Complete Poems (63 page)

The second and third versions do not vary significantly, but the fourth version—far lengthier than the final version—is the longest, and very rich in material that the poet later excised:

In its evocation of the fraught relationship between a court poet and his royal patron; in the way in which an evocation of earlier Greek history casts a bitterly ironic light on a later, corrupted age; and in particular in its subtle but pointed allusion to a historical episode involving a Greek invasion of Asia, the present poem, dated February 1922, strongly recalls the Published Poem “Darius” (1897?; 1917; 1920). And it is surely worth considering both poems, and indeed other poems of the early and mid-1920s, particularly the John Cantacuzenus cycle (for which see the biographical note on
here
), in the light of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922—a modern-day example of a disastrously ill-conceived and ill-executed Greek invasion of Asia. The war arose out of the irredentist concept of the
Megali Idea
or “Great Idea,” the longstanding nationalist Greek dream (and a cornerstone of foreign policy almost since the establishment of the independent Greek state in the 1820s) of a “Greater Greece” encompassing large Greek Christian communities, such as that in Izmir (Smyrna), still living under Turkish domination in Asia Minor. The war began with a massive Greek landing at Izmir, and at first went well for the Greeks; but as Turkish resistance stiffened, the tide began to turn. The years 1921 and 1922 saw reverses for the Greeks, starting in the interior and moving toward the coast, a trajectory that culminated in the Turks’ recapture of Smyrna and their atrocious massacre of the Christian population of that city. A month later an armistice was concluded, and the following year saw the harrowing exchange of populations between the two implacably hostile states.

The manuscript for this draft offers the following significant variants:

The Dynasty

The covering sheet (the first of a total of four) gives the date and the title. The front of sheet 2 contains the text of the poem, while the back gives a page reference to a passage from Bouché-Leclercq’s
Histoire des Séleucides
about Cleopatra III “the Scarlet.” The third sheet lists the three titles Cavafy considered for this poem, and also contains the variant for line 7. On sheet 4 the poet made the following note: “In connection with the degrading
sobriquets
of the Ptolemies something has been written in a number of ‘Pharos’ early 1925; or late 1926.”

This poem stands as perhaps Cavafy’s most trenchant editorial comment on the moral and political disintegration of the Hellenistic Greek monarchies during the second century B.C., when Rome was assuming world hegemony—a disintegration all too apparent in the contemptuous nicknames that the Alexandrians lavished on their corrupt rulers. For P
TOLEMY
VIII “P
HYSKON
” (“P
OTBELLY
”), see above on “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor).” Physkon had several children by his second wife, his niece and stepdaughter Cleopatra III, a scheming woman who was nicknamed Kokkê, “
THE
S
CARLET
” (the term was also vulgar slang for the female genitalia). These children included two daughters also named Cleopatra, as well as two warring brothers, Ptolemy IX Soter II (c. 141–81), rather mysteriously nicknamed Lathyrus, “C
HICKPEA
,” and Ptolemy X Alexander I (c. 180–88), nicknamed Epeisaktos, “I
NTERLOPER
,” because of his mother’s schemes to put him on the throne. (Despite this favoritism, he is said to have had a hand in her death.) Each, at various points, ruled Cyprus after having been driven from Egypt by his brother, only to return later on.

As this poem and its predecessor in this series make clear, Cavafy is well and wryly aware of the striking parallels between two generations of Ptolemies: Ptolemy VI and his brother, Ptolemy VIII; and the latter Ptolemy’s sons, Ptolemy IX and Ptolemy X. Like their father, both Ptolemy IX and Ptolemy X were co-rulers at various points with powerful mothers and sisters; each brother in both generations was driven from Egypt and briefly ruled a nearby Mediterranean principality (Cyrene in the earlier generation, Cyprus in the later); and in each generation, one of the brothers married the daughter of the other—in each case, a woman named Cleopatra.

There are significant variants for the following lines:

The two other titles that the poet had contemplated were “Potbelly’s Sons” and “House of Potbelly.”

From the Unpublished History

The dossier consists of only two sheets, the first noting the title and the date and the second containing the text of the poem on the front, written, as Lavagnini observes, quickly and with almost no corrections, apart from a pair of short false starts for the first line, after which the verses flow freely and without interruption. On the back of sheet 2 the poet noted a reference to his source material.

The swift and assured composition of this short poem derives, Lavagnini observes, from the poet’s recent reading of his source material, an anecdote about the Byzantine emperor J
USTINIAN
(483–565), often referred to as “the last Roman emperor.” Born near what is now Skopje in present-day Macedonia, he was the nephew of Justin I, the talented if nearly illiterate commoner who went on to become a great general and then emperor (for whom see the note on “If Indeed He Died”). Justinian is best known for the magisterial revision of the Roman legal code that was undertaken at his behest; for the remarkable reassertion of imperial power in the West—the last such before what had been the Western Empire was lost forever to the Germanic tribes—under the great general Belisarius; and of course for his marriage to the dynamic, lowborn, and highly colorful empress Theodora, a former courtesan. Among the noteworthy events of his reign was the Byzantine state’s takeover of Plato’s Academy in Athens, which for a millennium had been the symbolic source of pagan Hellenic culture and the training ground of its great intellectual emissaries—a final and symbolically resonant absorption of the pagan Greek past into the Christian Greek present.

Much of what we know of Justinian’s reign derives primarily from the works of the historian Procopius, a contemporary of Justinian’s who served on the staff of Belisarius. For many years these works were thought to consist of
On the Wars,
comprising a total of eight volumes dedicated to the emperor’s military exploits through the year 552—a work Procopius was eminently well suited to write, given his intimacy with Belisarius’s numerous campaigns—and “On Buildings,” a panegyric to the emperor’s building programs. Only after the author’s death (probably in the 560s) did another, remarkably different account of Justinian’s reign come to light: the so-called
Secret History
(the Greek title, which Cavafy uses in his poem, is simply
Anekdota,
better rendered as the
Unpublished
[i.e.,
History
or
Writings
]). Here, the historian allows himself to indulge in vicious criticism of the emperor and his wife impossible to express in his official history. No little of the vituperation expressed in the U
NPUBLISHED
H
ISTORY
, which is full of scandalous and, often, pornographic gossip about Justinian and Theodora, derived from the wellborn Procopius’s resentment—shared by many of his class—of Justinian’s use of talented commoners, or “new men,” in the energetic administration of the newly revivified empire; although it is also true that dissatisfaction with the emperor grew over the years of his long reign, which included a devastating plague that decimated the empire throughout the east.

The source for the present poem is one we can pinpoint with some accuracy, thanks to Cavafy’s note on the back of the second sheet: page 424 of the second volume of J. B. Bury’s
A History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian
(395–565), published in London in 1923. That the draft of this poem is dated so soon after the book’s publication indicates how eager the poet was to get his hands on Bury’s new work. (We know that he had already read and made notes on the British historian’s 1889
History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene
[395
A.D. to
800
A.D.
]) Here is the passage in question (to provide proper context, I begin the citation on the preceding page):

The passage in Procopius’s
Secret History
to which Bury refers (12.14–21) is the following one: