Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Originally written in March 1909, with the title “March 1907,” this is the first of the five “Days of …” poems that the poet published.
The dramatic date of the poem is crucial. The brief reign of the emperor Gaius (“Caligula”: born 12 A.D., acceded in 37, assassinated in 41) was marked by explosions of violence against, and among, Jewish communities in the empire. In 39–40, riots broke out in Jerusalem and other cities with large Jewish populations after the emperor tried (in 38) to have a statue of himself placed in the Temple; in Alexandria, tensions between the Jewish community (which had benefited under a relatively disinterested Roman administration), and the majority of Alexandrian Greeks (who bitterly resented both the Romans and the increasingly assimilated Jews, who were showing ever-greater interest in acquiring Greek citizenship rights) exploded in a violent pogrom. Many Jews were massacred, synagogues were destroyed or defiled, and a ghetto was established. Only after the accession of the emperor Claudius, in 41, was calm restored for a time. The Jews were granted their civic rights once more, although they were denied Greek citizenship.
It is against this background of tensions among the various subcultures of the Roman East that Ianthes’ oscillation between Hellenic culture and the Jewish identity, which sets him apart from Hellenism, must be read. (His name is Greek but his father’s is Roman, which itself is suggestive of the cultural mixing that fired Cavafy’s imagination.)
An early version of this poem, entitled “Love It More,” was written in October 1915; however, it lacked the historical details provided in the second stanza of the poem in its current state, and hence the larger framework that suggests one possible reading of this strange short poem.
The Byzantine emperor M
ICHAEL
III (839–867), nicknamed “the Drunkard,” was the son of the emperor Theophilus and empress Theodosia; he inherited the throne as a child and, when he grew up, was known for his dissoluteness. (The intrigues of his mother and various protectors, and the ecclesiastical upheavals they caused, are likely the historical backdrop for the Unpublished Poem “Fugitives.”) In his avidity for pleasure and his disdain for the right exercise of kingship, he resembled no one so much as Nero, to whom Gibbon compared him—unfavorably, indeed, since Michael, a devotee of drink and horse racing, did not even have Nero’s artistic pretensions. Cavafy was familiar with Gibbon’s devastating assessment of this deliciously immoral figure, from chapter 48, part 3, of
Decline and Fall:
Among the successors of Nero and Elagabalus, we have not hitherto found the imitation of their vices, the character of a Roman prince who considered pleasure as the object of life, and virtue as the enemy of pleasure. Whatever might have been the maternal care of Theodora in the education of Michael the Third, her unfortunate son was a king before he was a man. If the ambitious mother labored to check the progress of reason, she could not cool the ebullition of passion; and her selfish policy was justly repaid by the contempt and ingratitude of the headstrong youth. At the age of eighteen, he rejected her authority, without feeling his own incapacity to govern the empire and himself. With Theodora, all gravity and wisdom retired from the court; their place was supplied by the alternate dominion of vice and folly; and it was impossible, without forfeiting the public esteem, to acquire or preserve the favor of the emperor. The millions of
gold and silver which had been accumulated for the service of the state, were lavished on the vilest of men, who flattered his passions and shared his pleasures.… The unnatural lusts which had degraded even the manhood of Nero, were banished from the world; yet the strength of Michael was consumed by the indulgence of love and intemperance. In his midnight revels, when his passions were inflamed by wine, he was provoked to issue the most sanguinary commands; and if any feelings of humanity were left, he was reduced, with the return of sense, to approve the salutary disobedience of his servants. But the most extraordinary feature in the character of Michael, is the profane mockery of the religion of his country.… A buffoon of the court was invested in the robes of the patriarch: his twelve metropolitans, among whom the emperor was ranked, assumed their ecclesiastical garments: they used or abused the sacred vessels of the altar; and in their bacchanalian feasts, the holy communion was administered in a nauseous compound of vinegar and mustard.… By this extravagant conduct, the son of Theophilus became as contemptible as he was odious: every citizen was impatient for the deliverance of his country; and even the favorites of the moment were apprehensive that a caprice might snatch away what a caprice had bestowed. In the thirtieth year of his age, and in the hour of intoxication and sleep, Michael the Third was murdered in his chamber by the founder of a new dynasty, whom the emperor had raised to an equality of rank and power.
It is worth nothing here that Michael has the characteristics of various other Postclassical and Late Antique monarchs whom we meet in Cavafy’s historical poems. Like Orophernes in the poem that bears his name, or the children of Cleopatra in “Alexandrian Kings,” he was caught in political intrigues from earliest childhood; like Julian the Apostate, another rebel monarch, he was notable for his contempt for religion. But Michael lacks the poignancy or contrarian fascination of those figures; undistinguished, perhaps, for anything but the intensity of
his decadent pursuits, he is of interest for Cavafy because his reign provides the decadent context in which other “unnatural” pleasures might emerge, as indeed they do here.
The original title of this poem was “The Ionian Sea.”
Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.)
For D
EMETRIUS
I S
OTER
(“the Savior”), see the note on “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,”
here
. Demetrius was the second son of S
ELEUCUS
IV P
HILOPATOR
, a son of Antiochus III “the Great” of the Seleucid empire. It was under Antiochus III that the Seleucids were disastrously defeated by the Romans at the B
ATTLE OF
M
AGNESIA
in 190 B.C. (on which see “The Battle of Magnesia”); afterwards his son, Seleucus IV, became the mere coregent of his ancestral domain. In 178 B.C., at the age of nine, Seleucus IV’s son Demetrius went to live at Rome as a political hostage, a token of goodwill by the Seleucids to their new masters; he remained there for sixteen years, during which time first his uncle, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and then his cousin, Antiochus V, supplanted him on the Seleucid throne. This Demetrius is the eponymous Seleucid of the poem “The Seleucid’s Displeasure”; he is also mentioned briefly in “Orophernes.”
In the year 162 B.C., at the age of twenty-five, Demetrius succeeded in escaping from Rome, with the help of no less a personage than the historian Polybius. Despite Rome’s support of his rivals, Demetrius successfully (and somewhat ruthlessly) established himself as ruler in the empire of his forefathers after his return, and he took for himself the title
Sôter,
“Savior.” He was killed in battle in 150, at the age of thirty-seven, defending his throne against the pretender Alexander B
ALAS
(see “Orophernes” and “The Favor of Alexander Balas”), who claimed to be the son of Seleucus IV, and who, more importantly, had the support of the Romans as well as of the Egyptian and Pergamene rulers. Balas triumphed, but only briefly: after scarcely five years he was forced from the throne, with the Romans’ blessing, by Attalus II of Pergamum, Ptolemy VI of Egypt, and an intriguer called H
ERACLEIDES
,
formerly satrap of Babylon, and subsequently murdered by the man with whom he had taken refuge.
An early version of this poem, entitled “Absence,” was written in October 1897; Cavafy revised it in July 1910 and again in March 1920, when he printed it for private circulation. The text of this early draft is worth comparing to the final version:
A
BSENCE
Where has he gone off to, where has the Sage been lost?
After his innumerable miracles
he suddenly disappeared, and nobody has heard
what’s become of him, what he’s done, where he’s gone.
But they said that he will never die.
Perhaps the time has not yet come for his return
and for this reason he’s been gone for sixteen
centuries.—But he will appear again.—
Or perhaps that story is true, the one in which
his assumption into heaven took place in Crete,
in the middle of the night, while virginal voices,
harmonious voices, and foreign to this earth,
hymned “Go from the earth, go up to heaven,
go,” and to his native land he then returned.—
But after this, in Tyana, a young
man, a sophist, said that he had seen him.—
In both versions, the speaker is a pagan admirer of A
POLLONIUS OF
T
YANA
, Philostratus’s biography of whom was alleged to have been based, in part, on a memoir of Apollonius by a disciple called D
AMIS
. The title of Cavafy’s poem is the Classical Greek phrase
eige eteleuta,
a quotation from the closing of Philostratus’s
Life:
“There are several versions of his death,” Philostratus writes, “if indeed he died [
eige eteleuta
].”
In its final form, the poem pointedly juxtaposes the covert paganism of Cavafy’s speaker with the famous Christian piety of the Eastern
Roman emperor J
USTIN
I (ca. 435–527). Often overshadowed by his more illustrious nephew and heir Justinian (not least because the historian Procopius, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of Justin’s court and that of his nephew, was implacably hostile to the lowborn Justin), Justin was in many ways a remarkable figure. The legend has it that, with little more than the clothes on his back, he traveled from his native Macedonia to the great capital of Constantinople as a young man, and rose through the ranks swiftly to become commander of the three hundred
excubitors,
or elite palace guard; this meant that he was the only commander of troops in the city. When, on the night of July 8, 518, the emperor Anastasius died without immediate heirs, Justin was acclaimed—unwillingly, or so he immediately wrote the pope in Rome, Hormisdas—the new emperor. He was distinguished in his personal life for a lack of self-indulgent excess (he remained married to the wife he had bought as a slave and subsequently freed) and, in his public life, for effecting a reconciliation of the Eastern and Western Churches, in 518.
Justin is known, indeed, for having supported other kinds of reconciliations as well. Two years before his death, he repealed a law that prohibited members of the senatorial classes from marrying women from the lower classes—presumably, it is thought, to allow his nephew and adopted heir, Justinian, to marry a former actress, Theodora, who later became empress. This repeal is credited with precipitating the disintegration of old class boundaries within the Byzantine court. It was as an alleged spy for Justin’s court at Constantinople that Boethius, author of
The Consolation of Philosophy,
was put to death in Rome by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, in 524.
Justin’s reign was marked by ferocious theological disputes and schisms between various Christian sects, and it is against that perfervid and sometimes violent background that we must read the clandestine paganism of the speaker in the present poem, which like so many others (for instance, “On the Outskirts of Antioch”) contrasts the fervor of the Christians with the decaying energies of Greco-Roman paganism. The addition of the Late Antique frame to the original poem of 1897 suggests, perhaps, a desire to represent subtly within the poem the poet’s own complicated negotiations between pagan desires and Christian culture, between the permissible and the forbidden.
S
IDON
was an important commercial city of Phoenicia, located on the coast of present-day Lebanon; in antiquity it was a major producer of luxury goods, such as purple dye, and also of glass. The date of 400 A.D. is suggestive, marking as it does a historical moment not long after the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and not long before the advent of the barbarians; for this reason, the date Cavafy chooses for this poem evokes the short but clarion swan song of pagan Classical culture. (“Beyond the gardens of Sidon,” Sareyannis wrote of this poem, “and the perfumed youths, we can make out in the background of the scene the shapes of the barbarians.”) Cavafy uses the fraught date of 400 A.D. in the title of two other poems: “Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.),” and “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.”
The poem is organized, in part, around a perceived competition between purely literary pursuits and great historical events. The setting in luxurious Sidon, the perfumed room in which the recital is taking place, and in particular the choice of poets to be recited clearly suggest that, at least in the mind of the youth who speaks out, “poetry” is an exalted and rarefied realm which one ought proudly to inhabit; his and his friends’ preference for epigrammatists known for their erotic verses suggests further that the proper subject of poetry is, to his mind, the passions. M
ELEAGER
, a poet and philosopher from Gadara, in Syria, flourished around 100 B.C.; although he wrote in a variety of genres, he is most famous for his
Garland,
a collection of verse epigrams elaborately arranged by author and theme. His poems are nearly all erotic, addressed to both girls and boys. C
RINAGORAS
, from the city of Mytilene on Lesbos, was a poet of epigrams, many of them about members of the inner circle of the emperor Augustus; he himself was a member of official embassies to both Julius Caesar (in 48–47 and again in 45 B.C.) and Augustus (in 26–25 B.C.), and appears to have lived until about the time of the latter’s death, in 14 A.D. R
HIANUS
of Crete was another epigrammatist. Born a slave about 275 B.C., he became a schoolteacher and scholar; best known as a composer of epics devoted to various regions of Greece, he also produced an edition of Homer and many erotic epigrams, of which very few survive.