporary Greeks were horrified that the obese monarch favored the transparent garments of the Egyptians, rather than the modestly opaque dress of the Greeks), paranoid, and murderously cruel. He seems to have been particularly vindictive against those whom he saw as supporters of his late older brother, Ptolemy VI. These groups included Alexandria’s Jews (whom, according to the historian Josephus, the king tried to have trampled by elephants: an incident that the biblical book of Maccabees assigns to an earlier Ptolemy) and particularly the city’s thriving intellectual class, many of whom, as a result of Ptolemy’s persecutions, fled Alexandria and scattered throughout the Mediterranean.

And yet despite his oppression of the Alexandrian intelligentsia, Ptolemy was not without considerable intellectual pretensions himself. He was a pupil of the great literary scholar Aristarchus, the head of the Alexandrian library (which the king supported), and is said to have delighted in abstruse literary debate of the kind which Cavafy evokes in the present poem. He left no fewer than twenty-four volumes of memoirs.

The interpretation of the present poem stems from a proper understanding of the subject of the discussion between the belletrist monarch and the fictional court poet, who has evidently composed a work on a bit of history already three hundred years old at the dramatic date of the poem: the Asian campaign of the Spartan king and general A
GESILAUS
II (444–360 B.C.). Already middle-aged by the end of the Peloponnesian War, which saw the defeat of Athens and the triumph of Sparta, Agesilaus—who was lame and rumored to be the son of the aristocratic Athenian statesman Alcibiades—led a force of eight thousand allied troops into Asia in 396, in order to guarantee the safety of the coastal Greek cities, an expedition he rather grandiosely saw as a modern-day Trojan War. To underscore the parallel, he sought to offer a sacrifice at Aulis prior to sailing for Asia, as the Greek forces did in the legend of the Trojan War; but the Theban allies objected, thereby winning Agesilaus’s undying enmity.

Once in Asia, however, Agesilaus is said to have begun entertaining
the idea of a far grander project: a campaign into the Asian interior and an attack on the Persian king Artaxerxes II. Before he was able to undertake this enterprise, however, he was recalled to Greece due to the explosion of hostilities between Sparta and a coalition of Greek city-states including Athens, Corinth, Thebes, and Argos. Although he was successful in some of his encounters with the anti-Spartan coalition, the Spartan fleet under his leadership suffered a devastating defeat at sea at the hands of the Persians (whose leadership included the Athenian admiral Conon, only too happy to have a chance to revenge himself on the Spartans after the cataclysmic Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War).

A detail from Paparrigopoulos’s account of Agesilaus’s Asian campaign suggests why the fourth-century Spartan king’s expedition sparked Cavafy’s imagination—and why he chose to frame it in a late Ptolemaic, second-century B.C. context. For the nineteenth-century Greek historian so greatly favored by Cavafy describes Agesilaus as “the true forerunner of Philip and Alexander”; which is to say, the Macedonian kings Alexander the Great, who successfully invaded Asia and toppled the Persian empire in the 330s B.C., and his father, Philip II, whose idea the Asian campaign originally had been. Alexander’s conquests, of course, created the Hellenistic world that is the setting of this poem: as we know, following his death and the breakup of his world empire, his general Ptolemy became the pharaoh of Egypt, and was therefore the source of the Macedonian blood of which his distant, decadent descendant, Ptolemy Physkon, here rather preposterously boasts.

Another irony suggested by the invocation of Agesilaus (in light of Paparrigopoulos’s phrasing) is that “the feelings that the campaign of Agesilaus would likely have provoked in Greece” were, if anything, the opposite of the “lofty pride” and “unchecked rush to heroism” that the ignorant poet rather optimistically imagines. For the Asian campaigns of both Alexander and his “forerunner,” Agesilaus, provoked hostility and suspicion among the other Greek states; as we know, Agesilaus was unable to undertake his planned invasion precisely because the Greeks back home were rising against Sparta. Cavafy, then—the “poet-historian” whose own historical method was so rigorously scholarly and meticulous—presents here a poet who is grossly ignorant of history; while, in a further irony, the “Macedonian” who does know his history—Ptolemy himself—is
so clearly an unworthy successor to the illustrious ancestor whose name he bears, and who was a proud participant in that earlier Asian campaign.

The evolution of this poem from its earliest to its last extant version suggests a typically rigorous self-editing on Cavafy’s part. As the poem took shape, he stripped away a good deal of material about Ptolemy’s knowledge of history, which in the later version is merely inferred; and he also removed references to further details of the history of Agesilaus’s expedition (the sacrifice at Aulis, for instance). The result is a poem at once more evocative and more pointed.

The first version contains the following two passages:

And, from Ptolemy’s address to the poet: