Complete Poems (69 page)

The poem presents a character—the cocky young man whose superciliousness is a cover for tenderer feelings that he cannot seem to admit to consciousness—familiar from other works, such as the Published Poem “In the Taverns” (1926). See too the note on “And Above All Cynegirus,”
here
.

Nothing About the Lacedaemonians

The entire poem is written on one sheet; a covering sheet bears the title. The latter indicates that Cavafy had considered an alternate version of the title, “Except for the Lacedaemonians”; the phrase reveals the deep and complex significance of the title, and of the poem as a whole—and indeed this poem’s relationship to other works in the Cavafian corpus.

The opening line is a quotation from the message from Alexander the Great to the Athenians that accompanied the three hundred Persian panoplies that he sent to Athens to commemorate his victory over the forces of Darius III, the king of Persia—a line that, according to the protocols of Ancient Greek inscriptions, constituted what we might today refer to as the “from” line:

A
LEXANDER
,
SON OF
P
HILIP
,
AND THE
G
REEKS EXCEPT FOR THE
L
ACEDAEMONIANS
 …

“Except for the Lacedaemonians” pointedly alludes to the fact that of the Greek states, only Sparta (also known as Lacedaemon) refused to join in Alexander’s panhellenic campaign against Persia, proudly unwilling, as they were, to serve under a non-Spartan general. And yet this ostensibly high-minded and nationalistic pride cost the militaristic Lacedaemonians dearly, since in refusing to join the Macedonian’s expedition into Asia, they missed out on the greatest military conquests the world had ever seen: conquests that took Alexander and his armies as far east as Bactria, a province located in what is now the northern part of present-day Afghanistan, and India.

Alexander’s rebuke to the Spartans had been on Cavafy’s mind for fifteen years by the time he wrote the present poem. The original title of “In 200 B.C.,” first composed in 1916 and published in 1931, was, in fact, “Except the Lacedaemonians.” In that earlier poem, the narrator cites Alexander’s text and goes on to sneer at the Spartans’ proud isolationism; with unmistakable pride, he lists the many victories that Alexander and his forces managed to achieve “without the Lacedaemonians”—a tart rebuke to the Spartan position. But as the Cavafy scholar and translator Edmund Keeley pointed out in his 1976 study
Cavafy’s Alexandria,
the date of 200 B.C. suggests an ironic undercutting of the speaker’s Hellenic swagger: within ten years of that date, the Greek Hellenistic monarchies of Macedon and Asia—the heirs of Alexander—would crumble under the onslaught of Roman forces, and all that had been Greater Greece would become the property of Rome.

The invocation of Alexander’s words clearly serves a similar purpose in the present poem (where they are paraphrased as “nothing about the Lacedaemonians,” an alteration that gives the phrase the quality of an axiom), illuminating a theme to which the poet returns so often: the way in which the eventualities of history can ironize men’s intellectual, cultural, and political pretensions. The speaker here, like that in the earlier poem, looks back condescendingly on the Spartans’ refusal to fight under a foreign general, which he sees as overprincipled. And yet, as we know from other poems in the corpus that belong to the same period of composition as this one—for instance, “In Sparta” (1928) and “Come Now, King of the Lacedaemonians” (1929)—Cavafy himself had tremendous admiration for the unyieldingly high principles shown by the Spartans, particularly, as those two poems make clear, when
adhered to in times of abject defeat. Understood within the densely allusive network to which the use of Alexander’s phrase, and the allusion to Spartan principles, should alert us, the present poem therefore suggests that it is the speaker, rather than the Lacedaemonians to whom he condescends here, who should be considered a fool.

A variant for line 8 reads, “What a lover of the truth, an equable man!”

Zenobia

Apart from the covering sheet, which bears the title and date, there is only one sheet, which shows signs of great vacillation on the poet’s part; the end of the last line is illegible, as indicated by the crosses (each of which stands for approximately two letters).

Z
ENOBIA
(ca. 240–after 274) was the alluring and canny queen of the short-lived Palmyrene empire: caught between empires and cultures, combining great charm and immense ambition, and claiming an illustrious Alexandrian lineage to boot, she was a type of post-Classical character so greatly appreciated by Cavafy. Much of her history is related by the Byzantine historian Zosimus in his
New History.

During the period of internal weakness and external collapse known as the Crisis of the Third Century, the Roman Empire split into three enormous sections: the easternmost of these arced along the Mediterranean coast from the southern part of present-day Turkey to the northern part of Egypt. After the Syrian king who had consolidated most of these territories under his rule, Odaenathus, was assassinated in 266–67, his beautiful and ambitious widow, Zenobia, took control of the empire in the name of their infant son. During her brief rule, more territories were added, and Zenobia went so far as to assume the title
Augusta,
“Empress.”

By 270 Rome’s crisis was nearing its end under the leadership of the emperor Aurelian; after dispensing with the rebellious provinces in the west of Europe, he turned his attention to the east, and in 272 he defeated Zenobia’s armies at the Battles of Immae (near Antioch) and Emesa. A story that emerged from these crushing defeats reveals much about Zenobia’s character: it is said that after losing to the Romans at Immae, she fled to Antioch ahead of the news, presenting herself to the
city as the victor, accompanied by a man resembling Aurelian who was weighted down by chains—a maneuver that bought her enough time to flee in the night. After Emesa she tried to flee again, this time to her former enemies the Persians, but was captured. Interestingly—perhaps because he was impressed by her—Aurelian granted clemency to Zenobia (who appeared in golden chains at his triumph in Rome), and she ended her days in comfortable exile at Rome, where she took up philosophy and acted the Roman matron.

Although born into prominent enough circumstances—her father was a Syrian chieftain who could boast of genealogical ties to the Roman empress Julia Domna—Zenobia appears to have had no qualms about enhancing the allure of her family tree. Among other things, she claimed descent from Drusilla of Mauretania, the great-granddaughter of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, who belonged to the L
AGID
dynasty and who was, through her descent from Alexander’s general Ptolemy, of M
ACEDONIAN
descent. (For instance, the
Historia Augusta
reports that, in an imperial declaration of the year 269 addressed to the people of Alexandria, Zenobia referred to the city as “my ancestral city.”)

Although the French scholar of Hellenistic history Bouché-Leclercq (well known to Cavafy) and Gibbon both make reference to Zenobia’s genealogical pretensions, which suggest the kind of personality much beloved of Cavafy, the poet-historian devoted to post-Classical history, the figure of the Syrian queen was likely to have interested him for other reasons. One tale told concerning Aurelian’s reconquest of the eastern provinces prominently features Apollonius of Tyana, the figure so fascinating to the poet; according to this legend, Aurelian spared the city of Tyana after a vision of Apollonius appeared to him begging the emperor not to destroy it.

The state of the second part of the text for this poem is questionable at best. On the back of the sheet on which the text of this poem appears there are lines suggesting that Cavafy had toyed with the idea of elaborating the characters of the scholars charged with the task of genealogical enhancement:

Company of Four

Although the dossier for this poem, which consists of six sheets, itself bears no date, the evidence cited by Lavagnini for a date of 1930 is more than persuasive: two of the sheets bear that date; the name
Zabinas
(along with a variant,
Zebinas
) doodled on the back of sheet 2, belong to the poem “Should Have Taken the Trouble,” which was first printed in July 1930; and sheet 6 is of the same paper used by the poet early in 1930 to compose a list of titles. A parenthetical note to the covering sheet indicates that the title was to be considered “provisional.”

This is the only one of the Unfinished Poems to be written in the style, recurring frequently in the Published and Unpublished poems, which Savidis has characterized as tango-like: poems each of whose lines consists of two short rhythmical elements, each with the following meter:
x. Cavafy uses this form almost exclusively in writing of frustrated or lost love; most of these poems were published in the mid-1920s. See, for example, “Maker of Wine Bowls” (1903; 1912; 1921), “In Despair” (1923; 1923), “Theater of Sidon” (1923; 1923), “Before Time Could Change Them” (1924; 1924), and “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.” (?; 1925). For this meter, see the Introduction,
this page
.

Agelaus

The dossier for this poem contains seven sheets: sheet 1 gives the title and the date; 2 and 3 contain the text of the poem, which bears few corrections; and the rest contain Cavafy’s transcription of one of his sources for the incident narrated in the poem, on which see below.

This poem returns to a favorite Cavafian theme—the foolish shortsightedness of men who are too often hamstrung by their own narrow vision of the world (compare, for instance, “Nero’s Deadline”)—set at a favorite Cavafian moment: the confrontation, ultimately fatal to Greece, between the declining Greek city-states and the rising power of Rome to the west.

The Second Punic War (218–202 B.C.) between the expanding Roman Republic and its great rival in North Africa, Carthage, created a rare opportunity for the perennially warring Greek city-states to band together and, united, to confront their common enemy to the west. In
the summer of 217, P
HILIP
V (238–179 B.C.), the dynamic if erratic ruler of Macedon and the most powerful man on the Greek mainland, was involved in a war against other Greeks—in this case, the Aetolian League. After learning of the Carthaginians’ devastating defeat of the Romans at Lake Trasimene in the north of Italy, in June 217, Philip was convinced that negotiations with his fellow Greeks would be advantageous, and a peace conference thereafter took place at the port city of N
AUPACTUS
, on the Gulf of Corinth. Here, according to the historian Polybius, one of the Aetolian delegates, A
GELAUS
, gave a rousing speech in which he showed a prescient understanding for the necessity of a concerted Greek front against Rome. His advice was heeded, but within a few years Hellenic unity had, all too typically, become fragmented, and in 211 Rome concluded an alliance with the Aetolians against Philip, who was eventually crushed by the Romans under Titus Flamininus at the Battle of C
YNOSCEPHALAE
in 197. Cynoscephalae would turn out to be the first of three decisive defeats by Rome of Greek states: in 190, L. Cornelius Scipio and his brother, Scipio Africanus, trounced the forces of the Seleucid king Antiochus III at the Battle of M
AGNESIA
, and in 168 the Roman general L. Aemilius Paullus crushed Philip V’s son, Perseus, at the Macedonian city of P
YDNA
, thereby putting an end forever to the Macedonian dynasty descended from Alexander’s general, Antigonus the One-Eyed. Together, the defeats at Cynoscephalae, Magnesia, and Pydna mark the end of Greek power in the Mediterranean and Near East.

Cavafy had two sources for Agelaus’s words at the conference of Naupactus, one ancient and the other modern. The former was the account of Polybius (5.103), whose version of Agelaus’s speech Cavafy closely follows:

Cavafy’s contemporary source was an article by the British historian W. W. Tarn in
The Cambridge Ancient History,
7:
The Hellenistic Monarchies and the Rise of Rome,
a long extract of which Cavafy transcribed by hand and kept in the dossier for the present poem. The reference to Cynoscephalae, Magnesia, and Pydna in the second stanza makes it clear that, however rousing the “delusive gleam” (as Tarn put it) of the Aeolian’s exhortation to the assembled Greeks, the proper context for understanding the poem is our awareness of the disastrous events that followed, which indeed fulfilled the dark prophecy uttered by Agelaus at the end of his speech, a passage not paraphrased in Cavafy’s poem but copied into his notes for it: