Complete Poems (65 page)

As Lavagnini notes, the poet’s particular interest in the Seven Sleepers
of Ephesus at this time is evident in a note that he made on seeing a reference to the legend in a source that was distinctly unreligious: the eighth pastiche in Proust’s
Pastiches et mélanges,
which were first collected in book form in 1919. In the context of a renewed attention to this legend at this point in the poet’s career, it is perhaps not too much to wonder whether a certain correction that he consistently made in revising the present poem is significant: in the last three stanzas, the word
paides,
“children,” in the phrase “Seven Holy Children,” which appears in the last version, has replaced the original reading
neoi,
“young men.” It is interesting to think that Cavafy began by having in his mind’s eye seven
young men
who fell into the miraculous languor to which the legend refers: the experiences of what we might call attractively declining young men during the early Christian era seem to be very much present in his mind already in the mid-1910s, when he composed most of the poems that take the form of funerary inscriptions; and certainly persists through the mid- to late 1920s, as for instance in “Cleitus’s Illness” (1926) and “Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D.” (1929).

Among the Groves of the Promenades

The dossier containing the four sheets of paper associated with this poem bears no date; the first sheet, on which the poet normally records the title and date, contains only the title. Lavagnini points out, however, that the paper on which the one complete draft is written is the same as that on which “The Seven Holy Children,” dated January 1925, was written; further evidence for a date of 1925 is the fact that Cavafy wrote and published another poem about Apollonius in that year, “Apollonius of Tyana in Rhodes.” Alternatively, a date of 1920 is also attractive: in that year Cavafy was working on another draft about a “telepathic” vision of the death of a tyrant (“Athanasius”) and it was also the year in which he revised and published “If Indeed He Died,” also about Apollonius and his supernatural powers.

The dossier notes an alternate title: “Apollonius of Tyana Seeing from Ephesus What Was Transpiring in Rome.” For detailed analysis of the importance of the sage and magician A
POLLONIUS OF
T
YANA
in Cavafy’s work, see the Note on
here
.

The title of the present poem, which is a verbatim quotation from
Philostratus’s
Life,
is an allusion to another famous “telepathic” incident in the magus’s career, which takes place after he has returned to Ephesus following his trial: the sage’s miraculous vision, while he was strolling in a grove of trees adorning a promenade in Ephesus, of the bloody assassination of Domitian in Rome. (Having been stabbed by an attendant called Stephanus, the emperor fought back using a golden goblet as a weapon, but eventually succumbed when more conspirators joined in.) The incident is described in detail in chapter 26 of the final book of the
Life,
and elements in Cavafy’s poetic account of it again suggest how closely he followed his sources:

The first lines of this poem, with their evocation of the ruinous effect that Domitian had on the provinces of the empire, stands in contrast to an observation that Cavafy made in one of the letters he wrote to Alexander Sengopoulos between 1918 and 1919, apropos of his recent reading of Suetonius:

Variants:

The Patriarch

The dossier contains a total of seven sheets, of which the first records the title—which the poet notes is only “provisional”—and the date of original composition. Sheet 2 contains the earliest draft of the poem, which is heavily reworked in places; on sheet 3 only the phrase “that worthy man” appears; sheet 4 contains, along with some variants to lines on sheet 2, the passage from the Byzantine historical work that is
cited verbatim in the long variant which appears on sheet 5. Lavagnini notes that fully two years elapsed between the first version of this draft and subsequent rewriting: the stationery of sheet 5 bears a colophon with the date 1927. Sheets 6 and 7 contain variants to the last six lines of the text on sheet 2.

The text reproduced here is the last form of the draft appearing on sheet 2; variants are noted below.

Like the other poems in the Cantacuzenus cycle (see the note in “Favorite Cavafian Characters,”
here
), this one contrasts the virtue of the Byzantine emperor J
OHN
VI C
ANTACUZENUS
with the perfidy of his opponents during the Civil War of 1341–1347 and the events leading up to it. Particularly two-faced was the sly P
ATRIARCH
of Constantinople, John XIV Calecas, whom John had helped to secure the Patriarchate in 1334 (hence the narrator’s outrage at the patriarch’s ingratitude).“The Patriarch,” like “On Epiphany,” is in fact inhabited by four characters named John, two present in the poem and two only alluded to—one of them with characteristically delicate Cavafian subtlety. An appreciation of its bitter ironies rests on a proper understanding of the relationship among the four.

The noble character of John Cantacuzenus, the first John, is plain: the poet’s emotional regard for him is signaled by, among other things, the use of the charged phrase “the worthy man whom our race then possessed” in line 5, the possessive pronoun here as elsewhere marking a nostalgic pride in Byzantium (see the note on “After the Swim,”
here
), as the Cavafy scholar Diana Haas has noted. The contrast with the second John, the scheming John Calecas, could not, of course, be greater. The particular object of the narrator’s scorn is the hypocritical claim by the ambitious patriarch that Cantacuzenus was seeking to seize the throne from the rightful heir, Andronicus’s underage son—the poem’s third John. In making this outrageous claim, Calecas had disingenuously alluded to events of almost exactly one hundred years earlier involving yet another underage heir named John, the fourth John of this poem. In 1258, the seven-year-old J
OHN
L
ASCARIS
succeeded to the throne of his father, Emperor Theodore II Lascaris, but he was soon deposed by the powerful aristocrat Michael Palaeologus with the perhaps reluctant complicity of the boy’s guardian, the patriarch A
RSENIUS
(the latter referred to in some variant lines here). After a few years as co-emperor with John, Michael seized the throne for himself, having ordered his men to blind the boy (thereby disqualifying him from the throne). He then crowned himself emperor as Michael VIII, thus establishing the Palaeologue dynasty—the dynasty to which John Cantacuzenus’s young charge, the subject of the intrigues described in the present poem, belonged. The final irony that hangs over this draft owes much to an awareness that this dynasty owed its origins to a usurpation that the noble Cantacuzenus, rather than Calecas (as he himself hypocritically claims), is eager not to see repeated.

Sheet 4 of the dossier for this poem contains the poet’s transcription of Calecas’s hypocritical charge against Cantacuzenus, which he found in Nicephorus Gregoras’s history:

Sheet 5 offers a long variant that quotes the patriarch Calecas’s disingenuous words about that earlier, hapless patriarch, adding outraged interjections on the part of the narrator:

Gibbon, in an account of the coup d’état of Anna of Savoy, Apocaucus, and Calecas with which Cavafy was familiar, dryly notes that “the
founder of the Palaeologi had instructed his posterity to dread the example of a perfidious guardian”—this being the pretext used by Anna and her party to wrest power from Cantacuzenus, although the perfidy was, of course, theirs.

On Epiphany

The covering sheet for this poem bears the title and the date; the word “May” has been written above the word “Dec[ember].” The dossier consists of four sheets altogether, of which the covering sheet is the first. Sheet 2 contains the text of the first two stanzas; and sheets 3 and 4 contain variant versions of the final stanza.

The crisis that led to the Civil War of 1341–1347 between John Cantacuzenus and the faction of Anna of Savoy, Apocaucus, and the Patriarch Calecas (see above on “The Patriarch”) was specially marked by the gross ill-treatment of John’s family by his enemies, who had control of the boy emperor. A carefully coordinated (and funded) campaign of insults, rumors, and allegations of treachery against John culminated at Christmastide 1341, after John had been declared a public enemy and his aged mother, the great noblewoman Theodora Palaeologina Cantacuzene, imprisoned in a cell in the royal palace. The ill-treatment of his mother was particularly painful to John, an only child who had been brought up by the widowed Theodora, who, according to his
Histories,
was a woman well known for her high intelligence, ability, and “more than feminine strength of mind.” As the account of Nicephorus Gregoras makes clear, the party of Anne of Savoy took advantage of the Christmas Eve vigil to whip up popular resentment against the Cantacuzeni, an outpouring that the demoralized and increasingly ill old woman was forced to listen to from her prison cell, where she was shamefully ill-treated by the guards set by Apocaucus. This bit of demagoguery was to be repeated twelve days later, on Epiphany (January 6, 1342), the day on which Theodora finally died.

The final stanza of this poem invites the reader to compare two accounts of Theodora’s wretched last days. The first is that of Gregoras, a source to whom Cavafy often turns. An exact contemporary of Cantacuzenus (he was born around 1292, and died in 1360), Gregoras was
a distinguished humanist of a type much in evidence in the later Byzantine empire. He rose to prominence under the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus, who appointed him Keeper of the Archives when he was still quite young; not the least of his attainments was a series of proposals for the reform of the calendar, which were rejected at the time but were nearly identical to those ultimately adopted by Pope Gregory two centuries later. Among his many writings may be counted theological texts, orations, a treatise about the wanderings of Odysseus, and astronomical and calendrical treatises; his most significant work, however, was a thirty-seven-volume
Roman History
(“Roman” here referring to what we call “Byzantine”), which covered in exhaustive detail the years from 1204 to 1359. It is on this work that Cavafy relies for his account of the reign of John Cantacuzenus in this poem and the others of the Cantacuzenus cycle.