Complete Poems (44 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Byzantine Noble, in Exile, Versifying
The imaginary speaker refers to events during the reigns of Michael VII, who was deposed in 1078, and N
ICEPHORUS
III B
OTANIATES
, who deposed him. Three years later, in 1081, Botaniates was himself deposed by the founder of a new dynasty, Alexius I Comnenus. (Alexius
was the husband of I
RENE
D
UCAS
and father of Anna Comnena: see “Anna Comnena” and “Anna Dalassene.”)
The “
HEROES OF
T
HESSALY AND THE
P
ELOPONNESE
” are, very likely, the protagonists of the
Iliad
—Achilles, who was raised in Thessaly by the centaur Chiron, and the sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, kings of Mycenae and Sparta in the Peloponnese.
The references to matters both Byzantine and Classical in this poem clarify its underlying structure and a hidden irony. The poem falls into two sections, each of which is divided among religious and political themes. The first, Byzantine section begins by mentioning the speaker’s expertise in religious and ecclesiastical matters (which apparently had made him invaluable to the now-deposed Botaniates) and then alludes to the turbulent politics of his time—his own exile at the order of Irene Ducas, the new empress, presumably because of his relationship with Botaniates. A similar progression structures the second, Classical part of the poem: first there is a reference to religion (to the trio of Greek gods about whom the speaker now composes his verses), and then to a mythic political struggle—the clash of wills between kings, Achilles and Agamemnon, which fuels the narrative of the
Iliad.
The historical, mythological, and literary allusions crammed into this short poem reveal, in turn, its underlying irony—one that, as often in Cavafy, recalls to mind the power of poetry itself. Although the speaker presents his poetic efforts in exile as a mere “diversion” to alleviate his boredom, the subjects he has chosen (religion, internecine struggles between powerful rulers) in fact pointedly recall to mind the reasons he has been exiled in the first place. For this reason, his conclusion—that the littérateurs back in Byzantium censure his verses simply because they are jealous of his poetry’s technical perfection—is revealed as being disingenuous.
The reference to C
ONSTANTINOPLE
in line 18 is the only instance in which the name of the city occurs in Cavafy’s published poetry.
The original title of this poem was “The Wheel of the Chariot.”
A
LEXANDER
B
ALAS
(d. 145 B.C.), a pretender to the Seleucid throne
who claimed to be the son of Antiochus IV (see “For Antiochus Epiphanes”), wrested the kingship from Demetrius I Soter in 150 B.C. (see “Of Demetrius Soter,” “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” and “Orophernes”) with the support of Rome and the rulers of the Hellenistic kingdoms of Egypt and Pergamum, suspicious as they always were of a resurgence of Seleucid power. Five years later Balas, who had proved an incompetent king notable for his deplorable excesses, was himself driven from the throne and killed.
The ephebic royal favorite who is Cavafy’s narrator here is fictional.
Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D.
The original title of this poem was “Knife.”
C
OMMAGENE
, a territory in the northern part of ancient Syria (now in southeastern Turkey), was once a part of the Seleucid empire but became an independent principality in 162 B.C. after its governor revolted; its principal metropolis was Samosata, founded by King Samos in 150 B.C. During the first century B.C. and first century A.D. its fortunes as an independent state rose and fell: one ruler, Antiochus I (see “Epitaph for Antiochus, King of Commagene”), voluntarily submitted to the Romans, while at other times it was forcibly annexed. In later times, Commagene was part of the Byzantine empire, until it was conquered by the Arabs in 638 during their great expansion after the death of Mohammed.
The symbolic appeal that this little kingdom had for Cavafy is easy to see. It was, first of all, a hybrid of Greek and Asian elements: in Classical times, the kings of Commagene claimed descent from both Darius and Alexander, and the kingdom’s religion was appropriately hybrid as well—a Hellenized form of Zoroastrianism. There was, too, the status of Commagene as a nominally Greek culture beleaguered by larger, non-Greek powers: the Romans at the beginning of its history, and the Arabs at the end. The date of 595 A.D. suggests that Jason’s decline is meant to mirror that of his city, for that year fell about halfway between two landmarks in the decline of Commagene, the first being the brutal sack of the city by the Persian Sassanid monarch Chosroes I in 542, and the second the final conquest of the city by the Arabs in 638. It is worth
noting further that this century-long death agony was alleviated—“for a while”—by a peace treaty between Chosroes’ successor, Chosroes II, and the Byzantine emperor Maurice.
The dramatic date of the poem could well be the latter half of the fourth century A.D., the era of P
ORPHYRY
, a scholar, philosopher, theologian, and student of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism. Porphyry was born in the Phoenician city of Tyre in 234 A.D., and died around 305; in 263, he moved to Rome, where he became Plotinus’s student and friend. (Plotinus, in turn, was a student of Ammonius Saccas, who is mentioned in “From the School of the Renowned Philosopher.”) Best known for having organized and edited Plotinus’s teachings into a collection of texts now known as the
Enneads,
Porphyry, who was as interested in Aristotle as his fellows were in Plato, also wrote a valuable commentary on Aristotle’s
Categories,
a
Life of Plotinus,
and a number of original philosophical texts of his own.
Porphyry, on the other hand, was a common name in Late Antiquity, and it may be that the teacher in question is not, in fact, supposed to be the great Neoplatonist (who, as the scholar Christopher Jones reminds me, is unlikely to have been setting exercises for young students).
The theme to which this intriguing Porphyry’s young student applies himself concerns a figure from the remote period, nearly eight hundred years earlier, of the Persian Wars (490–480 B.C.) during which a coalition of small Greek city-states repulsed invasions by the Persian kings D
ARIUS
and X
ERXES
. The Spartan king D
EMARATUS
(or Damaratus) ruled between 510 and 491 B.C. In his
Histories,
Herodotus recounts how Demaratus’s co-ruler, Cleomenes I, conspired with a Spartan called L
EOTYCHIDES
to force Demaratus from the throne: Cleomenes bribed the Delphic Oracle to say that Demaratus was not the legitimate son of his father, King A
RISTON
, and therefore was ineligible to be king himself. Furious and seething with resentment, Demaratus fled Sparta and offered his services as an expert on Greek ways to Darius, who rewarded him with the satrapy of Mysia (for which see “The Satrapy”).
Timos Malanos recollected Cavafy’s own interpretation of this complicated character: “The poem shows that Demaratus is not a traitor.
Deep down in his conscience he rejoices when he hears that the Greeks are winning.”
From the School of the Renowned Philosopher
A
MMONIUS
S
ACCAS
(d. 242 A.D.), “the Socrates of Neoplatonism,” was an Alexandrian Christian, famous as the teacher of two much better known and crucially important figures in Christian Neoplatonism, Plotinus and Origen. The teachings of these fellow students of Cavafy’s fictional protagonist are worth bearing in mind when reading this poem. Plotinus (205 to 269–70 A.D.) maintained that the soul stood halfway between pure mind and the inferior flesh, and that moral choices were, therefore, choices between the aspirations of the former and the primitive urges of the latter. (His student Porphyry, another important figure in Late Classical Christian theology—see the note on “Demaratus”—began his biography of his teacher with the observation that Plotinus always seemed ashamed of being in his body.) Origen (185–86 to 254–55 A.D.) also adapted Platonic models to Christian theology. A central concern of his theological writings (most of which consisted of commentary on biblical passages) was to refute the predestinarianism of the Gnostics of the century before; he maintained that the workings of human reason enabled individuals to choose between good and evil acts.
It is, perhaps, with these alternative models of what Ammonius Saccas’s teaching might lead to that we ought to read Cavafy’s poem about a shallow young man vacillating between religious, cultural, and moral poles. This vivid young character is one that the poet had experimented with earlier: an Unfinished Poem entitled “And Above All Cynegirus,” dated July 1919, is narrated by a young Roman making a Grand Tour of the Greek east, whose ability to concentrate on the lofty literary lecture he is attending is compromised by thoughts of erotic ecstasies to come that evening.
First written in November 1903 with the title “The Amphora Maker,” the poem was reworked in July 1912, when it was given its current title, and again in December 1921, when it was printed for the first time.
The dramatic date is fifteen years after the decisive Roman defeat of the Seleucid king Antiochus III at the B
ATTLE OF
M
AGNESIA
, which took place in 190 B.C.—hence around 175 B.C. (See “The Battle of Magnesia”; for the significance of the battle, see the note on
here
.) H
ERACLEIDES
was the all-powerful treasurer of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a son of Antiochus III who illegally succeeded his brother Seleucus IV as ruler of the empire (see “Of Demetrius Soter,” “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” and “Temethus, Antiochene: 400 A.D.”).
Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League
The title of the poem, in Classical Greek, purports to be from an epigram written (as the last lines indicate) during the reign of the Hellenistic Egyptian king Ptolemy IX Soter (“Savior”), nicknamed
Lathyros,
or “C
HICKPEA
.” Ptolemy, born about 141 B.C., was elected co-ruler of Egypt with his (extremely unwilling) mother, Cleopatra III, in 116, on the death of his father, Ptolemy VIII (on whom see “Envoys from Alexandria”). This puts the dramatic date of the poem in 110–109 B.C.
The A
CHAEAN
L
EAGUE
, an association of Greek city-states formed in 280 B.C. as a successor to an earlier confederation, consisted eventually of nearly the entire Peloponnese and much of central Greece, and was the chief Greek political power during the period that saw the rise, and eventual triumph, of Rome—a period, as so many poems make clear, of great interest to Cavafy. In the early 140s B.C., long-simmering conflicts between the Spartans and other League members exploded, and Sparta appealed to Rome for intervention; the Romans sent envoys to demand that Sparta, Corinth, and Argos, the complainants, be released from the League. League officials, however, insulted the Roman officials, with the result that the Roman forces stationed in Macedon (which had already been conquered by the Romans) marched south and defeated the League’s forces, who were serving under the incompetent commanders D
IAEUS
and C
RITOLAUS
, in 146 B.C. (The historian Polybius, in his account of the Achaean War in book 38 of his
Histories,
denounces the two as “ignorant and ill-disposed” in their blind and foolish belief that the Romans, preoccupied with the prosecution of the Third Punic War in Africa and campaigns in Spain, would be unwilling to engage the Greeks as well. “But empty heads have empty
notions,” the
Histories
go on to declare.) After the victories against the Achaeans by the Roman commanders Metellus and Mummius, Corinth was sacked, its men killed and its women and children sold into slavery; the League was dissolved; and Central Greece and the Peloponnese were added to the province of Macedon as Roman possessions. The defeat of which Cavafy’s fictional poet writes, then, marks the final military and political subjugation of Greece to Rome.
The incompetent and doomed struggle to assert an independent Greek identity against the
Realpolitik,
to say nothing of military might, of Rome is a theme that runs through both parts of this poem—which is to say, not only the wistful epigram lauding the doomed Greek struggle of 146 B.C., but also the closing couplet, with its allusion to Ptolemaic Egypt. For the reign of “Chickpea” was characterized by a level of intrigue and instability—to say nothing of Roman intervention in Hellenistic Egyptian affairs—that was unusual even for the infamously intrigue-ridden Egyptian dynasty. After serving as governor of Cyprus during his father’s last years, Ptolemy married first one of his sisters, then divorced her to marry another; was made to rule jointly with his hostile mother, and then forced by Rome into a co-kingship with his younger brother. An armed insurrection by this younger brother compelled Ptolemy to flee first to Cyprus, then to Seleucid territory, during which time the younger brother acceded as Ptolemy X Alexander I. Ptolemy IX, however, struck back and reconquered Cyprus, subsequently defeating a coalition between his mother’s forces and those of the Jewish state; in 89–88, he reconquered Egypt and reestablished himself as king (at which time his brother Ptolemy X was killed in a naval battle).
Other poems about the disastrous Ptolemies include “Envoys from Alexandria,” “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” “The Glory of the Ptolemies,” and the Unfinished Poems “Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor)” and “The Dynasty.”
The poem, with its original title “Antiochus Epiphanes,” was most likely written first in November 1911, and then reworked and printed for the first time in February 1922.