Complete Poems (64 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Wherefore to me, and many others of us, these two seemed not to be human beings, but veritable demons, and what the poets call vampires: who laid their heads together to see how they could most easily and quickly destroy the race and deeds of men; and assuming human bodies, became man-demons, and so convulsed the world. And one could find evidence of this in many things, but especially in the superhuman power with which they worked their will.
For when one examines closely, there is a clear difference between what is human and what is supernatural. There have been many enough men, during the whole course of history, who by chance or by nature have inspired great fear, ruining cities or countries or whatever else fell into their power; but to destroy all men and bring calamity on the whole inhabited earth remained for these two to accomplish, whom Fate aided in their schemes of corrupting all mankind. For by earthquakes, pestilences, and floods of river waters at this time came further ruin, as I shall presently show. Thus not by human, but by some other kind of power they accomplished their dreadful designs.
And they say his mother said to some of her intimates once that not of Sabbatius her husband, nor of any man was Justinian a son. For when she was about to conceive, there visited a demon, invisible but giving evidence of his presence perceptibly where man consorts with woman, after which he vanished utterly as in a dream.
And some of those who have been with Justinian at the palace late at night, men who were pure of spirit, have thought they saw a strange demoniac form taking his place. One man said that the Emperor suddenly rose from his throne and wandered about, and indeed he was never wont to remain sitting for long, and immediately Justinian’s head vanished, while the rest of his body seemed to make these same extensive rounds; whereat the beholder stood aghast and fearful, wondering if his eyes were deceiving him. But presently he perceived the vanished head filling out and joining the body again as strangely as it had left it. (tr. Richard Atwater, with modifications)
Lavagnini notes that Cavafy must have consulted Procopius directly, in addition to reading Bury: she cites “late” in line 6 of the poem (cf. Procopius, “late at night”) and the variant for line 7, “went about/the hallways of the palace” (cf. Procopius, “make these same extensive rounds”), details absent from Bury’s paraphrase.
Given the meticulousness of Cavafy’s reading of source material, and his habit of comparing contemporary historians with those original sources, it is worth citing the assessment (p. 424) of Procopius’s reliability as a source with which Bury follows his paraphrase of the ancient historian’s gossipy account:
[I]t may be asked whether the book deserves any serious consideration as an historical document, except so far as it illustrates the intense dissatisfaction prevailing in some circles against the government.
Bury then goes on to say that the attitude toward the government shown in
On the Wars
is “not inconsistent” with that shown in the
Secret History,
and concludes that “the
Secret History
therefore is a document of which the historian is entitled to avail himself, but he must remember that here the author has probably used, to a greater extent than elsewhere, material derived from gossip which he could not verify himself.”
The dossier consists of five sheets, the first giving the title and date.
Following the death of C
ONSTANTINE
in 337, his three sons, Constantine II, Constantius, and Constans divided the empire among them, per their father’s will: Constantius, however, is said to have had a hand in the massacre of nearly all of his late father’s male relations. Among the murdered men was J
ULIUS
C
ONSTANTIUS
, the late emperor’s half brother, whose two small children, Gallus (then aged twelve) and J
ULIAN
(the future emperor, then aged six), were the only two survivors of the coup. In the account of Gregory of Nazianzus, a favorite Cavafian source, Julian was “saved together with his brother” by Christian priests, who spirited the boys to a church, where they took refuge near an altar—an “unlikely, incredible rescue.” That Cavafy originally derived his inspiration from Gregory’s account is clear not merely from the fact that his poem reproduces details from it (such as Nazianzus’s word
paradoxon,
“incredible,” to describe the rescue in the second stanza), but because the early forms of the poem refer to both princes being rescued. And indeed the two original titles were “The Rescue of Gallus and Julian” and “The Rescue of the Small Children of Julius Constantius.” At a certain point, however, Cavafy evidently consulted another favorite source, the three-volume biography of Julian by the French historian Paul Allard, in which only Julian is mentioned as the object of the priests’ rescue; a note left by the poet in the dossier for this poem states that “Allard speaks only about Julian.” The doubt that Allard’s version placed in the poet’s mind evidently caused the ever-scrupulous Cavafy to revise the poem in progress, eliminating references to the older brother and changing the title.
Whatever their origins in a wholly typical desire for strict historical accuracy, the revisions had the salutary effect of focusing the poem on Julian alone—a narrowing that adds an even sharper point to the final
verse, which highlights Julian’s own dismissive (and, in view of the events recalled here, appallingly ungrateful) attitude toward his early life as a Christian. The Apostate began his fourth oration, on the sun god Helios, with a recollection of his early days, when he was still a professed Christian (and yet, he claims, even then deeply attracted to the sun god). He interrupts this reverie with the following exclamation:
But why do I mention these things, having more important things to talk about, if I should talk about how I used to think about the gods in those days? Let there be no memory of that darkness [i.e., his early days as a Christian].
That oblivion conveniently elides the heroic bravery of the Christian priests to whom he owed his life. Here as elsewhere, the quality in Julian that Cavafy particularly detests is his hypocrisy.
Gibbon, like Cavafy, understood that both the apostate emperor’s character and his bizarre ideology were formed during the traumas of a violent childhood, although he shows himself somewhat more sympathetic to Julian than our poet is:
The cause of his strange and fatal apostasy may be derived from the early period of his life, when he was left an orphan in the hands of the murderers of his family. The names of Christ and of Constantius, the ideas of slavery and of religion, were soon associated in a youthful imagination, which was susceptible of the most lively impressions.
The poem exists in a single draft written on the second of the two sheets that constitute this dossier, the first giving title and date.
Cavafy’s interest in photographs and photography is already evident in several of the Unpublished Poems: “That’s How” (1913); “The Bandaged Shoulder” (1919), and “From the Drawer” (1923). Moreover, the poet’s chronological listing of poems from 1891 to 1925 refers to a
work, apparently no longer extant, called “The Photograph,” dated 1904. What relation that poem and the present draft have to each other is uncertain—this unfinished draft of 1924 could indeed be an attempt at revision and recasting of the earlier poem—but at any rate we can see that the poet’s interest in photography dates at least to the beginning of the century, and was a particular preoccupation in the 1920s.
That interest should not surprise us, given that Cavafy’s perception of photography as a medium for the preservation of beauty, long after the material reality of the beauty in question has faded to dust, is remarkably similar to his conception of the role of memory and poetry. In “That’s How,” the photograph allows the narrator to
remain
the face of dreams, a figure
fashioned for and dedicated to Greek pleasure
And in “From the Drawer,” the photograph that the narrator keeps in a special drawer, never to be framed or displayed, is clearly a memento of a forbidden love which, were it to be seen, might trigger embarrassing questions.
There are two noteworthy variants:
The dates referred to in the drafts of this poem—which is to say, the early to mid-1890s—place the taking of the photograph in the period of the poet’s intellectual and artistic ferment, one in which he also seems to have struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality. For a detailed discussion of Cavafy’s artistic transformation during the 1890s, see the Introduction,
here
.
The dossier consists of three sheets, the first bearing the title and the date. One side of the second sheet contains lines 1–13 of the last version, with minor corrections. The reverse of the same sheet contains, again with minor corrections, lines 15–22, along with a much-corrected draft of parts of the last stanza. The last form of the remainder of that stanza, together with further crossings-out and corrections, appear on the third sheet.
The remarkable, fairy tale–like legend of the S
EVEN
S
LEEPERS
(or “S
EVEN
H
OLY
C
HILDREN
”), well known to Greeks, is retailed in the third volume of the three-volume
synaxarion,
or biographical calendar of saints’ feast days, that Cavafy is known to have owned and which shows signs of attentive reading—and from which he meticulously quotes here, thereby lending his poem a certain ecclesiastical color. The seven children in question were said to have been brothers living in E
PHESUS
, the great city on the coast of Asia Minor; in order to flee the vicious persecutions of Christians that were set in motion by the emperor Decius (201–251) in 250, they took refuge in a cave near the city. (Cavafy’s
synaxarion
sets this particular event in the year 252, which is to say, after Decius had died.) After the cave was walled up by the persecutors, the children entrusted their souls to God, and then fell asleep. They woke on what they thought was the next morning but, according to Cavafy’s source, turned out to be the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Theodosius II (401–450; acceded 408)—i.e., the year 446. (Their sleep, therefore, indeed lasted for the “two centuries” Cavafy refers to in his poem, and not the 372 years to which his
synaxarion
rather mysteriously refers.) Not knowing that the empire had by this time been Christianized, one of their number, I
AMBLICHUS
, nervously went out to the city to buy bread. As he traveled through an uncannily altered Ephesus—there was, he observed, a cross decorating the city gate—he thought that the people seemed different; among other things, the baker looked askance at the outdated coinage with which he tried to pay for his bread. (In one version of the story, resentful citizens assume that the seven boys have come across a cache of old Decian coinage.) Soon enough the miraculous truth of what had happened became clear, and in order to
marvel at the wonderful children even the emperor, the pious and scholarly T
HEODOSIUS
, came from Constantinople. The conclusion of the story, in which the exhausted boys soon fell asleep again forever, was seen as a prefiguration of the Resurrection.
The legend, which seems to have originated in a Syriac version (in which there were eight children), goes back at least as far as the late 500s, when it was translated into Latin by Gregory of Tours (ca. 540 to 593–94), that aristocratic bishop and avid chronicler of history and miracles. The cave where the Seven hid and the cemetery in Ephesus where they were buried were the object of pilgrimages by the devout, and indeed the earliest evidence we have for the veneration of these saints is a visit to their tomb by a pilgrim in the 530s. Gibbon, who gives a splendid retelling of the legend in chapter 33 of the
Decline and Fall,
and who was particularly impressed by its cross-cultural appeal (he notes that it appears in the Koran), saw it as a parable about men’s relation to history: “We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change in human affairs.” Cavafy is sure to have been acquainted with Gibbon’s version and analysis as well as with the reference in the
synaxarion.
Cavafy’s interest in early Christian themes is evident in his earliest work: under one of his thematic headings, “The Beginnings of Christianity,” were grouped six poems, of which only two survived the poet’s Philosophical Scrutiny of 1903–1904: “Julian at Eleusis” (written in 1896, then given the title “Julian at the Mysteries”) and “The Cross,” written in 1892 and revised in 1917, which was very likely the original version of “A Great Procession of Priests and Laymen,” published in its final form in 1926. We know the titles of the others from his chronological indices: “The Return [of] C[ono]n” (1892); “The Temptation of the Syrian Monk Thaddeus” (1892, rewritten in 1902 as “The Temptation of the Syrian Ascetic Thaddeus”); “Porphyry” (1892); and “Saint Stephanus” (1898). This besetting interest in early Christianity, although superseded in time by other enthusiasms, resurfaced by the late 1910s, as is evident in the Unpublished Poem “Simeon” (1917: see the note on that poem concerning the lengthy marginal comment, dating to the mid-1890s, that Cavafy made in his copy of Gibbon, expressing admiration for Simeon Stylites).