Complete Poems (66 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
And yet as Cavafy was aware, Gregoras’s style can be overwrought and bombastic, and the tension between these qualities—which are more than evident in the passage describing the events treated in the present poem—and those of Cantacuzenus’s own account of the same events, in his
Histories,
is the fulcrum of this poem.
After describing the frenzied scene outside the palace on Christmas Eve—with the seething and clotted mob, encouraged by Apocaucus’s bribes, both cheering the boy emperor and spewing vile invectives against Cantacuzenus and his mother—Gregoras paints a poignant if rather overdone picture of the aged lady’s private agonies:
Cantacuzenus’s mother heard all these things herself, inhabiting as she did a cell within the royal palace, whither the mass of the populace was coursing together in veritable rivers, gathering force. And verily her heart was greatly afflicted, and from her very depths she gave forth lamentations, like turbid and misty clouds of smoke, which made plain to those nearby her soul’s great bitterness. Riven in her soul by the unendurable noise of the insults, and considering by whom all this was being staged, they who only yesterday and two days before were as slaves before her, and at the same time casting her memory back to the fortune she had
enjoyed since childhood, the flower of youthful happiness that until old age had remained unsullied and freshly blooming, and comparing all of that to the quite opposite and unimaginable issue of Time, she could not bear it; but stricken deep in her heart, she gave her body up to a grave illness which promised that the end of her life was not far off.
When, therefore, the celebration of Epiphany came twelve days later, and the [boy] emperor made his appearance from on high as he had done before, and the people below thundered the same cheers and insults, the Lady Cantacuzene lay dead before her cell, cast aside and utterly forgotten, by now the very image of her former happiness and glory; for she had broken from this life just before the sounding of the trumpets. For her soul, as I think, fearing lest it descend once more into the tempest of those insults, girded itself up and broke forth from her body. And how it was that God contrived that these things should happen, I shall discuss more broadly as I proceed, endeavoring to do so as much as it is possible for me.
To this florid and overwrought account, the narrative of Cantacuzenus—who, obviously, had good reason to feel deeply about the events he was recounting—stands, in its narrative control and emotional restraint, almost as a reproach. In the third book of his four-book
Histories,
the former emperor also describes at great length the way in which the mob had been incited to insult him and his family: he does so in considerable detail but with a dispassion all the more admirable given that he and his loved ones were the victims of the abuses in question. (We know that his model, as a historian, was Thucydides, and his account of this turbulent moment in his own reign, although self-serving to be sure in many places, reveals a nicely dry Thucydidean turn of phrase now and then: of the abuses heaped on him and his family he remarks that the mob “offered this to the young king as if it were a sweet gift.”) Later on in the narrative of his turbulent accession, Cantacuzenus, again with an impressive stylistic and emotional restraint, describes his mother’s final sufferings (always referring to himself in the third person):
And the mother of king Cantacuzenus, whom they had first thrown in prison, they intentionally maltreated, nor did they fail to display to her any kind of meanness. For they set as guards for her men both shameless and of savage mind, and ordered them to show her every sort of cruelty and to treat her as outrageously and contemptuously as possible. Their provision of the necessities of nourishment, which earlier had been insufficient enough, grew ever more niggardly. And if they were to provide her with some porridge, whence they might be thought to be charitable, knowing in what luxury and elegance she had been raised, and that she would never touch anything that had been fouled, they would thrust their dirty hands in it, making as if to test the porridge to see if it concealed letters that had been sent by her son, although they themselves had cooked what was being offered her. Which seeing, she preferred to die of hunger than to taste of such filth. Nor, in the bitter and freezing winter, was she afforded the comfort of a fire or of any other necessity, although the empress [Anna of Savoy] had ordered that she not be deprived of any bodily comfort. Every day the guards did not fail to insult her son outrageously in her presence and—as if they had just had the news from a messenger—they would relate to her sometimes that her son had been captured and, suffering shamefully, had been clapped in irons; or, at other times, that a battle had taken place in which he had been killed and that his head was being borne thither, which they promised her they would bring to her, as a consolation. And they told her other, more savage and by far more inhumane things as well, as a result of which, with her heart boiling over and as if melting, she succumbed to extreme fever. The women about her, greatly imploring those savage keepers in the hopes that they might prevail upon them to send for a doctor and to show her some little consideration, were unable to incite to pity the inner marrow of hard-hearted men who were accustomed daily to feast on the marrow of other human beings. But they denied her all care, slaughtering her as surely as if they had done it
with their own hands. Now the empress, having heard from someone that the emperor’s mother was ailing and that no order had been given, neither by the magistrates nor by the master of the world and his gentle and humanitarian student, to fetch her a doctor, bitterly reproached them their savagery and hard-heartedness; and she ordered her doctor, who was wont to attend her own illnesses, to go to her and to accord her whatever care was called for. But the patriarch and the rest of that fellowship of goodly men took the doctor aside and forced him to swear that when he had gone in to see her he would do nothing about the illness.
The considerable power of this passage (which cannot have been easy to write, even after the passage of many years) owes much to shrewd use of detail—the porridge story conveys the humiliations of Theodora’s captivity with terrific efficiency—and to a bitter but always understated irony (the references to Calecas and his band as “the master of the world and his gentle and humanitarian student,” “the patriarch and the rest of that fellowship of goodly men”).
Why does the poet invite us to contrast the high-flown and self-serving sentimentality of Gregoras’s account with the contained power of Cantacuzenus’s narrative? A suggestive clue lies in a variant reading for the final stanza, which reads as follows:
The death of Cantacuzene, so piteous,
I found in the History of Nicephorus Gregoras.
It’s written somewhat differently (but not less painfully)
By the historian John Cantacuzenus.
To refer to the former emperor as a “historian,”
istorikos,
is a striking gesture—particularly for this poet, for whom the word has a very special resonance. As we know, Cavafy insisted on referring to himself as a “poet-historian,” and both his poetic corpus and working papers, not least the dossiers for these Unfinished Poems, everywhere betray a scholarly meticulousness and deep respect for the methodological and intellectual standards of the professional historian. (As witness here his reluctance to publish “Athanasius” until he had located the primary source for the anecdote
retold in that poem: see
here
.) We might say that the invitation, in the present poem, to reflect on matters of historiographical style reminds us that the qualities of understatement and restraint that Cavafy admired in Cantacuzenus the man are clearly also present in the qualities of Cantacuzenus’s historical text; and it is surely no accident that these qualities—a meticulously calibrated control and self-effacement, an eye for the representative and suggestive narrative detail, a stylistic understatement effectively contrasted with emotional drama—are qualities representative of Cavafy’s own work. Read against Gregoras’s text, we can see, then, how the phrase “no less sadly” in the last version of the poem suggests, in a fashion that is allusive but impossible to miss, an artistic credo: that a great restraint can be a conduit for, rather than an impediment to, the expression of profound emotion.
The dossier contains four sheets in all, the first bearing the title and date. Sheet 2 consists of the text of the 1893 draft of a sonnet, “Epitaph,” which Cavafy was here attempting to work into a larger and more complex frame. The back of sheet 2 contains some reworkings of lines from the original sonnet; sheet 3 is a note in English (see below); and sheet 4 contains, in addition to further revisions to the original sonnet, new material meant to comprise a historical frame for the original epitaph.
The dossier for this vexed attempt at reconfiguring a discarded poem from a much earlier period provides a fascinating insight into Cavafy’s creative intelligence. The note in English written on sheet 3 sounds almost plaintive (I quote it in Lavagnini’s reconstruction of Cavafy’s shorthand):
A very old poem
cannot something be
made of it?
In 1925 the poem in question was indeed more than thirty years old: the sonnet entitled “Epitaph,” an Unpublished work dated June 1893 and listed under the heading “Ancient Days,” which purports to be the
gravestone inscription of a Samian Greek (see
here
). The various drafts indicate that Cavafy considered a number of alterations to the original sonnet, the most significant of which is a replacement for the second stanza that would have read as follows (a variant worth noting not least because it adds a line that is then quoted in the new “framing” verses the poet wanted to add to the original poem):
I was utterly worn out, very harshly worked—
far from my dear Samos, and, terrible to tell
I spent forty years without
ever hearing or ever speaking Greek.
The material of greatest interest in this dossier is the seven new lines the poet composed, a supplement that creates a subtle historical frame of a kind familiar from other works. The sonnet itself, in this version, is presented as a poem written by a fictitious poet called Cleonymus, son of Timandrus, described as a favorite poet of the Seleucid monarch A
NTIOCHUS
IV E
PIPHANES
(215–163 B.C.). Late Hellenistic evocations of historical incidents or texts of the Classical period constitute a familiar Cavafian device, one that allows the poet to comment with some irony on the discrepancy between the glories of the Greek past and the complex compromises—cultural, historical, and often moral—of the later, decadent present of the “frame.” This device seems, if anything, to enjoy special prominence during the mid- to late-1920s, the period of the composition of the present poem: see, for instance, the Published Poems “Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League” (1922) and “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.” (1925), and, among the Unfinished, “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor),” also from 1922. As many of the poems—published, unpublished, and unfinished—also demonstrate, the decade of the 1920s saw Cavafy returning again and again, either directly or indirectly, to the period of the collapse of the Seleucid monarchy, a period in which Antiochus IV, a Seleucid whom Cavafy particularly liked to invoke, was a key figure. See, for instance, “Of Demetrius Soter: 162–150 B.C.” (1915; 1919), “Favour of Alexander Balas” (1916; 1921), “Craftsman of Wine-Bowls” (1903; 1912; 1921), “For Antiochus Epiphanes” (1911, 1922), “Temethus, Antiochene:
400 A.D.” (?; 1925), and the Unfinished Poem “Antiochus the Cyzicene” (1920).
The framing device, and the preoccupation with the declining Seleucid empire, come together in the present draft, which indicates that although Cavafy had played with various geographical and chronological possibilities, he was intent on integrating the old poem into a new one that had considerably greater complexity and bite. One variant, to the text of the original sonnet, would have placed the Samian’s tomb on the banks of the Tigris, a location less fabulously distant from Greek culture than the Ganges. Another variant, on the second line of the framing addition, had the epitaph referring “to times before Alexander [the Great],” an era closer to the fictitious poet’s times than is the setting of the last reading (“to a time before the Persian Wars”).
Whatever locale and era the Samian belongs to, Cleonymus’s emotion—and Cavafy’s irony—are clear. The Seleucid poet is full of no little cultural self-satisfaction: writing at a time when the Greek language, under the Hellenistic kingdoms, holds sway throughout much of the former Persian (or “Median”) territory, he views with a pitying condescension the anonymous Samian of long ago who was unfortunate enough to live at a time when a Greek traveler in the East would have been lonely for the sound of Greek. (It is worth noting that Hellenic pride in the extent of the spread of the Greek language, particularly to India, is a theme of other later poems: see the Unpublished Poem “Coins” [1920] and the Published Poem “In 200 B.C.” [1916?; 1931].) And yet here as in certain other poems whose narrators are full of pride in the magnificent extent and achievements of Hellenistic civilization—“In 200 B.C.” and the Unfinished “Nothing About the Lacedaemonians” and “Agelaus”—the speaker’s complacent confidence in the supremacy of his Greek culture is in fact the object of a subtle irony. For as we know, the reign of the philhellenic Antiochus IV saw the end of the Seleucid might of which the court poet in the present poem is so proud; indeed, the great capital of S
ELEUCIA
fell to the Parthians soon after Antiochus’s death. (For more on this device, see below on “Nothing About the Lacedaemonians” and “Agelaus,”
here
and
here
.)