Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities: History, Archaeology, Empire 3031349024, 9783031349027

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THE NEW ANTIQUITY

Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities History, Archaeology, Empire Takis Kayalis

The New Antiquity Series Editor

Matthew S. Santirocco New York University New York, USA

Over the past two decades, our understanding of the ancient world has been dramatically transformed as classicists and other scholars of antiquity have moved beyond traditional geographical, chronological, and methodological boundaries to focus on new topics and different questions. By providing a major venue for further cutting-edge scholarship, The New Antiquity will reflect, shape, and participate in this transformation. The series will focus on the literature, history, thought, and material culture of not only ancient Europe, but also Egypt, the Middle East, and the Far East. With an emphasis also on the reception of the ancient world into later periods, The New Antiquity will reveal how present concerns can be brilliantly illuminated by this new understanding of the past.

Takis Kayalis

Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities History, Archaeology, Empire

Takis Kayalis School of Humanities Hellenic Open University Patras, Greece

ISSN 2946-3017     ISSN 2946-3025 (electronic) The New Antiquity ISBN 978-3-031-34901-0    ISBN 978-3-031-34902-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Sketch in ink from the Cavafy Archive ©2016-2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Frida and Tereza radiant, intelligent, gentle creatures spreading happiness around you in ways that poets will never know For Anna your love made this and most of everything else come to life In gratitude

Love likes me Love takes its shoes off and sits on the couch Love has an answer for everything Love smiles gently…and crosses its legs well here we are well here we are1

1  Lyrics by David Byrne from “Liquid Days,” in Songs from Liquid Days, composed by Philip Glass (1986). Quoted from http://davidbyrne.com/.

Acknowledgments

As most things in our home’s kitchen, this book was slow-cooked; it was in the making for almost ten years. I wish to thank colleagues who invited me to seminars, symposia and colloquia at the Universities of Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete, Ioannina, Oxford and Malaga to present and discuss earlier versions of its chapters. Other colleagues and friends responded to my queries or provided me with material Ι needed from their private or institutional libraries. Hoping that I do not leave out anyone, I am indebted to Michalis Bakoyiannis, Theodoros Chiotis, Christina Dounia, Elli Filokyprou, Ariadne Gartziou-­ Tatti, Sofia Iakovidou, Kostas Ioannidis, Peter Jeffreys,  Katerina Karatassou, Alexandros Katsigiannis, Vassilis Lentakis, Anastasia Natsina, Rania Polycandrioti, Anna-Maria Sichani  and Lambros Varelas—thank you all for being there for me. Thanks are also due to the editors of Journal of Modern Hellenism and boundary 2, for publishing early versions of material in this book. Mr Evangelos Sachperoglou generously allowed me to quote liberally from his excellent translations from Cavafy’s canon, for which I am grateful. I also thank the Onassis Foundation for its kind permission to print images from items in the Cavafy Archive and translations of other Cavafy poems by E. Sachperoglou. For several years now, the Onassis Foundation has given me the opportunity to be part of a bustling creative community, in which research engagements blend gracefully with educational and artistic initiatives of the highest order. I was given the opportunity to co-edit the Cavafy Archive’s Digital Collection and to serve in its International Academic Committee; I was invited to present earlier versions of parts of this book in lectures and vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

seminars at the Archive and the Onassis Stegi, as well as in the 2018 International Cavafy Summer School, co-hosted by Dimitris Papanikolaou and Constanze Güthenke; I was invited to co-host the 2019 and 2023 International Cavafy Summer Schools with Stathis Gourgouris and Peter Jeffreys, respectively; in addition to these, I was given the opportunity to direct and supervise various other projects at or in cooperation with the Cavafy Archive. For all this and much more, I need to thank Effie Tsiotsiou, the Foundation’s Executive Director and Director of Education and an enlightened creative force on her own right. The confidence she has shown in me, her affectionate kindness and her indefatigable inspirational drive have made these years amazingly productive, memorable and gratifying. My warmest thanks, also,  to  Marianna Christofi, Communication and Ιnitiatives Coordinator, and Angeliki Mousiou, Research Coordinator at the Cavafy Arhive, for cheerfully turning a heavy load of work into the greatest time, again and again! My colleague and fellow Cavafy-buff Yiannis Papatheodorou has been the first recipient and a patient discussant of many of the ideas that found their way into this book (and of a lot more that thankfully didn’t). I am grateful for this and for so much more in the twenty-odd years of our friendship, collaboration and cheerful exchange. Almost forty years ago, I timidly asked Prof. L. S. Lockridge to supervise my dissertation on Ezra Pound at the NYU English Department and he miraculously accepted. Larry is now an emeritus professor and a great novelist. During the last year he read all the chapters of this book, one after the other, as they were revised and finalized; and then he duly mailed me his meticulous comments and emendations on each chapter, re-­enacting what was to me an amazing formative experience that I never imagined anyone could live twice. Through his kind and  gentle example, Larry Lockridge turned me into a researcher, taught me the essence of mentoring and showed me how to live a life in writing, thinking and teaching. I have no words to thank him. Hope is the mantra!

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I Cavafy Reads a Coin  19 2 Orophernes. Lessons from a Golden Coin 21 3 How to Read an Ancient Coin in the Early 1900s 43 4 What Is a “Poet-Historian”? 77 Part II Cavafy Reads Inscriptions  99 5 “Caesarion” as Palimpsest101 6 Reading As Writing: “Athyr”137

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Part III Cavafy’s Contexts: Antiquity, Desire, Empire 169 7 Antique Desires171 8 At a Slight Angle to the British Empire209 Index269

About the Author

Takis  Kayalis  is Professor of Modern Greek Literature at the Hellenic Open University, having previously taught at Queens College, CUNY, and the Universities of Crete, Cyprus and Ioannina. He holds a PhD in English Literature from New  York University. He co-edited the Cavafy Archive Digital Collection at the Onassis Foundation (2019) and, since 2017, serves in the Cavafy Archive’s International Academic Committee. His research focuses mainly on modernist poetics, nineteenth-­ century prose, digital humanities and literary pedagogy. He has co-edited with Anastasia Natsina Teaching Literature at a Distance: Open, Online, and Blended Learning (Bloomsbury, 2010) and is currently preparing, with Vicente Fernández González, a volume on Cavafy as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2024).

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4

Detail from the first presentation of Orophernes’ coin (Newton, 1871) The coin of Orophernes A page from Andrea Fulvio’s Illustrium imagines (1517) “Of Ptolemy Caesar.” First page of Cavafy’s manuscript © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation John Pentland Mahaffy, c. 1910–1919. The Keogh Photographic Collection, National Library of Ireland Manuscript of “In the month of Athyr” © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation Cavafy’s handwritten notes for “In the month of Athyr” © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation Cavafy’s handwritten notes for “In the month of Athyr” © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation Wilhelm von Gloeden, Terra di Fuoco (c. 1890–1900) Wilhelm von Gloeden, Flute Concert (1905) Wilhelm von Gloeden, Dancing Boys (1895–1900) Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer (1841–1917) General Ronald Storrs (1881–1955), photographed in 1918 Cavafy’s manuscript of “Coins” © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation Passage from B. V. Head’s Historia Numorum (1887, p. 709)

26 27 68 105 108 146 147 148 157 197 198 215 233 246 256

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Cavafy was inspired, although this is a word the poet does not condone, from the Hellenistic or Alexandrian period…. Few wise men have better knowledge of this period than Cavafy. No detail has escaped the poet and it may be said that, at times, he appears to live in those olden years; so vivid is his description. Cavafy, then, is the poet of Alexandria under the Lagids and of the states that Alexander’s conquests hellenized. (Politis, 1930, p. 451. My translation)

This book calls for a thorough re-examination of C. P. Cavafy’s historical and archaeological poetics by placing his work in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary, cultural, political and sexualized receptions of antiquity.1 My inquiry pays particular attention to a set of his poems which stage readings of Hellenistic and late ancient objects and texts and discusses them extensively, drawing on material from the recently digitized and publicly available Cavafy Archive of the Onassis Foundation (cavafy.onassis.org) and from books in the poet’s personal library. In this pursuit, I aim to trace Cavafy’s specific historical and scholarly sources, to explore the complex ways in which he made creative use of them and to situate his work in the context of the broad spectrum of intellectual and cultural manifestations of his time, including appropriations of the classics to legitimate British colonial rule and homoerotic desire. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Kayalis, Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7_1

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Cavafy’s creative uses of episodes from Hellenistic history and objects of archaeological interest, such as coins and inscriptions, have fascinated and perplexed the poet’s large international audience; his poems have also often been admired and quoted by historians and classical scholars. Yet the poet’s historicism has eluded analytical and rigorous critical investigation. This most typical feature of Cavafy’s work is often addressed in impressionistic terms, as a simple disguise of his private yearnings and concerns or as a way of expressing universal axioms and truisms. In a larger way, Cavafy’s poetry is noticeably in the process of being divorced from its highly complex historical and intellectual frames of reference and normalized as a self-sustained mythical edifice. As has been aptly observed, “the poet’s receding sociocultural setting in recent studies” indicates “what we might call a creeping decontextualization of Cavafy’s work,” manifest, among others, in the assumption “that the historical Alexandria of his lifetime was a paradise of cosmopolitan conviviality sustained by unmediated European influences” (Kazamias, 2021, pp.  90, 113). My inquiry proposes the study of Cavafy’s multiple contexts as an urgent priority for current criticism and suggests that this task requires a new species of interdisciplinary scholarship, founded on a wide-ranging but precise engagement with the broad spectrum of historical texts and discourses that contributed to the poet’s intellectual and artistic formation. This book does not aim to provide a close reading of an extensive selection of Cavafy’s poetry or to serve as a general introduction to his work. I have also refrained from surfing through his poetry on the wings of free association and from offering lines and phrases from his poems as glosses that supposedly explain other parts of his work. Instead of the light, intuitive and expansive type of commentary that has so often trivialized Cavafy’s poetry, I have opted to focus on a relatively small number of poems and to trace their literary, cultural and intellectual contexts persistently. My principal aim is to elucidate these poems’ broader meanings, to correct some crucial critical misconceptions, and perhaps to incite the interest of future scholars who may wish to further explore other untraversed  aspects of Cavafy’s work. In contrast with the poet’s earlier and predominantly hellenocentric apprehension, recent studies have established Cavafy as a poet of the Greek diaspora whose upbringing, culture and manners were distinctly British. Cavafy is now often perceived as “a British national with a Greek passport living in colonial Egypt” (Murphy, 2003, p. 75) and working as a clerk in a British-run colonial office. He received an “Anglocentric and Anglophile

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education, … in Egypt as well as in England” (Mufti, 2021, p. 182). “He wrote fluently in English, and is said to have spoken Greek with something of a British accent” (Murphy, 2003, p. 74). Cavafy was “a subject of the British Empire” (Mufti, 2021, p. 179) and “his world was trans-national and imperial” (Murphy, 2003, p. 75). He grew up among “thoroughly even absurdly  - anglicized” boys who “cultivated and performed a self-­ consciously Victorian masculinity” (Jeffreys, 2021, p.  28); they were “mimic-men … cultural middle men destined like Cavafy to serve in the local colonial administration” (McKinsey, 2010, p.  80). The poet was defined by a “lifelong adulation and imitation of all things British” (Jeffreys, 2021, p. 18). The main features of this portrait are common for a great number of writers and artists who grew up and lived as colonial subjects; they clearly do not make Cavafy politically an Anglophile or a supporter of British imperialism, either in his life or in his art. Moreover, as in other similar cases, Cavafy’s colonial background was balanced by an intense and persevering concern for various aspects of Greek culture, both ancient and modern, which went well beyond the level of interest in the “home culture” commonly expressed by diaspora intellectuals and has sometimes been interpreted as an affinity with nationalism. Fascinating as it may be in itself as a subject, the study of Cavafy’s biographical colonialism is not among this book’s goals. It enters my inquiry only as a broad cultural framework, which allows me to locate correspondences between Cavafy’s readings and writings and various British texts and other manifestations that circulated in his time. In researching Cavafy’s imperial surroundings, I am more interested in the poet’s “proximity to the networks of [cultural] colonial capital” (Mufti, 2021, p. 185) and in their reflections on his work. Cavafy’s colonial capital includes scholarly works that would probably be out of his reach if he was situated outside a colonial setting, as well as Victorian British periodicals, of which he was an “avid reader” (Jeffreys, in Cavafy, 2010, p. xvii), and other similar material. But it also features Cavafy’s own colonial network of classically educated and highly cultured British friends and acquaintances, who read his work and brought to his attention scholarly material, as well as new ideas and fresh perspectives on antiquity. The poet’s archive and library offer a wealth of valuable information on these issues; surprisingly, much of this information has not been properly mined and evaluated by previous users of these resources.

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Placing Cavafy in the context of a British colonial cultural setting allows me to connect his work to a broad array of viewpoints and conceptualizations that circulated in and formed an essential part of British culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By the same token, I often seek connections between Cavafy’s perceptions of Eastern Hellenism and its articulations in scholarly and cultural texts, which filtered and shaped the poet’s understanding. The complex and dazzling transport of perspectives that emerges as we observe Cavafy studying Hellenistic history from British imperialist scholars, who were at the same time studied, praised and used by eminent imperial figures like Lord Cromer, is a major theme under investigation in this book. Aamir Mufti has elucidated this theme’s conceptual framework succinctly: It is a distinct and recognizable feature of the predicament of colonial intelligentsias that their fabrication of the historical past takes place on the epistemological ground of colonial culture. … In rare (but decisive) instances, this conundrum opens up onto the shattering discovery that your “own” tradition is only available to you through the mediation of colonial knowledge. (Mufti, 2021, p. 180)

Several aspects of Cavafy’s historicism have been probed by criticism (see for example Dallas, 1974; Beaton, 1983; Kayalis, 1998; Papatheodorou, 2004; Frier, 2010; Chryssanthopoulos, 2013; Athanasopoulou, 2016). However, the poet’s multi-faceted connection to the popular antiquarian traditions that preceded academic history and inspired many generations of writers has remained virtually unnoticed. It has only been briefly acknowledged by a few commentators, including Peter Bien, who spoke of the poet’s “antiquarian mind” and noted that “his antiquarianism is never an end in itself, but rather an aid toward the imaginative expression of personal and social problems which are perennial and thus modern” (1964, p. 21); C. M. Bowra, who mentioned Cavafy’s “eager, antiquarian sense of an historic situation” (1967, p. 40); and Willis Barnstone, who alluded to “Borges the librarian and Cavafy the clerk and antiquarian” (Barnstone, 1997, p. 55). However, none of these mentionings was traced further or used in subsequent critical configurations of Cavafy’s historicism. The poet’s formative years were a time of transition from antiquarian uses of texts, objects and monuments of the past to their enfoldment in the disciplinary practices of history and archaeology. This was a major paradigm shift that has been described as a passage “from personal,

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idiosyncratic and élite networks to nationalist, collective and representative ones … from stories to histories, from fragments to totalities, from cabinets to museums” (Crane, 2018, p.  187). Antiquaries, whose ranks featured major intellectuals like Edward Gibbon and J. J. Winckelmann (Momigliano, 1990, p. 75; Colby, 2009, p. 20), had exhibited for centuries a “form of passionate interest in artefacts, and … a personalized expression of historical consciousness” (Crane, 2018, p. 187). They were “acutely aware that a study of coins, buildings, or monumental tombs could furnish important information with a greater foundation of accuracy—not just about dates and rulers, but in that very eighteenth-century phrase, the ‘manners and customs of the time’” (Sweet, 2001, p. 188). They were also particularly attached to “fragments and specialized collections based on objects of personal interest” (Crane, 2018, p.  187). Antiquarians were famous for putting objects at the center of historical inquiries and improvised “ways to elucidate the documentary records inscribed onto epigraphy, coins, and other material remnants from times past” (Gould, 2014, p. 216). Satire of antiquarianism has a very long tradition, in which antiquaries were “portrayed as the unacceptable, undiscriminating, other face of history” (Vine, 2010, p. 2). In modern times, as “antiquarians became figures of ridicule and contempt from the nineteenth century onward, their status reduced to that of ‘dilettante’” (Crane, 2018, p. 187), their outlook was gradually absorbed and transformed in the context of several academic disciplines, including history, archaeology, art history and numismatics. Outside the University, antiquarians were outmoded and displaced, but this did not prevent them from evolving into other species centered on cultural production: “they became museum curators, conservators, local folklorists, artists inspired by the past to create new visions, writers of historical fiction, re-enactors, and the large and late-born clan of public historians” (Miller, 2017, p. 15). Cavafy was clearly one of these artists. He embraced antiquarianism as a more accessible, empathetic and passionate way of relating to the past and creatively transformed it in his poetry into a method for locating and explicating homoerotic and other modern meanings in Hellenistic and late ancient antiquities. As analytically discussed in the chapters that follow, in composing his poetry Cavafy used current historiographical material along with some ancient sources and, in the last ten or fifteen years of his life, also employed a limited number of specialized numismatic and epigraphic publications. However, neither the poet’s intellectual formation nor his art’s historicism

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was shaped in academic environments and through the disciplinary practices of history, archaeology or other subjects of specialized training. History, as Cavafy learned it through educational channels in his youth, was still very much a field of antiquarian discourses and pursuits. We may get a glimpse at his early “historical sense” by looking at the books the poet carried with him as a nineteen-year-old, as he urgently boarded the ship that carried him and his family from Alexandria to Istanbul, where they sought safety from the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. “I am well provided with literary nourishment,” Cavafy noted in the idiosyncratic journal he kept during this voyage and went on to list seven books, which included the Rev. Thomas Milner’s History of England: From the Invasions of Julius Caesar to the Year A.D. 1852 (1853); David Hume’s History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second (1754–1762); the Rev. James Mac Kenzie’s History of Scotland (1867); and The Antiquary (1816; 1877), a famous portrayal of a “wildly eccentric and laughable figure, whose obsession with collecting the detritus of the past has warped his vision and clouded his judgment” by Sir Walter Scott, who was “himself an antiquary who made his career as a collector and fabricator of Scottish national antiquities” (Sweet, 2001, p. 182; Heringman and Lake, 2014; Cavafy, 2019a; Haas, 1994, p. 290n). In attempting to situate and contextualize Cavafy’s poetic historicism, we need to distinguish between different levels of his association to antiquarian culture. On one of these levels, we discern the poet’s own sensibility as a later-day amateur antiquary; this is manifest, for example, in the style of many of his early essays on topics related to antiquity and also in his persistent focus on ancient objects and their meanings, both in his prose and in his poetry. As Peter Jeffreys comments, Cavafy repeatedly valorized the preciousness of the antique object; he once wrote, ‘The ancients worked like me . . . and I work like the ancients,’ and even compared his poetry to an ‘amphora . . . which admits of many meanings.’ … There is something of the curator in the poet who fashions these mock-antique poems that partake of that Keatsean spirit which evokes a reverential awe for the beheld artifact. (Jeffreys, 2005, pp. 24, 28)

Apart from his particular interest in antique objects, an antiquarian sense may also be traced in several of Cavafy’s side-interests and distinctive traits. Antiquarians had a strong impulse for the retrieval and arrangement

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of genealogical information; “a huge proportion of antiquarian activity had always revolved around what was essentially genealogical material” (Sweet, 2004, p. 39). This impulse is clearly manifest in the abundance of genealogical and heraldic material researched and composed by the young Cavafy, sometimes in collaboration with his brother John. This material, as recorded in the poet’s archive, includes the documents entitled “Genealogical Gossip or Various bits of the History of our Father’s & Mother’s family thrown together” (Cavafy, 2019c), “Memorandum about the Cavafy family” (Cavafy, 2019d), an extensive untitled text that recounts the history of his family since the early eighteenth century (Cavafy, 2019e), an attempt to construct its “Genealogy” (Unidentified, 2019), and various drawings representing his family’s supposed heraldic emblems (Cavafy, 2019b; Unknown, 2019; see Karayiannis, 1983; Haas, 1996; Ghika, 2009). Another prominent feature of antiquaries was “their insistent, perhaps obsessive concern with details” of the deep historical past (Peltz and Myrone, 2018, p. 5); this notorious trait is perfectly mirrored in Cavafy’s well-documented “obsessive fixation on minute details – historical as well as aesthetic” (Jeffreys, 2015, p. 207). Antiquaries were also fond of tombstones and gravestones as privileged memorials of the past and as sources of valuable historical information; they often researched local histories through ancient cemeteries. This antiquarian ethos was so widespread that by the nineteenth century it had inspired a wave of commemorations of fictional characters on the gravestones of deceased men and women (see Rigney, 2001, pp. 13–16). It provides an illuminating frame for the multitude of Cavafy’s poems that represent tombs, often through the voices and narratives of their fictional deceased inhabitants, and for the poet’s frequent expressions of nostalgia over vanished memorials and unregistered life-endings. Antiquarianism and collecting also formed the prevalent modes of relating to the past in the context of Alexandria’s diaspora community, including Greek media and cultural societies. In this environment, an antiquarian-­ styled “empathetic relationship with the historical past” (Sweet, 2004, p. 32) was a  common idiom that Cavafy shared with his immediate readers. Furthermore, antiquarian habits and practices may also have inspired some of Cavafy’s most distinctive traits, such as his compilations of material not meant for publication (see for example Cavafy, 2015) and most notably his famous “idiosyncratic system for compiling and circulating his work, hand-producing loose folders and provisionally bound volumes that were never made commercially available, but were

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distributed either in person or through friends to a relatively small circle of individuals, most of whom were known to the poet himself” (Emmerich, 2013). Antiquaries had devised and practiced similar idiosyncratic schemes for their work’s dissemination through “brotherhoods” and networks of trusted like-minded readers for ages: They surveyed national and local landscapes, and wrote about both the distant and the recent past. They were interested in customs, languages, institutions, laws, and religious practices. They compiled notebooks, made sketches, wrote diaries, and whilst some sought to publish their material, others did not. There was a market for printed antiquarian studies, but information was also circulated around scholarly networks in manuscript form. (Lyon, 2022, p. 759)

Alongside its reflections on Cavafy’s intellectual formation, cultural practices and poetic themes, antiquarianism may  also have  furnished an imaginary “international brotherhood” (Momigliano, 1990, p. 72) with which the poet could relate and identify at a social and psychological level. The profile of a belated antiquary fit Cavafy as a clerk with no formal higher education but very conscious of his upper-class origins. Although antiquarianism was initially an aristocratic pursuit, by the eighteenth century it “was open to civil servants and the lower nobility” (Eriksen, 2014, p.  29); many antiquaries were autodidacts, while clerks and tradesmen were welcome to antiquarian circles (p. 44). Moreover, antiquarians traditionally moved in strictly male, homosocial environments: “The collection and study of antiquities was highly gendered. Antiquarianism was a ‘manly’ pursuit, encouraging masculine qualities. … Antiquities and antiquarianism … were regarded by men as being definitely masculine occupations” (p. 69). As a socially acceptable and distinctly manly pursuit, this profile balanced the poet’s image as a frail artist. Antiquarianism allowed Cavafy to build a public persona whose queerness was venerable rather than dandyish and whose daring art was sanctioned by the specialized interests of a culturally conservative if idiosyncratic man of letters: a “history man.” Apart from its impact on his sensibility and its reflection on his public persona, antiquarian culture also served Cavafy as the basis on which he built his own, original and modern idiom for expressing same-sex desire. As has been noted, “in seeking a common thread that ran through antiquarian activities, contemporaries and modern scholars alike have tended to highlight the emotional quality of many antiquaries’ engagement with

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the past” (Lyon, 2022, p. 759; my emphasis). Antiquarian readings had always been directed by personal and often idiosyncratic interests. The prevalent view of antiquarianism, as Momigliano postulated in 1950, was as an engagement with historical objects and texts by men who “craved for strong emotions in art” and sought for “beauty and emotion of a new kind” (Momigliano, 1950, p.  285). In fact, the cultural impact of an antiquarians’ fervent devotion to the explanation of antiquity was so great that Marcel Proust, “in the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (1915), likened the voracious and boundless curiosity of the lover for the beloved to that of the antiquary for ‘the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evidence, and the interpretation of old monuments’” (Miller, 2017, p. 7). As we will see in detail in the chapters that follow, Cavafy claimed the common perception of antiquarians as passionate readers of antiquity but infused his antiquarian interpretations with a heavy dosage of Paterian aestheticism and directed them toward retrieving specifically homoerotic meanings and emotions. Appropriating the established view of antiquarianism “as a revival of ancient forms of life” and rediscovery of “ancient traditions” (Momigliano, 1990, p.  71), Cavafy reoriented this pursuit toward the poetic “discovery” of ancient queer legacies, in which he traced alternative ways of feeling, thinking, living and even of reading art and literature. Antiquaries, as noted earlier, were primarily readers and explainers of the past by means of their empathetic and “passionate interest in artefacts” (Crane, 2018, p.  187): “not quite a connoisseur … and not quite a historian, the antiquary lingered somewhere in between, acquiring, classifying, and explicating ‘old things’” (Heringman and Lake, 2014). Out of this heritage, Cavafy honed his own idiosyncratic persona: the “reader of antiquity” who speaks in several of his poems, including “Orophernes,” “Caesarion” and “In the month of Athyr,” all of which are analytically discussed in the following chapters. Fusing the authoritative voice of an old antiquarian curmudgeon with a fresh and irreverent gaze that freely misreads and reappropriates ancient coins and inscriptions, Cavafy’s quasi-antiquarian persona guilefully expresses and historicizes early twentieth-century homoerotic yearnings, which he authorizes by the antiquarian perception of material antiquity as “evidence of undisputed authenticity” (Momigliano, 1990, p. 72). The present study is divided into three Parts. The first Part traces the modalities of Cavafy’s historical and aesthetic vision centering on “Orophernes” (1904, 1916, 1923), one of the most celebrated

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numismatic poems in world literature, but also exploring many other texts that focus on readings of Hellenistic coins, images and objects. Chapter 2 begins with an account of the discovery of Orophernes’ silver coin, in 1870, and a discussion of its early appraisals, by the archaeologist C. T. Newton (1871, 1881) and the epigraphist E. L. Hicks (1885). This is followed by a discussion of the debate around Cavafy’s visual and textual source for the poem, which has engaged literature scholars, as well as archaeologists and numismatists for over eighty years. Tracing a hitherto unnoticed detail in the poem’s publication history, I demonstrate that Cavafy’s source for this poem was neither numismatic nor ancient, as suggested in this long debate. The poet saw a photographic reproduction of Orophernes’ coin portrait and read this notorious character’s biography in the second volume of E. R. Bevan’s The Ηouse of Seleucus (1902), which together with William Smith’s A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1880) were in his library and served as his main sources for this and other poems on Seleucid-related themes. This finding allows us to establish with precision what Cavafy knew about Orophernes and his coin when he wrote and later revised his poem. Building on this insight, Chapter 3 centers on the poet’s aesthetic reading of the Hellenistic coin portrait and seeks to trace its broader cultural and literary contexts. This inquiry proceeds on two parallel tracks: on the one hand, I survey traditional antiquarian and physiognomic interpretations of coin portraits and append them with perceptions that derive from the culture of photography, whose impact was particularly strong in Cavafy’s formative years. On the other hand, I discuss approaches to coin portraits by early numismatists, most of whom were based at the British Museum (including R.  S. Poole, B.  V. Head, Percy Gardner, Warwick Wroth, and George F. Hill), and correlate them with insights expressed in a number of late nineteenth-century literary texts on ancient coins, whose authors include Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, Charles Tennyson Turner, Oliver Gogarty, Vernon Lee, José-Maria de Heredia and others. This extensive discussion contextualizes Cavafy’s rendering of Orophernes’ coin portrait and traces the residue of antiquarian, physiognomic and other cultural perceptions that inform the poet’s aesthetic outlook. Apart from “Orophernes,” this chapter also engages other poems by Cavafy that center on ancient coins, pictures and objects, including “Philhellene” (1906, 1912), “The tomb of Lanes” (1916, 1918) and “Craftsman of kraters” (1903; 1912; 1921).

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My fourth chapter seeks to clarify Cavafy’s method of composing historical poetry. It sets out with a comparison of the poet’s account of Orophernes’ life to the information furnished by Bevan’s House of Seleucus and Smith’s Dictionary, with particular attention to the poet’s narrative handling of historical data. Cavafy’s depiction of Orophernes as a child-­ king caught up in ceaseless waste of aesthetic, sexual, political, and economic capital and led by a coarse and instinctive type of hedonism, is contrasted to the mature, reserved and refined Paterian hedonism that is manifest in the narrator’s own telling of the hero’s story. This chapter also questions the significance of Cavafy’s typically antiquarian protest at the inadequacy of the historical archive, in ll. 41–44 of the poem, often misinterpreted by commentators as a valid cultural critique of academic historiography. This discussion leads to a reconsideration of the nature and value of Cavafy’s so-called self-comments, two of which focus on “Orophernes” and have been sanctioned as guidelines for the poem’s interpretation. As I argue, Cavafy’s ostensibly self-explanatory comments may be more profitably viewed as fascinating exercises in self-censorship that reveal an ingenious shielding strategy. Through these radical re-conceptualizations of his work and manifesting his talent in the art of compromise, Cavafy sought to face the prejudices that impaled his reception by the Greek community of Alexandria at the cost of moralizing and trivializing his own poems’ import. The second Part of the book centers on Cavafy’s readings of Hellenistic and Late Antique inscriptions in two of his most emblematic texts, “Caesarion” and “In the month of Athyr,” which along with “Orophernes” have often been viewed as interpretative keys to the poet’s work as a whole. Chapter 5 begins by challenging two central premises manifest in critical approaches to “Caesarion”: first, that Cleopatra’s son was a marginal or obsolete historical figure until Cavafy drew attention to him; and second, that this poem reveals Cavafy’s method of composing historical poetry as a confession of an actual incident experienced by the poet. In the chapter’s first section, I bring forth new evidence to demonstrate that Caesarion was a familiar and highly recognizable historical figure long before Cavafy’s poetic rendering; he was mentioned or portrayed in a large variety of texts, ranging from scholarly studies and reference works to various forms of popular culture. As I also show here, Cavafy’s main source for this poem was J. P. Mahaffy’s The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895), a book still shelved in his library, which the poet employed as a storehouse of narrative patterns, tropes and motifs. Cavafy appropriated, mimicked and revised

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Mahaffy’s text in his poem’s initial stanzas, transforming it into the elusive and clearly fictional “collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions” mentioned in his poem. This chapter also traces the genealogy of Caesarion’s literary presence before Cavafy’s poem, by discussing the hero’s previous depictions in texts by several authors, including Walter Savage Landor; Algernon Charles Swinburne; Georg Moritz Ebers; Vincent P. Sullivan; Frederick the Great of Prussia, as discovered and anthologized by Elisar von Kupffer and Edward Carpenter, at the turn of the twentieth century; and Léon Michaud d’Humiac. As this discussion demonstrates, Caesarion was prominent as a literary figure long before Cavafy’s rendering. Interestingly, during his several literary transformations, the hero has never been linked to conventional masculine stereotypes, which may explain why he is the only historical figure from antiquity to be directly presented as an object of same-sex desire in Cavafy’s poetry. After establishing the method of this poem’s composition and tracing Caesarion’s fascinating literary genealogy, I discuss other aspects of the poem, including the riddle of Caesarion’s early appearance as a statue in Cavafy’s “Sculptor of Tyana” (1911) and the poem’s relation to literary manifestations of “aesthetic vampirism” in texts like Théophile Gautier’s short story “Arria Marcella: A Souvenir of Pompeii” (1852). The chapter’s concluding section situates Cavafy’s poem in the context of Caesarion’s vanishing from the domain of public history, due to the impact of early twentieth-century cinematic renderings of the story of Antony and Cleopatra. Here I draw attention to the Italian silent film “Marcantonio e Cleopatra,” directed by Enrico Guazzoni and starring Gianna Terribili-Gonzales, which was shown for a record period of ten weeks at the Greek moviehouse Iris, in Alexandria, just before Cavafy wrote the first version of his “Caesarion.” Chapter 6 focuses on the process of deciphering and making sense of an inscription on a late antique tombstone, as staged in Cavafy’s “In the month of Athyr” (1917). After discussing some of this poem’s technical aspects, drawing on the scarcely noted epigraphic commentary provided by archaeologist Haralambos Bakirtzis in 1972, I examine the numerous suggestions of Cavafy’s ancient sources contributed by critics over the last decades. Following this, I present conclusive evidence from the Cavafy Archive demonstrating that the poet’s source was Gustave Lefebvre’s Recueil des inscriptions grecques-chrétiennes d’Égypte (Le Caire: impr. de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1907), which was in fact conjectured as such by Bakirtzis fifty  years ago. The next section reviews the

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critical debate on the poem’s meaning, which has privileged the dramatized process of reading at the expense of what is actually presented as being read in this text. My reading focuses on Cavafy’s invention of a collective and communal entity, which enters his poem in l. 9: “[U]S HIS FRIENDS” and replaces the deceased man’s family as dedicators of the stele and as mourners over his death. The utopian projection of friendship as a metaphor for an emotionally fulfilling and socially permissible version of male love was a highly topical issue in the early twentieth century and central to the collective attempt to legitimate male homosexuality supported by authors like John Addington Symonds, compilers of homoerotic anthologies like Elisar von Kupffer and Edward Carpenter and visual artists, like the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden who often staged belated antiquity in settings that suggest communal clusters of male affection. This chapter’s final section describes and analyzes the figure of a quasi-­ antiquarian “reader of antiquity” that Cavafy uses as an autobiographical persona in several of his poems, including “Orophernes,” “Caesarion” and “In the month of Athyr.” This discordant figure combines the voice of an expert antiquarian who confidently guides the poem’s reader in his métier with a stunning disregard for the historical elements of ancient texts and objects and with a tendency to misconstrue their meaning, based on his own yearnings and impressions. This narrative device allows Cavafy’s queer readings of ancient texts and artifacts to be articulated by a voice of cultural authority and to appear engulfed in mainstream antiquarian practice. Along with important cultural critics like Pater, Symonds, and Carpenter, Cavafy crafts his own aesthetic perception of material antiquity as a privileged site, in which same-sex desire and antiquarian expertise are assimilated in a way that invests the queer self with new cultural value. This chapter concludes with a broad review of a number of Cavafy’s poems in which homoerotic desire is conflated with scholarly study and artistic expression, while readings of material antiquity run parallel to physiognomic renderings of present-time males and their pictures, in ways that suggest same-sex desire as a prerequisite for artistic creation and also for the attainment of a profound understanding of the cultural past. The third Part of this study explores the broader historical and cultural context of Cavafy’s poetic readings of Hellenistic antiquity, paying particular attention to its concurrent uses by critics seeking to legitimate same-­ sex desire and by thinkers and apologists of British imperialism. Chapter 7 begins with a new reading of the Ionian episode in Orophernes’ poetic biography, in ll. 9–17 of Cavafy’s poem, which is correlated with late

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Victorian figurations of effeminacy as a social and political threat to the British Empire and contextualized by Walter Pater’s contrast of the Ionian-­ Asiatic tendency in Greek culture to an ideal of Dorian masculinity in his Plato and Platonism (1893). Pater’s re-reading of Plato posited a homoerotic ethos of masculinity and civic responsibility against Oscar Wilde’s dandyism and social provocation; it is akin to a broader revisionist project led by turn-of-the-century homosexual artists and critics who sought to correlate homoerotic desire with traditional manly virtues, including martial, Christian and patriotic values that were at the heart of imperialist discourses. This bold attempt, as I go on to suggest, is concomitant with an aspect of Cavafy’s work. A number of Cavafy’s poems have traditionally been read as privileged expressions of national or moral values by critics eager to balance and naturalize the poet’s more daring work. However, many of these poems engulf heteronormative values in homoerotic insinuations, whereas in others hedonistic principles and queer desire are more directly interwoven with martial imagery and conventional middle-class values. In these poems Cavafy, in line with his other European counterparts, reaches toward prevalent heteronormative themes in an attempt to vindicate homoerotic desire by associating it with the moral and ideological backbone of middle-class sensibilities. This chapter’s concluding sections trace thematic and structural affinities between Cavafy’s historical depictions of homoerotic themes and their present-time emplotments, in poems like “Days of 1909, ’10 and ‘11” (1928), “That is How” (1913) and “Passage” (1917). It also attempts to locate contemporaneous sources, contexts and references for Cavafy’s historical representations of homoerotic desire. This discussion leads to a comparison of certain aspects of Cavafy’s poetry with the aesthetic vision of Wilhelm von Gloeden’s visual project. Both artists explored representations of manly love staged in comparable pseudo-historical settings. Like Cavafy’s, von Gloeden’s erotic archaeology depicts post-classical and Decadent versions of antiquity, while his photographs clearly suggest Hellenistic and Late Antique hybridity. In fact, both artists used antiquarianism as a code by which they could either cloak or enhance homoerotic desire, depending on the reader looking at their work. The book’s concluding chapter illuminates Cavafy’s position as a poet who read and wrote of Eastern Hellenism through facilities, resources, and viewpoints made available by the British Empire, while also keeping his distinct cultural identity and seeking to increase his cultural capital as a diaspora Greek within the broader imperial framework in which he

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lived and operated. Chapter 8 commences with an attempt to contextualize Cavafy’s poetic handling of Hellenistic history by an examination of the same historical material’s deployment in British imperialist discourse. Here I investigate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiographical and cultural formulations of the Hellenistic East as code for the British Empire, as elaborated in the first academic histories of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties; these were the books Cavafy studied from and used extensively in his work: Mahaffy’s Empire of the Ptolemies (1895) and Bevan’s House of Seleucus (1902). Moving along, I bring evidence demonstrating that some of the poet’s favorite historical themes, including Hellenistic hybridity, assimilation, amalgamation and cosmopolitanism, were also topics of urgent concern for imperialist intellectuals in his time. This concern is manifest in Lord Cromer’s Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1910) and also in the symposium on Ancient Imperialism he organized at Oxford, in May 1910, as President of the Classical Association, with the participation of several important scholars who doubled as imperialist thinkers. These findings show that Cavafy’s depictions of Hellenistic fusion and hybridity may not be axiomatically read as “an instantly decentering and de-essentializing gesture” that goes against the grain of imperialist discourse (McKinsey, 2010, p. 34), since these themes also attracted imperialist political and scholarly interest at the same time. This inquiry is followed by a discussion of the poet’s own colonial network, composed of British-educated and cultured men who were well-­versed in the classics but often also held high-ranking positions in colonial administration. These men read and responded to Cavafy’s work, while many of them also interacted with him on a personal level. Among them were T. E. Lawrence, Ronald Storrs, Edgar John Forsdyke, Robert (Robin) Allason Furness and George Antonius. As evidence from the poet’s library shows, Cavafy also read a lot of material of colonial interest. Among this material was John Morley’s response to imperial theorist John Robert Seeley’s enthusiastic promotion of Greater England in the model of Greater Rome in his popular book The Expansion of England (1883); Lord Cromer’s political books as well as his scholarly articles on classical matters; and William Robertson’s An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients had of India; and the Progress of Trade with that Country, Prior to the Discovery of the Passage to It by the Cape of Good Hope (1844), an important early colonial work, first published in 1791, which argued “that Alexander was a

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benevolent ruler and that the British would help in the upliftment of the Indian people if they fashioned their rule in India after him” (Vasunia, 2013, pp. 40–41). This chapter also probes into the various formulations of Hellenism at play in Cavafy’s poetry and relates them to his diaspora outlook and to the tensions, aspirations and anxieties of the Greek Egyptiotes, who represented Egypt’s largest diaspora community. This community claimed a continuous presence in Alexandria since 331 BCE and, by this token, a privileged status as cultural heirs of the Ptolemies. At the same time, British colonialism viewed the Greeks of Egypt as “thoroughly orientalized” and sought to convert them, along with other local minorities, into colonial subjects. This discussion leads to the conclusive section of the book: an extensive close reading of “Coins,” a poem that was originally composed in 1920 but was not published until 1968, which illustrates the interpretative complexities that arise once we acknowledge and critically investigate the colonial substratum of Cavafy’s historical poetry.

Note 1. Athanasios Politis’ early description of Cavafy’s poetry quoted in this chapter’s epigraph was reportedly dictated by the poet himself (see Tsirkas, 1983, p. 449)

References Athanasopoulou, A. (2016). Ιστορία και Λογοτεχνία σε διάλογο, ή Περί μυθικής και ιστορικής μεθὀδου. Μια ανίχνευση στη νεοελληνική ποίηση του 19ου και του 20ού αιώνα. Thessaloniki: Epikentro. Barnstone, W. (1997). Real and Imaginary History in Borges and Cavafy. Comparative Literature, 29(1), 54–73. Beaton, R. (1983). The History Man. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 10(1–2), 23–44. Bien, P. (1964). Constantine Cavafy. New York: Columbia University Press. Bowra, C. M. (1967). The Creative Experiment. London: Macmillan. Cavafy, C.  P. (2010). Selected Prose Works. Translated and annotated by Peter Jeffreys. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cavafy, C. P. (2015). Λεξικό Παραθεμάτων. Ed. by M. Pieris. Athens: Ikaros. Cavafy, C.  P. (2019a). Constantinopoliad an Epic. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S02-­F24-­0003 Cavafy, C. P. (2019b). Folder. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi. org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S02-­F25-­SF006-­0017

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Cavafy, C. P. (2019c). Genealogical Gossip or... Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S02-­F25-­SF002-­0002 Cavafy, C. P. (2019d). Memorandum about the Cavafy Family. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S02-­F25-­SF002-­0006 Cavafy, C. P. (2019e). Prose Text. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https:// doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S02-­F25-­SF002-­0003 Chryssanthopoulos, M. (2013). ‘Ποιητής ιστορικός.’ Το καβαφικό κείμενο ως στοχασμός επί της ιστοριογραφίας. Nea Estia, 1860, 663–688. Colby, S. (2009). Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson. Bern: Peter Lang. Crane, S.  A. (2018). Story, history and the passionate collector. In L.  Peltz & M.  Myrone (Eds.), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850 (pp. 187-203). London & New York: Routledge. Dallas, Y. (1974). Καβάφης και Ιστορία. Athens: Ermis. Emmerich, K. (2013). No Two Snowflakes, or Cavafy Canons, Are Alike. Window to Greek Culture: C.P. Cavafy Forum, University of Michigan, Department of Modern Greek. https://lsa.umich.edu/modgreek/window-­to-­greek-­culture/ c-­p%2D%2Dcavafy-­forum.html. Eriksen, A. (2014). From Antiquities to Heritage: Transformations of Cultural Memory. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Frier, B. (2010). Making History Personal: Constantine Cavafy and the Rise of Rome. Window to Greek Culture: C. P. Cavafy Forum, University of Michigan, Department of Modern Greek. https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/ modgreek-­assets/modgreek-­docs/CPC_Frier_Makinghistorypersonal.pdf Ghika, K. (2009). “Τοις Ρωμαίων έμμενε”: Εμβλήματα του Κωνσταντίνου Καβάφη. Nea Estia, 1818, 18–53. Gould, R. (2014). Antiquarianism as Genealogy: Arnaldo Momigliano’s Method. History and Theory, 53(2), 212–233. Haas, D. (1994). Kωνσταντίνου Kαβάφη Constantinopoliad an Epic. In Zητήματα Iστορίας των Eλληνικών γραμμάτων. Aφιέρωμα στον K.Θ. Δημαρά (pp. 281-304). Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Haas, D. (1996). Biographical, Autobiographical and Epistolary Material from the Archives of C.  P. Cavafy: A Report on Recent Research. Molivdo-kondilo-­ pelekitis, 5, 39–49. Heringman, N., & Lake, C. B. (2014). Introduction: Romantic Antiquarianism. Romantic Circles Praxis Volume. Romantic Circles. https://romantic-­circles. org/praxis/antiquarianism/praxis.antiquarianism.2014.heringman_lake.html Jeffreys, P. (2005). Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press. Jeffreys, P. (2015). Reframing Decadence. C.  P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Jeffreys, P. (2021). Cavafy’s Levant: Commerce, Culture, and Mimicry in the Early Life of the Poet. boundary 2, 48(2), 7–39.

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Karayiannis, V. (1983). Σημειώσεις από τη Γενεαλογία του Καβάφη. Athens: ELIA. Kayalis, T. (1998). ‘Εγώ είμαι ποιητής ιστορικός’: Ο Καβάφης και ο μοντερνισμός. Poiisi, 12, 77–119. Kazamias, Α. (2021). Another Colonial History: How Cosmopolitan Was Cavafy’s Contemporary Alexandria? boundary 2, 48(2), 89–121. Lyon, H. (2022). Re-thinking Nostalgic Antiquarianism: Time, Space, and the English Reformation. The Seventeenth Century, 37(5), 757–777. McKinsey, M. (2010). Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination. Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott. Madison & Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Miller, P. N. (2017). History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture Since 1500. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Momigliano, A. (1950). Ancient History and the Antiquarian. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13(3–4), 285–315. Momigliano, A. (1990). The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mufti, A. R. (2021). Constantine Cavafy in the Colony: Hellenism at the Margins of Empire. boundary 2, 48(2), 177–203. Murphy, P. (2003). The City of Ideas: Cavafy as a Philosopher of History. Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 11, 75–102. Papatheodorou, Y. (2004). Η γνώση των ηδονών. Ο ιστορισμός του Καβάφη και η κριτική (1932–1946), Poiisi, 24, 215–256. Peltz, L. & Myrone, M. (Eds.) (2018). Introduction. In Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850 (pp. 1–14). London & New York: Routledge. Politis, Α. (1930). Ο Ελληνισμός και η Νεωτέρα Αίγυπτος (Vol. 2). Alexandria: Grammata. Rigney, A. (2001). Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Sweet, R. (2001). Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34(2), 181–206. Sweet, R. (2004). Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London & New York: Hambledon & London. Tsirkas, S. (1983). Ο Καβάφης και η εποχή του (7th ed). Athens: Kedros. [Unidentified] (2019). Genealogy. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https:// doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S02-­F25-­SF002-­0004 Unknown (2019). Small-size Sketches. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S02-­F25-­SF002-­0005 Vasunia, P. (2013). The Classics and Colonial India. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Vine, A. (2010). In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART I

Cavafy Reads a Coin

CHAPTER 2

Orophernes. Lessons from a Golden Coin

C. P. Cavafy’s “Orophernes” (1904, 1916, 1923) is a complex and elusive poem in which impressions formed by the viewing of a rare Hellenistic coin are contrasted to a poetic narrative of an obscure king’s life, leading to ruminations on the value of art, history and beauty. The poem has been described as historical (Dallas, 1987, p. 67), erotic (Savidis, 1985, p. 232; Cavafy, 1984), and political (Savidis, 1985, p.  330) as well as “self-­ referential” or a poem on poetics (Jusdanis, 1987, p. 110; Savidis, 1985, p. 310). It is also one of the most famous numismatic poems in world literature. As P. Roilos aptly observes, the coin at the poem’s center is handled “both as an historical ‘document’ and an aesthetic ‘monument.’ ‘Orophernes’ explores the fluid boundaries between these two notional and epistemological categories by foregrounding the aesthetic merit of the ‘document’ while problematizing the reconstructive historical potential of the monument” (Roilos, 2009, p. 191). The poem’s first version, which has been lost or destroyed, was written in 1904; the poem first appeared in print in 1916. Here is a translation of the final and standardized text: OROPHERNES He whose face upon the tetradrachm appears to affect a smile his beautiful, delicate face he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Kayalis, Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7_2

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He was only a child when they drove him out of Cappadocia,  5 from the great ancestral palace and sent him away to grow up in Ionia and be forgotten among strangers. Oh! Exquisite Ionian nights, when in a fearless and entirely Greek way    10 he came to know utter sensual bliss. Deep in his heart, always an Asiatic; but in his manners and his speech a Hellene, adorned with turquoise gems, clad in Greek style, his body scented with the perfume of jasmine oil,   15 of all the lovely Ionian youths, he was the loveliest, the most ideal. Later as the Syrians entered Cappadocia and declared him king, he flung himself upon the kingship     20 to indulge each day in a new way, rapaciously to gather gold and silver, and to delight himself and boast, watching piled-up riches shine. As for the cares of state and government,     25 he had no idea what went on around him. The Cappadocians soon removed him; and he ended up in Syria, in the palace of Demetrios, basking in revelry and idleness. One day, however, his great indolence     30 was interrupted by unusual thoughts; he recalled how, through his mother Antiochis and through that Stratonike of old, he too was related to the Syrian crown and was a Seleucid himself - almost.      35 For a while, he emerged from lechery and stupor, and ineptly, and half-dazed, he somehow endeavored to engage in intrigue to do something, to plan something and failed pitifully and was utterly overwhelmed.   40

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His end was recorded somewhere and then lost; or perhaps History passed it by, and - with good reason - a thing as trivial as that she didn’t deign to record.

He who upon the tetradrachm     45 left the allure of his lovely youth, the radiance of his poetic grace, the aesthetic memory of an Ionian boy, he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes. (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, pp. 145–147)

“Orophernes” brings together and juxtaposes several key themes in Cavafy’s oeuvre. These include the focus on a young man, who is recalled from historical obscurity on the impetus of a chance sighting; the poetic rendering of an artifact of material antiquity; the contradistinction of art to eros and politics, especially in relation to the workings of private and public memory; the dialectics of cultural hybridity; questions concerning the ethical grounding and reliability of the historical archive and others. Part of the poem’s allure derives from Cavafy’s subtle way of stitching together and contrasting three distinct discourses: the recognition of an ancient coin’s value (a tetradrachm) and the aesthetic apprehension of the portrait inscribed on it, in lines 1–4 and 45–49; an extensive narrative on the historical figure’s life and questionable legacy, in lines 5–8 and 18–44, which is presented as an orally delivered mnemonic exercise, but clearly manifests the narrator’s familiarity with highly specialized scholarly material; and also, Cavafy’s purely fictional depiction of the hero’s  sensual refinement as a youth in Ionia (lines 9–17), which testifies to  the coin portrait’s fanciful impression on the poem’s narrator. Equally perplexing is the effect of the contrast between history and art, which several critics have treated as the poem’s major theme (Kostiou, 2005, pp. 146–148; Mackridge, 2007, xxvi; Jusdanis, 1987, p. 110). For what is art and what is history in this text? “Orophernes” encompasses several distinct facets of “art,” including the craftsmanship evident in the coin portrait, this portrait’s aesthetic rendering by the poem’s narrator, and of course the poet’s own art, which engulfs and expresses everything in the text. Cavafy also handles here several different senses of “history”:

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the seemingly historical depiction of Orophernes’ youth is Ionia; the long narration of the hero’s life and times; the story of his sensual allure, as gathered from his coin portrait; the coin itself, as a piece of historical evidence. The interplay of meanings and nuances concealed under the narrator’s casual poise often leads attempts at this poem’s interpretation astray, reducing critical arguments to partial impressions or simplistic generalizations. The poem’s complexity is further trivialized by its frequent decorative use by historians and numismatists. As Bruce W. Frier has argued, reconstruction of Cavafy’s hermeneutical dialogue with his sources is crucial to fully comprehending his historical poems. Although even the most esoteric poems (such as “Orophernes,” 1904) may appeal to naïve readers simply through Cavafy’s forceful presentation, their profundity is, in most instances, enormously enhanced through careful historical analysis, just as Cavafy evidently intended. (Frier, 2010, p. 33)

Sharing this conviction, the present chapter seeks to establish the textual and visual sources Cavafy used in composing “Orophernes” in an attempt to place Cavafy’s historicism and the poet’s dialogue with the classics in a more precise and tangible context than it has usually been presented. The chapter begins with an account of the discovery of Orophernes’ silver coin, in 1870, and a discussion of its early appraisals. This is followed by a critical review of the arguments put forth during the past eighty years by literature scholars, archaeologists and numismatists who have located Cavafy’s visual source in various numismatic publications and attributed the poem’s historical content mainly to ancient authors, including Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin, Appian, Livy, Dio Cassius, Athenaeus and Aelian. In this chapter’s final section, close scrutiny of the poem’s publication history will unearth conclusive evidence concerning the poem’s actual visual and textual source, which has not been discussed by any of the forementioned scholars. This historical source will be employed in subsequent chapters to investigate further Cavafy’s reading of the coin portrait in its broader cultural and literary context and to re-examine the poet’s account of Orophernes’ life and deeds in an attempt to tackle Cavafy’s proclaimed historicism with some measure of accuracy.

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1   An Unknown Coin The coin of Orophernes, usurper of the throne of Cappadocia who is estimated to have reigned from 159/8 until 156  BCE (Habicht, 2006, p. 212; Facella, 2013), was accidentally discovered in April 1870 among the ruins of Priene, in Asia Minor, by Augustus Oakley Clarke, a British expatriate who lived at the nearby town of Söke (Thonemann, 2016, pp. 121–122). The excavation of the temple of Athena Polias, which had been funded by the Society of Dilettanti (see Kelly, 2010) and directed by the architect Richard P. Pullan, had been completed a year earlier (Jenkins, 2007, pp. 238–249; Carter, 1983) with a vast number of antiquities transferred to the British Museum at the personal expense of John Ruskin (Brand, 1998, p.  151). While visiting Priene’s site on a family outing, Clarke, who had assisted Pullan during the excavation, found the base of the main cult statue of Athena vandalized and discovered a silver coin and some ancient pieces of jewelry. With the help of Greek masons who worked at the site, trimming stones for use in cemeteries, Clarke found two more identical coins. An additional pair was discovered by local workers during the following days, of which Clarke bought one. Clarke presented two of the coins he owned to the British Museum and the Society of Dilettanti. Μore coins were probably retrieved soon afterwards, as today at least nine are known (Salvesen, 2002, p. 11), most of which are kept in museums around the world (see Kraay et al., 1973, p. 176). The discovery of Orophernes’ coins was announced a year later by the archaeologist and, since 1861, first Keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum C.  T. Newton (1871); it was subsequently broadly reported in the press.1 In his article, which was accompanied by a woodcut depiction of the coin’s two sides (Fig. 2.1), Newton described the coins and the events of their discovery, noting that they were very well preserved. He went on to identify the figure depicted on the portrait as “Orophernes II, King of Cappadocia” and to reconstruct his story from testimonies by ancient historians (Newton, 1871, p. 21). Newton mentioned the epithet Nikephoros, assumed by Orophernes in the coin’s legend, and noted that it does not “occur on the coins of any of the other kings of Cappadocia” (p. 25).2 He observed that these coins do not resemble those of other Cappadocian kings, but “remind us of the contemporary autonomous tetradrachms of Ionia and Aeolis, and their weight is adjusted to the same later Attic standard, as the silver money of many cities and kings in Asia Minor of the same period” (p.  25). So,

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Fig. 2.1  Detail from the first presentation of Orophernes’ coin (Newton, 1871)

Newton suggested that “as Orophernes was bred up in Ionia, and adopted the Ionian manners and way of life, he probably imitated their style of coinage–possibly these tetradrachms were struck for him in the mint of Priene” (p. 25). Finally, Newton associated the coins’ location with the four hundred talents that Orophernes is known to have deposited in Priene after his accession. His step-brother and greatest foe, Ariarathes V Eusebes Philopator, later waged war at the Prienians to claim this treasure but without success in retrieving it, so it ultimately was returned to Orophernes (Newton, 1871, pp.  21–22; Thonemann, 2016, p.  121). Newton suggested that the discovered coins may have been deposited by Orophernes under the pedestal of the colossal statue of Athena Polias, which he may have dedicated in gratitude for the Prienians’ fidelity to himself (Newton, 1871, p. 23).3 He also speculated that the coins had so far remained unknown to numismatists because of Orophernes’ short stay in power, which lasted less than two years (p. 22; also see Carter, 1983, p. 235). Newton’s article incorporated a letter by A. O. Clarke that offers a vivid, if notably orientalist, description of the circumstances of the coins’ discovery:

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During lunch the two Greek masons, with two or three other Greeks from Kelebesh (who came to Priene, hearing I was there, to pay me a visit), as well as Yuruks from the hillside, who, seeing Franks excited at having found something, came down to the spot to join in the kismet. All commenced scratching in the most perfect harmony, wondering at my good kismet at having found so much in so short a time, and their bad kismet at not being able to find anything. This was on a Saturday, so on Sunday the inhabitants of Kitibesh, having heard of the well-read Frank’s discovery, turned out, bound to Priene, in search of treasure, two Jews accompanying them with a fair supply of money to purchase any bargain that might turn up. A grand turning over of stones took place by this mob of men, women, and children, but nothing was found. (Newton, 1871, p. 27)

Newton was the first commentator to appraise the coin’s cultural significance and to commend its value as a source of historical information. As he explained, this discovery clarified the usurper’s name (which in printed ancient sources was usually rendered as Olophernes) and also illustrated “in a remarkable manner the scanty particulars which ancient historians have recorded respecting this prince” (p.  21).4 The coins soon assumed great monetary value among collectors and were later listed among the rarest in the world.5 But they were also highly praised for their artistic value and for the aesthetic quality of the king’s portrait (Fig. 2.2). Already in 1871, Newton could see that in contrast to other coins of Cappadocian kings, which were usually “of a coarser character of art,” the newly discovered specimens were “very fine examples of the art of the period” (p. 24). “The head of the king is finely modelled,” he suggested,

Fig. 2.2  The coin of Orophernes

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“and the portrait one full of character” (p. 25). A few years later, in 1885, the epigraphist E. L. Hicks, a close friend and associate of Newton, provided a detailed reading of the coin portrait’s aesthetic characteristics, which he found to be in perfect correspondence to Polybius’ account of Orophernes’ personality (Hicks, 1885, p. 271). In 1922, George F. Hill, then director of the numismatic collections of the British Museum, would refer to the “fine head” on Orophernes’ coin to justify his claim that “artistically speaking, portraiture is the most satisfactory phase” of the period from 190 to 100 BCE (Hill, 1922, p. 25). The portrait coin continues to be famous for its artistry today; it is often described as “magnificent” (Lorber and Houghton, 2006, p.  58) or “arguably the most beautiful of all Hellenistic portrait coins” (Salvesen, 2002, p. 8) and has been listed among the most important coins of antiquity (Berk, 2007, p. 72; Sayles, 2007, p. 201). Orophernes’ portrait is also frequently summoned to illustrate the “idealizing trend” in Hellenistic coin portraits, in contrast to the “realistic tradition” exemplified by royal coin portraits of Parthia, Bactria and Pontus (Mørkholm et al. 1991, p. 28). We may also note that Orophernes’ coin portrait has been found to be strikingly similar to a terracotta emblema in Berlin which, as G. M. A. Richter proposed, “probably represents Horophernes” (Richter, 1965, p. 276). The discovery of the coin, in 1870, also triggered a correlation of the historical Orophernes with Olophernes (or Holofernes), the general of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Assyria, who according to the deuterocanonical Book of Judith was sent on an expedition against Palestine. During the siege of the city of Bethulia, however, Olophernes was seduced and famously beheaded by a beautiful Jewish widow named Judith, who thus made possible the defeat of the leaderless Assyrian army. The Olophernes of the biblical “historical romance” (Pentin, 1908, p. ix), which is dated between 158 BCE and 96 CE (Steyn, 2008, p. 160), was correlated to the usurper of Cappadocia’s throne by E. L. Hicks, in his 1885 article which also, as previously mentioned, features the first aesthetic discussion of the coin portrait. After summarizing the numismatic and historical facts on Orophernes and his coin’s discovery, Hicks followed insights by the German theologian Heinrich Ewald on the allegorical nature of the Book of Judith to interpret Nebuchadnezzar’s fury against the Hebrews as a reference to Demetrius Soter’s victory over the Maccabees, in 160 BCE. As he claimed, the slightly altered name of Orophernes, whom the text’s first readers would instantly recognize as a friend of Demetrius, served as “a clue to the symbolical meaning of the whole story” (p. 264). To support

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this correlation, Hicks also pointed to similarities between the traits of Orophernes’ character and his habits, as presented in historical sources, and the biblical portraiture of Olophernes.6 Noting that Hicks’ allegorical correlation of the historical Orophernes to the book of Judith continues to have a strong following among contemporary scholars (see for example Corley, 2012, pp.  43–44; Steyn, 2008, p. 160; Jong, 1999, p. 481), one may be tempted to fantasize that long before he was taken up by Cavafy, and under the guise of a biblical persona, Orophernes had traversed a spectacular span in literature and the visual arts, which ranged from Chaucer and Dante to Upton Sinclair and Michel Leiris, and from Donatello to Klimt. But was Cavafy aware of the argument that engulfed his hero in such a rich cultural tradition by virtue of allegory? A sarcastic remark on the French classicist Louis Russel’s inquiries into Orophernes, published anonymously by the poet in 1929, manifests that Cavafy knew the story of the biblical Olophernes but was unaware of Hicks’ argument that treated this figure as an alias for the historical Orophernes (Anon. 1929).7

2   The Debate on Cavafy’s Sources As we saw earlier, the historical and artistic value of Orophernes’ coin was established through articles and notes by several commentators long before it attracted Cavafy’s interest. But how much of this discussion was actually known to the poet when he composed his text and how did he use it? To answer this question, we need to locate the publication in which Cavafy first encountered the picture of Orophernes’ coin portrait and to trace the information he received from the same source about the coin’s attributes and possibly the sovereign’s life. Cavafy’s sources for “Orophernes” have been the object of ardent research by several scholars during the last eight decades. In fact, among Cavafy’s poems this has surely attracted the most extensive and multi-­ faceted scholarly attention, including several articles and comments by historians and numismatists. In the course of this long-ranging discussion, the coin’s image and description have been located in several late nineteenth-­century numismatic editions and catalogues, while the historical information featured in the poem has been traced in various ancient texts, with whose help it is generally assumed that Cavafy assembled his narration. By virtue of this double argument, scholars and critics have established an image of Cavafy as an expert classicist, self-trained but able

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to handle with efficiency both ancient historical texts and the professional resources of numismatists and epigraphists and to use them as raw material for his art. This largely fictional construction is supported by the autobiographical narrative persona Cavafy himself skillfully crafted in many of his poems and also projected through comments in conversations, articles and interviews. A careful re-examination of the poet’s sources in “Orophernes” will qualify this self-promoted but also critically established impression and allow us to observe Cavafy at work with the classics in some measure of accuracy. Let us begin by considering the impressive list of propositions that have been suggested by scholars and critics on the numismatic and historical sources Cavafy is believed to have used in “Orophernes.” The tracing of the poem’s visual and textual sources commenced in 1940, when Filippo Maria Pontani suggested that Cavafy saw an image of the coin in a numismatic catalogue by W.  W. Wroth (1899). He also referred to Newton’s article on the coin’s discovery in Priene and noted that the coin’s reverse is inscribed ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΟΡΟΦΕΡΝΟΥ ΝΙΚΗΦΟΡΟΥ (Of  King Orophernes Victorious)  rather than “son of Ariarathes,” as Cavafy wrote in the poem. With respect to Cavafy’s textual sources, Pontani mentioned ancient historians (Diodorus, Polybius, Justin) and Auguste Bouché-Leclercq’s Histoire des Séleucides (1913), which however, was published a few years after the poem’s initial composition. Moreover, Pontani cited Hicks’ comments on the coin portrait, in his article on the book of Judith, which he considered to be “in remarkable accordance” with Cavafy’s poem (Pontani, 1991, pp. 58–59). In a later article, Pontani clarified that he thought of Hicks’ text as the most telling example for Cavafy’s poetic use of material from journals and that he considered it a definite source for Cavafy’s poem (pp. 199–200, 247). Several years later, Timos Malanos pointed to Polybius as Cavafy’s source on Orophernes’ life and character, and quoted a relevant passage from Th. Reinach’s Mithridate Eupator, roi de Pont (Reinach, 1890). Malanos made no claim for Cavafy’s visual source, but, like Pontani, considered Bouché-Leclercq’s book on the Seleucids, which makes no mention of the coin, as the “principal source for the poem” and cited a passage from it (Malanos, 1957, pp.  313–314). In the same vein, Kyriakos Delopoulos located Cavafy’s textual sources in a new list of ancient historians (Polybius, Appian, Livy, Justin) and in Bouché-Leclercq’s study, without citing a visual source for the coin portrait (Delopoulos, 1978, p. 75).

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The question of the visual source in which Cavafy saw the coin portrait resurfaced in 1983 with Yiannis Dallas, who located it “most probably in the well-known and authoritative in its time publication by Barclay V. Head, Historia Numorum, Oxford 1886” (1987, p. 52). Dallas noted that “a sample from this book was published in Greek” (in Head, 1898b),8 but stated that “Cavafy naturally appears to be acquainted with the English version of 1886” (p. 52).9 Dallas also mentioned a slightly altered list of ancient historians (Diodorus, Polybius and Aelian) as Cavafy’s sources on the life of Orophernes (pp. 55–56).10 A variant of this argument was later put forward by the Spanish scholar and translator of Cavafy Pedro Badenas de la Pena, according to whom the poet saw the coin “in the collection of Barclay V. Head Coins of the Ancients, London, 1880 (4th ed., 1895).” On the question of textual sources, this commentator followed Pontani, citing ancient historians and Hicks (Badenas de la Pena, 1989, pp.  180–181). Similarly, a recent edition of Cavafy’s poems lists two numismatic editions (Wroth, 1899; Head, 1911) as visual sources and refers to ancient historians and Bouché-Leclercq as sources for Cavafy’s historical narrative (Apostolidis, 2006, pp.  118, 124–125). Dallas’ proposal of the first edition of Head’s Historia Numorum (Head, 1887) as Cavafy’s visual source was recently seconded by P. Roilos, who also refers to ancient historians as textual sources (Polybius, Dio Cassius, Diodorus, Athenaeus) (Roilos, 2009, pp. 190–191). In recent years, several numismatists have joined literature scholars in their attempt to trace the source of the coin portrait in Cavafy’s poem. Harald Salvesen referred to Wroth (1899) (Salvesen, 2002, p. 16), while the curators of the exhibition “MÜNZEN UND POESIE: Der griechische Dichter Konstantinos Kavafis,” which was held in the Coin Cabinet of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wienn (2006), mentioned as the poem’s most likely source the Greek version of Head’s Historia Numorum (Head, 1898a) (Geroulanos et  al. 2006, p.  31). In a more recent study, S.  Geroulanos repeated this proposition and pointed to Diodorus and Polybius as Cavafy’s “sources on Oropherne’s life” (Geroulanos, 2014, p. 122). In fact, Geroulanos is the only commentator to have made a specific argument in support of his choice of a numismatic publication among the many that have been suggested as Cavafy’s visual sources. As he noted, he chose the coin portrait as reproduced by Head (1898a) because in this particular version of the coin Orophernes “appears to be smiling,” as he is presented in Cavafy’s poem, whereas in other numismatic publications he seems “serious and sullen” (Geroulanos, 2014, p. 14).

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Going over this broad overview, we observe that during the last eight decades several scholars and critics have located the book in which Cavafy viewed the coin portrait of Orophernes in one out of six numismatic collections and catalogues (Head, 1887, 1895, 1898a, 1898b, 1911; Wroth, 1899). The poem’s biographical and historical content has been attributed to a range of ancient sources, with occasional supplementary references to A. Bouché-Leclercq’s study (Bouché-Leclercq, 1913) (which was published long after the poem’s first writing and makes no mention of the coin) and also to a passage from a book by Th. Reinach (1890). In addition to these suggestions, Pontani presented Hicks’ article on “Judith and Olophernes” (Hicks, 1885) as a definite source for Cavafy’s aesthetic reading of the portrait. We notice that, minor variations notwithstanding, all these propositions assume that Cavafy’s poem was inspired from his study of numismatic publications and texts by ancient historians. However, none of these arguments is valid. As we will go on to discuss, close scrutiny of the poem’s four published versions between 1916 and 1929 reveals conclusively: (a) that Cavafy did not encounter the portrait of Orophernes in a numismatic publication of any kind; (b) that when he first composed his poem, in 1904, and at least until 1918 or 1919, when “Orophernes” had already been published twice, all that Cavafy had seen or knew about the coin was a reproduction of the portrait on its obverse; (c) that Cavafy was therefore unaware of Hicks’ aesthetic appraisal and of all other comments on the portrait’s value or on the coin’s uniqueness and rarity; and also (d) that the textual source on which Cavafy grounded his poetic narrative of Orophernes’ life was not an array of short excerpts by ancient authors, but a concise recent study by a British historian (although at later stages of composition or revision he may also have consulted Bouché-Leclercq as well as ancient historians, whom his actual source diligently cites).

3  Silver and Gold: Cavafy’s Actual Source None of the many scholars who attempted to trace Cavafy’s visual and textual sources for “Orophernes” during the past eight decades seems to have noticed that the poem’s first published version, in the journal Nea Zoi of Alexandria in June 1916,11 does not begin with the familiar verse “He who appears upon the tetradrachm” but with the phrase “He who appears upon the golden coin,” which is duly repeated in the last stanza (Cavafy, 1915, pp.  124–125).12 Cavafy could not have written—and in

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any case would never have published—such a verse if he had known that the actual coin was made of silver.13 But of course this information is provided in all the numismatic publications which offer a picture of the coin and have been suggested as visual sources for Cavafy’s poem. The same is true of the articles by Newton (1871) and Hicks (1885), of Reinach’s study located by Malanos (see Reinach, 1890, p. 476), and also of other scholarly books that Cavafy might have consulted in the rise of the twentieth century, such as those by Wiegand and Schrader (1904, p. 104) and Reinach (1888, p.  44). We may therefore safely conclude that, at least until 1916, Cavafy was not aware of any of these works and in fact did not have access to any numismatic publications whatsoever. So, where did the poet view the portrait of Orophernes? Clearly, it was in a publication that featured an image of the coin portrait without specifying that it was a silver tetradrachm. The single candidate for this is Edwyn Robert Bevan’s The Ηouse of Seleucus (2 vols, 1902), which Cavafy kept in his personal library (Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, pp. 138, 154) and in which we may safely assume that he encountered the picture of the coin portrait which inspired his poem.14 The British historian illustrated his study by photographed casts of forty-six royal coin portraits, including that of Orophernes.15 But the purpose of these pictures was purely illustrational, so Bevan published only the obverse of each coin without any further detail or description, apart from the kings’ names in captions (in this case, simply “Orophernes of Cappadocia”). If we observe closely the coin portrait’s reproduction in Bevan’s book, we may in fact discern the subtle smile Cavafy mentions in his poem’s second verse, which Geroulanos also detected in the Greek edition of Head (1898a).16 The alluring smile of Orophernes may be seen in both of these books, yet Cavafy could not have seen it in Svoronos, as Geroulanos thought, for then he would know the coin was silver. In this case, Cavafy would also have seen the coin’s reverse, which reveals the usurper’s title as Orophernes Nikephoros, and would not need to improvise the historically unfounded epithet “Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.” In 1958, the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, who was familiar with Bevan’s work from her own historical inquiries, hinted in a note that, apart from the other sources indicated by scholars, Cavafy might also have seen Orophernes’ coin portrait in Bevan’s “very nice book” (Yourcenar, 1958, p. 18n). This casual observation has occasionally been reproduced by commentators, though interestingly almost never by critics writing in Greek (Guépin, 1958, p. 166; Liddell, 1978, p. 161; Frier, 2010, p. 12;

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Haynes, 2010, p. 110; Phillipson, 2013, p. 282).17 Still, as it has neither been analytically investigated nor cross-referenced with Cavafy’s factual error in the poem’s first printed version, Yourcenar’s note has been effectively ignored. It has not led scholars to identify Bevan as Cavafy’s definite primary source nor has it been employed in interpretative discussions of “Orophernes,” compared to Cavafy’s poetic narrative. In fact, as we saw earlier, none of the critics and scholars who have engaged in attempts to trace Cavafy’s sources after 1958 has paid any attention to the hint in Yourcenar’s book, which has been translated in Greek since 1983 (Yourcenar, 1983, p. 27n). As demonstrated above, Cavafy composed “Orophernes” after viewing a reproduction of the coin portrait in Bevan’s book and without possessing any information whatsoever about the coin. He may have chosen to present it as golden simply to stress its value; perhaps he was confused by the golden coins of the Ptolemies. Or maybe he mistook it as part of the notorious treasure of four hundred talents that Orophernes is thought to have deposited in Priene for safekeeping, which some early sources erroneously specified as golden.18 In any case, the coin was presented as golden in the poem’s first printing, in 1916, and remained so in 1917, when “Orophernes” was republished in G. Vrisimitzakis’ book (Vrisimitzakis, 1917, pp. 44–46). Singopoulo clearly read and commented on the same version in 1918 (Savidis, 1987, p. 268). The poem’s corrected version, in which the golden coin is rewritten simply as a tetradrachm, was first printed in the second edition of Vrisimitzakis’ book (1923, pp.  49–50) and then again in 1929, in the journal Alexandrini Techni (Cavafy, 1929, pp. 1–3). Clearly, the poem was corrected sometime between 1918–1919 and 1922–1923, and in a way that did not draw attention to the poet’s earlier factual error (without mentioning the coin as specifically made of silver). In all likelihood, Cavafy’s factual error concerning Orophernes’ coin was pointed out to him by his friend E. J. Forsdyke. As an archaeologist who had been working at the British Museum since 1907 (to become its director in 1936) and was editor of the Journal of Hellenic Studies from 1912 to 1923, Forsdyke would have known that the coin shown in Cavafy’s poem was not and could not have been golden. During the Great War, Forsdyke served as a captain in the British Royal Artillery and met Cavafy while stationed in Egypt. In a letter to the poet, dated January 1919 and kept in the latter’s archive, Forsdyke expresses his affection for Cavafy and notes: “We have much to do together” (Forsdyke, 2019). Forsdyke’s role

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in the development of Cavafy’s archaeological interests (and also as a possible prototype for the poet’s persona as an expert on antiquity) was probably crucial and needs to be further investigated. In this case, apart from pointing at the coin’s erroneous description, the British archaeologist must have also directed the poet’s attention to a numismatic publication, most likely one of the editions of B. V. Head’s Historia Numorum. And yet, ironically, Cavafy had easy access to the coin’s accurate description all along, in fact long before he composed “Orophernes,” although this clearly escaped his attention. The poet’s library still features a copy of the 1897 edition of the Guide to the Galleries of the British Museum (British Museum, 1897). But not knowing that the rare coin was exhibited at the Museum, Cavafy probably never thought to look into this book for information on it. So we may picture him at home, sometime around 1920, casually browsing the Museum’s Guide and turning to a passage on the temple and statue of Athena Polias in Priene, reading that “Under the pedestal were discovered several silver coins bearing the hitherto unknown portrait of the king Orophernes who usurped the throne of Cappadocia, B.C. 158, and who it has been argued (Hicks, Hellenic Journal, vi. p. 268) was probably the original of the Holofemes in the Apocryphal book of Judith” (British Museum, 1897, p. 27; my emphasis). In any event, once he was tipped of his error, Cavafy consulted one of the editions of Historia Numorum (Head, 1887, 1898a, 1911) and went on to revise the poem’s first line. As we will see in a later chapter, in browsing through the same book the poet may also have located the Indo-Greek coins that feature in his 1920 poem “Coins,” which are not included in Head (1895) or in Wroth (1899). Therefore, Cavafy must have become aware of his error in “Orophernes” in 1919 or in early 1920. His readiness to correct the factual inaccuracy and republish his poem confirms Cavafy’s antiquarian commitment to the verification of his factual data, which many critics have long (but falsely) confused with proper historical accuracy. As discussed in this chapter, Cavafy did not see the portrait of Orophernes in a numismatic publication, as we have grown accustomed to believe for many decades, but rather in a British historical study that he owned, which he also studied carefully on other occasions and generally used as a trusted source.19 On the same token, it is also safe to assume that Bevan’s detailed account on Orophernes’ life and times was the main source for Cavafy’s biographical narrative, in lines 5–8 and 18–40 of his poem.20 We may now proceed to consider the implications of this discovery for the interpretation of the double reading played out in the poem, of

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Orophernes as an aesthetic countenance and as a historical agent. In the following chapter we will re-examine Cavafy’s reading of the coin portrait, placing it in its broader cultural and literary contexts. Then, in Chap. 4 we will discuss Cavafy’s revision of Bevan’s account of the life and deeds of the usurper king to determine the method by which the poet transformed a historical narrative into art and to probe the value of his famous claim to be “a poet-historian.”

Notes  1. Such reports were published, for example, in the British journal The Academy (March 1, 1871, p. 155) and in the Boston periodical Littel’s Living Age (issue no. 1400, April 1, 1871, p. 66). A shorter account of the coin’s discovery was published by Newton ten years later, in a volume that presented the excavations of Ionian cities by the Society of Dilettanti (Newton 1881, pp. 25–27).   2. In fact, Orophernes’ coin was “for the first time associating an epithet with the royal name and title” (Lorber and Houghton 2006, p. 58).   3. This assumption has also been supported by more recent scholars; see, for example, Thompson (1982, p. 180).   4. As Haskell comments, coins at this time continued to be “important for the reassurance they could offer that the past recorded in books really had existed and was not a mere series of fictions wrangled over by partisan historians” (Haskell 1993, p. 23).   5. In 1990 the coin of Orophernes was sold at an auction for 100,000 U.S. dollars, which was the highest value ever documented for a coin of its kind (Salvesen 2002, p. 8). The great value of these coins was observed by the Greek poet George Seferis, when he attempted to obtain one of them to offer it to E. M. Forster, in the celebration of his 80th birthday held at King’s College, Cambridge, in January 1959. Eventually Seferis had to settle for a tetradrachm of Demetrius Soter (Thaniel 1994, pp. 15–16).   6. The possible connection of Orophernes to the biblical Olophernes was also noted by John Pentland Mahaffy, in a book Cavafy owned (Mahaffy 1896, p. 496).   7. For the anonymous comment’s attribution to Cavafy see Haas and Pieris (1984, p. 211).  8. This small volume, which Dallas misdated 1892, is a reprint of the Appendix of the Greek edition of Head’s work (1898a), featuring thirtyfive plates with reproductions of ancient coins with an introduction by the Greek numismatist I. N. Svoronos.

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9. Despite mentioning the first edition of the Historia Numorum (Head 1887), which he mistakenly dates 1886, Dallas actually refers to the second and enlarged edition of this work (Head 1911), which, however, was published after the initial composition of the poem, in 1904. In the first edition of Head’s book, reproductions of the coin’s obverse and reverse are accompanied by a short comment (“Silver tetradrachms  – KING OROPHERNES VICTORIUS, Victory with wreath and palm tree”) (Head 1887, p.  632). In the second edition, the coin’s reproduction indeed appears on the page cited by Dallas (Head 1911, p. 750), along with the analytical description that Dallas translates and quotes from (see Dallas 1987, pp. 54–55). 10. Dallas also suggested that the coin “was found in 1870 in Priene, during the excavation of the temple of Athena, with the discovery of the treasure deposited there by the king – four hundred talents! -, which may have been destined for warfare ‘intrigues’” and noted that the coin’s two sides “were first published” in Head 1887 (Dallas, 1987, p. 54). As we saw earlier, the coin was not discovered during the excavation but a year after its completion, whereas the treasure of Orophernes was never found in Priene (as it had probably been returned to him by the Prienians). Also, reproductions of the coin’s two sides were published long before 1887, in Newton (1871). 11. On the date of the issue’s actual publication see Savidis (1966, p. 311). 12. Malanos, who was himself a contributor to Nea Zoi, noted the different version of the poem’s first verse but without drawing on it to establish Cavafy’s source or making any other use of this information. As his comment suggests, Malanos at the time may not have been aware that the poem referred to an actual silver coin: “Doubtless, the change [of the verse] is due to the fact that in the Hellenistic era only the Ptolemies, with their notorious wealth, had issued golden coins” (1957, p.  314). Malanos’ note on the poem’s different early version seems to have escaped the attention of all subsequent critics of the poem and its sources. 13. On Cavafy’s legendary efforts to verify his facts see Kayalis (1998, pp. 88–90). 14. Malanos referred to this work (1957, pp. 265, 280), without implying that Cavafy used it as a source for any of his poems. Tsirkas also emphasized that Bevan’s two-volume History was included in the poet’s library (1982, p. 112). 15. The coin’s obverse was published, together with ten other coin portraits, in an inlaid table between pages 124 and 125 of the work’s second volume (Bevan, 1902, vol. 2, Table 3.1). 16. This may be related to the fact that at least two obverse dies have been noted to exist for this coin (Salvesen, 2002, p. 11). Two strikingly different images of Orophernes from the same coin’s obverse may be viewed

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online at Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, https://ikmk.smb. museum/object?lang=en&id=18200220 and https://ikmk.smb. museum/object?lang=en&id=18258935 (accessed September 2, 2022). 17. Haas mentions Yourcenar’s note on the coin’s possible source in a recent article (2018, p. 112). 18. Two books kept in Cavafy’s library mention the four hundred talents that Orophernes had deposited in Priene (Smith, 1880, vol. 3, p. 21; Mahaffy, 1896, p. 496). The erroneous assumption that the coins were part of this treasure was put forward by Reinach (1888, pp. 45–46). The four hundred talents are identified as golden coins in the entry on Cappadocia in early editions of Encyclopedia Britannica (1797, 1810, 1823 and others) and in other similar sources. 19. On Cavafy’s use of Bevan’s work in composing “Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 BC)” see Haas (2018, pp. 108–127). On the same work’s use in the poem “Philhellene” see Keeley (1996, p. 33). 20. As Yourcenar also suggested in 1958, in the unheeded note mentioned earlier, “apparently, all of the poems in [Cavafy’s] cycle on ‘PtolemiesSeleucids-Greek defeats’” were inspired by Bevan’s book, rather than ancient sources (1958, p. 18n).

References Anon. (1929). Σημειώματα. Alexandrini Techni, 3(5), 196. Apostolidis, R., Apostolidis I. & Apostolidis S. (Eds.). (2006). Κ. Π. Καβάφης, Άπαντα τα δημοσιευμένα ποιήματα. Athens: Ta Nea Ellinika. Badenas de la Pena, P. (Ed. and trans.). (1989). C. P. Cavafis. Poesia Completa (4th ed.). Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Berk, H. J. (2007). 100 Greatest Ancient Coins. Atlanta, GA: Whitman Publishing. Bouché-Leclercq, A. (1913). Histoire des Séleucides (323-64 avant J.-C.) (v. 1-2). Paris: E. Leroux. Brand, V. (Ed.). (1998). The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age. Oxford: Oxbow. British Museum (1897). A Guide to the Exhibition Galleries of the British Museum (Bloomsbury) with Maps and Plans (revised to November, 1897). London: Trustees of the British Museum. Carter, J.  C. (1983) The Sculpture of the Sanctuary of Athena Polias at Priene. London: Society of Antiquaries & British Museum. Cavafy, C. P. (1915). Οροφέρνης. Nea Zoi (Alexandria), 10(3–4), 124–125. Cavafy, C. P. (1929). Οροφέρνης, Alexandrini Techni, 3(1), 1–3. Cavafy, C. P. (1984). Ερωτικά ποιήματα. Athens: Erato. Cavafy, C. P. (2003). 154 Poems. Trans. by E. Sachperoglou. Athens. Corley, J. (2012). Imitation of Septuagintal Narrative and Greek Historiography in the Portrait of Holofernes. In G. Xeravits (Ed.), A Pious Seductress: Studies in the Book of Judith (pp. 22-54). Berlin: de Gruyter.

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Dallas, Y. (1987). Σπουδές στον Καβάφη. Athens: Kedros. Delopoulos, K. (1978). Καβάφη ιστορικά και άλλα πρόσωπα (2nd ed.). Athens: ELIA. Facella, M. (2013). Orophernes of Cappadocia. In R. S. Bagnall et al (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (pp. 4940–4941). Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Forsdyke, E. J. (2019). Letter by E. J. Forsdyke to Cavafy. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF02-­S01-­SS01-­F18-­SF003-­ 0044 Frier, B. W. (2010). Making History Personal: Constantine Cavafy and the Rise of Rome. Cavafy Forum, University of Michigan Department of Modern Greek. https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/modgreek-­a ssets/modgreek-­docs/ CPC_Frier_Makinghistorypersonal.pdf. Geroulanos, S. (2014). Απόκρυφη Ιστορία. Athens: Militos. Geroulanos S., Dembski, G. & Penna, V. (2006). Münzen und Poesie: der griechische Dichter Konstantinos Kavafis. Eine Ausstellung des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, 27. Nov. 2006 bis 30. März 2007. Wien: Kunsthistorisches Museum. Guépin, J. P. (1958). Verder nog dan Phraata, de bronnen van twee gedichten van Kavafis. Hermeneus 29(11), 163–176. Haas, D. (2018). Κ. Π. Καβάφης: Αυτοσχόλια στα ποιήματα ‘Δημητρίου Σωτήρος (162-150 π.Χ.)’ και ‘Η Δυσαρέσκεια του Σελευκίδου’. Kondiloforos, 16, 97–140. Haas, D., & Pieris, M. (1984). Βιβλιογραφικός Οδηγός στα 154 ποιήματα του Καβάφη. Athens: Ermis. Habicht, C. (2006). The Hellenistic Monarchies: Selected Papers. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Haskell, F. (1993). History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Haynes, K. (2010). Modernism. In C. W. Kallendorf (Ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition (pp. 101-114). Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Head, B. V. (1887). Historia Numorum: A Manual of Greek Numismatics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Head, B. V. (1895). A Guide to the Principal Gold and Silver Coins of the Ancients: From circa B.C. 700 to A.D. 1 (4th ed.). London: British Museum, Department of Coins and Medals. Head, B. V. (1898a). Ιστορία των νομισμάτων: Ήτοι εγχειρίδιον ελληνικής νομισματικής (Ed. and trans. by I. N. Svoronos). Athens. Head, B.  V. (1898b). Λεύκωμα αρχαίων ελληνικών νομισμάτων: τριάκοντα πέντε φωτοτυπικοί πίνακες μετ’ επεξηγηματικού κειμένου (Ed. by I. N. Svoronos). Athens. Head, B. V. (1911). Historia Numorum. A Manual of Greek Numismatics (New and enlarged edition, by B. V. Head, assisted by G. F. Hill, George Macdonald, and Warwick Wroth). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hicks, E.  L. (1885). Judith and Holofernes, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 6, 261–274.

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Hill, G. F. (1922). A Guide to the Department of Coins and Medals in the British Museum (3rd ed). London: Trustees of the British Museum. Jenkins, I. (2007). Greek Architecture and Its Sculpture. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Jong, F.A., de (1999). Khvarenah. In K. van den Toorn, B. Becking and P. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (2nd ed., pp. 481-483). Leiden: Brill. Jusdanis, G. (1987). The Poetics of Cavafy. Textualism, Eroticism, History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Karampini-Iatrou, M. (2003). H Bιβλιοθήκη Κ.Π. Καβάφη. Athens: Ermis. Kayalis, T. (1998). ‘Εγώ είμαι ποιητής ιστορικός’: Ο Καβάφης και ο μοντερνισμός. Poiisi, 12, 77–119. Keeley, E. (1996). Cavafy’s Alexandria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kelly, J. M. (2010). The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment. New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Kostiou, K. (2005). Ο Οροφέρνης, οι Λακεδαιμόνιοι και ο αμφίθυμος αφηγητής. In M. Mike et al (Eds.), Ο λόγος της παρουσίας: τιμητικός τόμος για τον Παν. Μουλλά (pp. 143-152). Athens: Sokolis. Kraay, C. M., Thompson M. & Mørkholm, O. (Eds.). (1973). An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (Vol. 2). New York: American Numismatic Society. Liddell, R. (1978). Cavafy. New York: Quokka Pocket Books. Lorber, C. C., & Houghton, A. (2006), Cappadocian tetradrachms in the name of Antiochus VII. Numismatic Chronicle, 166, 49–97. Mackridge, P. (2007). Introduction to C. P. Cavafy. In C. P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems (Trans. by E.  Sachperoglou, pp. xi–xxxiii). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mahaffy J. P. (1896). Greek life and thought, from the age of Alexander to the Roman conquest (2nd ed.). London & New York: Macmillan. Malanos, T. (1957). Ο ποιητής Κ. Π. Καβάφης. Ο άνθρωπος και το έργο του. Athens: Difros. Mørkholm, O, Grierson, P., & Westermark, U. (1991), Early Hellenistic coinage : from the accession of Alexander to the Peace of Apamea (336-188 B.C.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newton, C.  T. (1871). On an inedited tetradrachm of Orophernes II, King of Cappadocia. The Numismatic Chronicle, and Journal of the Numismatic Society (New Series), Vol. XI, 19–27. Newton, C. T. (1881). History of Priene. Society of Dilettanti, Antiquities of Ionia. Part the fourth (pp. 21-27). London: The Society of Dilettanti. Pentin, H. (1908). The Apocrypha in English Literature. Judith. London: Samuel Bagster & Sons.

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Phillipson, J. (2013). C.  P. Cavafy: Historical Poems. A Verse Translation with Commentaries. Bloomington, IN.: Author House. Pontani, F.  M. (1991). Επτά δοκίμια και μελετήματα για τον Καβάφη 1936–1974. Athens: MIET. Reinach, T. (1888). Numismatique ancienne: trois royaumes de l’Asie Mineure, Cappadoce—Bithynie—Pont. Paris: C. Rollin et Feuardent. Reinach, T. (1890). Mithridate Eupator, roi de Pont. Paris: Firmin-Didot. Richter, G.  M. A. (1965). The Portraits of the Greeks (Vol. 3). London: Phaidon Press. Roilos, P. (2009). C. P. Cavafy. The Economics of Metonymy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Salvesen, H. (2002). The Tetradrachm of Orophernes. Nomismatika Khronika, 21, 8–16. Savidis, G.  P. (1966). Οι καβαφικές εκδόσεις (1891–1932). Περιγραφή και σχόλιο. Βιβλιογραφική μελέτη. Athens: Tachidromos. Savidis, G. P. (1985). Mικρά καβαφικά, A’. Athens: Ermis. Savidis, G. P. (1987). Μικρά καβαφικά, Β’. Athens: Ermis. Sayles, W.  G. (2007). Ancient Coin Collecting II: Numismatic Art of the Greek World (2nd ed.). Iola, WI.: Krause Publications. Smith, W. (1880). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (Vols. 1-3). London: John Murray. Steyn, G. J. (2008). ‘Beautiful but tough’. A comparison of LXX Esther, Judith and Susanna. Journal for Semitics/Tydskrif Vir Semitistiek, 17(1), 156–201. Thaniel, G. (1994). Seferis and Friends (ed. by Ed Phinney). Stratford, ON: The Mercury Press. Thompson, H. A. (1982). Architecture as a medium of public relations among the successors of Alexander. Studies in the History of Art, v. 10, 172–189. Thonemann, P. (2016). The Hellenistic Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsirkas, S. (1982). Ο πολιτικός Καβάφης (4th ed.). Athens: Kedros. Vrisimitzakis, G. (1917). Το έργο του Κ. Π. Καβάφη. Από τα ποιήματα του Κ. Π. Καβάφη. Alexandria. Vrisimitzakis, G. (1923). Το έργο του Κ. Π. Καβάφη. Από τα ποιήματα του Κ. Π. Καβάφη (2nd ed.). Alexandria. Wiegand, T., and Schrader, H. (1904). Priene. Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen und Untersuchungen in den Jahren 1895 – 1898. Berlin: Reimer. Wroth, W. W. (1899). Catalogue of the Greek coins of Galatia, Cappadocia, and Syria. London: Trustees of the British Museum. Yourcenar, M. (1958). Présentation critique de Constantin Cavafy, 1863–1933. Paris: Gallimard. Yourcenar, M. (1983). Κριτική παρουσίαση του Κωνσταντίνου Καβάφη (trans. by G. P. Savidis). Athens: Hatzinikoli, 1983.

CHAPTER 3

How to Read an Ancient Coin in the Early 1900s

Having established the visual source of Cavafy’s “Orophernes” in the previous chapter, we are in a better position to appreciate the poet’s aesthetic gaze as manifest in his reading of the coin portrait. As previously discussed, the artistic value of this particular portrait has been unequivocally praised by commentators, from its initial presentation in Newton’s article (1871) to recent years (Salvesen, 1991, pp. 6–8). But Cavafy clearly had no access to the portrait’s earlier aesthetic appreciations, nor was he aware of the coin’s rarity. All the poet had seen was a significantly downsized image of the coin’s obverse, along with ten more portraits from coins of the same period, printed on a plate that was inserted in a historical study. And yet his eye was able to discern in this small image a whole range of aesthetic qualities: allure, radiance, grace, aesthetic memory and more. But a gaze, even when unmediated, can never escape its moment; the ways in which we “look at, or concentrate on anything have a deeply historical character” (Crary, 1999, p.  1). Cavafy certainly took in the coin portrait from his own perspective, which, however, was inscribed in the possibilities and contingencies of his time. The poet’s reading may be further elucidated once it is placed in the broader framework of cultural, critical and artistic views on ancient portrait coins that circulated in the early twentieth century. In Cavafy’s time, such notions were cultivated in academic fora but also disseminated through articles in newspapers and periodicals, as ancient coins were very popular among their readers. They were widely perceived as a special and privileged means of connection with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Kayalis, Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7_3

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antiquity and also used as standard illustrations to facilitate the teaching of ancient history. So, apart from his general intake of relevant information through various publications, Cavafy probably came across some of the fundamental notions concerning the reception of ancient coins, along with a bundle of antiquarian concepts, as a student in England between 1872 and 1877 (Daskalopoulos and Stassinopoulou, 2013, pp.  20–21; Jeffreys, 2015, p. 204n). But how was an ancient coin portrait read in the late nineteenth century? Which theoretical assumptions guided the eyes of its viewers and which of its features were highlighted in aesthetic appraisals, stimulating the creative imagination? Also, how did scholars and other commentators on ancient coins deal with the frequent discrepancies between a historical figure’s character, as known from ancient textual sources, and the aesthetic features of his or her depiction on a coin portrait (which is also a central antinomy posed by Cavafy’s poem)? In order to respond to these questions and to locate Cavafy’s reading of Orophernes’ portrait in its historical specificity, we need to review briefly some of the fundamental concepts guiding the aesthetic and cultural reception of coin portraits in the late nineteenth century.

1   Perceptions of Coin Portraits, from Physiognomy to Art History Images on ancient coins, particularly those of Roman emperors and other rulers, became a topic of great interest in the Renaissance, together with the growth of coin collections among European aristocratic elites from the fifteenth century onward (Callataÿ, 2012, p. 235). In the mid-fourteenth century, Petrarch was already arguing that the “portrait gallery” of coins from imperial Rome constituted a treasure trove of moral messages, which presented modern noblemen with worthy examples from their “illustrious predecessors” (Weiss, 1968, p. 177). The antiquarian viewpoint that gradually emerged from this perception considered history “as a series of images or ‘figures’ rather than texts” (Cunnally, 1999, p.  14; Haskell, 1993, p. 23). Consequently, early interest in ancient coins focused on the portraits of heroes and rulers, which since the early sixteenth century were also available in printed collections, and was guided by the perception of history as “philosophy that teaches through examples” (Rosenberg, 1985, p.  176).1 These portraits were thought to codify ethical premises that

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could be intuitively recognized and used for educational purposes. Antiquarians tended to conceptualize coins and other durable artifacts “as an objective and therefore indispensable form of evidence,” which “seemed to promise unmediated access to the past” (Kalter, 2012, p. 176). These notions would eventually forge a strong and lasting conviction in the authenticity and reliability of ancient coins as historical evidence and in their estimation as superior to written sources. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the physiognomic approach known from antiquity (Burke, 2003, pp. 276–277) would be revived in the context of antiquarianism. Assisted by specially designed publications, early modern physiognomists would examine a historical figure’s biographical data vis-à-vis his or her coin portrait, seeking to corroborate the virtues or flaws of their character. Andrea Fulvio’s Illustrium imagines (Rome, 1517), for example, offered images of important figures from Rome, Byzantium and the Middle Ages (mainly emperors and their wives) from over two  hundred coin portraits, juxtaposed to short texts on their lives and character traits. Physiognomic perceptions of coins were later expressed by Joseph Addison in his “Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals” (1721), where the protagonist Philander defended ancient coins as historically reliable and morally edifying, impressing his initially  skeptical dinner guests: You have shown us all conditions, sexes, and ages, emperors and empresses, men and children, gods and wrestlers. Nay you have conjured up persons that exist nowhere else but on old coins, and have made our passions, and virtues, and vices visible. I could never have thought that a cabinet of medals had been so well peopled. (Addison, 1830, pp. 65–66)

Although antiquarian perceptions of ancient coin portraits were never eradicated and may still be traced among popular notions in our days, during the eighteenth century they began to give way to scientific inquiries inspired by the work of early systematic numismatists, like Joseph Hilarius Eckhel. Later on, along with their recognition as a field of study, ancient coins would also attract the interest of art historians. A seminal contribution to this effect was Karl Otfried Müller’s Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst (1848), in which coins were compared to other manifestations of ancient art in an attempt to discern their stylistic affinities (Elkins, 2009, p. 35). In Victorian England, this new approach was championed by John Ruskin, the most important art critic of his time, who in his later years also

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emerged as “one of the great numismatists” (Shell, 1993, p. 70). A systematic coin collector himself, mentor and avid supporter of British Museum archaeologists and numismatists and a frequent visitor of the Museum’s Coin Room (Cook, 1905, lv; Collingwood, 1893, p.  87), Ruskin often made use of coins to illustrate aspects of ancient Greek art and history (Cook, 1905, xxxix, lv). The British Museum promoted substantially the study of ancient coins and its Department of Coins and Medals, founded in 1860, was home to “a group of first-rate numismatists [who] established a venerable tradition in the field of ancient numismatics” (Clain-Stefanelli, 1965, p. 43). These pioneers included R. S. Poole, B.  V. Head, Percy Gardner, Warwick Wroth and George Francis Hill (Burnett, 2011, pp. 4–5). In a lecture at the Royal Institution in 1864, inspired by Müller’s groundbreaking work, Poole observed that ancient Greek coins had until then never been studied “as documents in the history of art” and proposed a new method for their classification by local schools, based on their shared stylistic features with works of ancient sculpture, painting and jewelry (Poole, 1864, p.  236; Elkins, 2009, pp. 35–36). The inclusion of ancient coins in the trajectory of art history in the second half of the nineteenth century marks a significant paradigm shift in their reception. Ancient coins were now recognized as “original works of art, not copies, as are most of the extant sculptures” (Poole, 1880, iii) and at the same time as “state-monuments” in broad circulation (Poole, 1861, p. 578). In this ambiance, along with attention to their stylistic features and artistic value, we notice the emergence of early reflections on the coin portraits’ aesthetic, ideological and political expediencies. But the shift in the reception of ancient coins was not limited to the new discourse adopted by scholars and researchers. Alongside the emergence of numismatics as a field of study, a set of new cultural appropriations of ancient coins, including their handling as subject matter in literary texts, enriched their reception with a whole new set of associations and connections.

2  Cultural Values and Literary Motifs In the second half of the nineteenth century, largely due to the massive excavations that had been recently carried out or were still in progress, the number and variety of available ancient coins saw a dramatic increase. Moreover, coins were no longer kept exclusively in private collections, but were increasingly featured in organized museums that were open to the

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public, in which coins were used both for exhibition and research purposes; they were classified, compared, framed with scholarly and critical commentaries and published. Technology also presented new affordances; the constantly evolving methods of photographic reproduction and corresponding developments in printing provided accurate replicas that were far more vivid than pictures of ancient reliefs or sculptures and helped establish coins as privileged classroom material. Other factors were also at play. The frequency with which ancient coins, especially Roman, were accidentally discovered by individuals in the countryside but also in various cities of Europe; the ease of obtaining such specimens (authentic, forged or copies), which were also preferred souvenirs by the growing numbers of Western tourists in the south-eastern Mediterranean; the spread of personal coin collections, even among children; the small size of the coins, compared to other sculptural forms, and the immediacy of their physical impact; the haptic illusion that holding a coin in one’s hand brings one directly in contact with antiquity—all these parameters and more contributed to the emergence of a radically new condition of intimacy with ancient coins which, as expected, was also manifest in literary texts. Walter Pater’s incomplete imaginary portrait entitled “An English Poet” (1878; Pater, 2009, pp.  21–37), for example, and also Thomas Hardy’s sonnet “In the Old Theatre, Fiesole” (1887; Hardy, 1979, p.  102), deal with accidental discoveries of Roman coins, in Normandy and in Dorset respectively. In Hardy’s poem, another coin is offered for sale to the narrator by a child in modern Italy, while in the sonnet “On seeing a little child spin a coin of Alexander the Great” by Charles Tennyson Turner (1988, p.  85) a child is shown playing with a coin that depicts Alexander as the son of Zeus Ammon (see Cunningham, 2010, p. 515). The poem “With a Coin from Syracuse” by the Irish poet Oliver St John Gogarty refers to a coin of the Arethusa Fountain, which Gogarty had actually acquired during a visit to Sicily (Gogarty, 1954, p. 153). On the other hand, the British author and critic Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Viola Paget), who as a child had searched for ancient coins with other children in the neighborhoods of Rome, published at the age of fourteen a relevant novella in French at a Lausanne journal. This piece, entitled Les Aventures d’une Pièce de Monnaie (1870), has gained interest in recent years as an early example of “object biography”; it is “an imaginary portrait of a Victorian numismatist’s antique coin, a biography of an object’s creation

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and travels before it came to lie still in a collection” (Colby, 2003, pp. 242–243; Mahoney, 2006, p. 40). As we saw earlier, the inscription of coin portraits in the European bourgeois imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the particular charm they evoked and the emotional and biographical values with which they were invested, were in line with concurrent scientific and technological developments (including photography and the advancement of mechanical copying methods), and with the cultural radiance of exhibitions in the great metropolitan museums. They were also in line with the spread of collecting and other antiquarian social practices through which ancient coins became widely recognized as the most authentic and, at the same time, most familiar and endearing symbolic rendering of antiquity. In the context of this rediscovery of ancient coins, new perceptions were intermingled and sometimes hybridized with old antiquarian notions, which survived from the remote past. Expositions and arguments by early numismatists and other writers and commentators allow us to recover some of the central cultural values by which ancient coin portraits were invested with meaning and appreciated in the late nineteenth century. These notions may be schematically arranged in five broad thematic categories. Unearthing the Forgotten Past As late nineteenth-century commentators often noticed, some coins are the only available testimonies on historical figures, cities, heroes or deities of Greek antiquity. Coins thus fill the gaps in history, especially with regard to the “obscurer times, and forgotten rulers” of the distant past (Poole, 1861, p. 578). This is a favorite topic for vivid antiquarian ruminations and for reiterations of Joseph Addison’s arguments from the early eighteenth century. The Hellenistic age, in particular, which seemed to be “so intensely modern,” was thought to have perished for us almost as completely as some Spanish galleon laden with the spoils of America, which has sunk in mid ocean. And our modern studies of epigraphy and numismatics may be compared to divers sent down to rescue fragment by fragment such remains, consisting mainly of the pure gold that will not corrode or tarnish, as may yet be recovered. (Gardner, 1887, p. 10)

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Coins were also perceived as a far more reliable source of information than textual sources. Contrary to “the disputed statements of writers, often describing events that happened long before their days” (Poole, 1861, p. 578), ancient coins provide an “authentic record” (Poole, 1885, p. 1) and possess “the unquestionable authority of contemporary state-­ monuments” (Poole, 1861, p. 578). Viewed as testimonies that preserve precious traces of an otherwise obliterated past, ancient coins frequently furnish poets with excuses for elegiac reflection on the grandeur and the inevitable decay and annihilation of beauty and power (a theme that was particularly appealing in the context of British imperialism). This is, for example, the main function of coins in the sonnet “Médaille antique” by José-Maria de Heredia (1893; 1942, p. 58), to which Cavafy’s coin poems have sometimes been related (Politou-Marmarinou, 1984, p. 329; Dallas, 2000, p. 45), and in some of the texts previously mentioned here, as “In the Old Theater, Fiesole” by Thomas Hardy and “On seeing a little child spin a coin of Alexander the Great” by Charles Tennyson Turner. A Sense of Intimacy Along with their antiquarian perception as fragments from the distant and obliterated past, ancient coin portraits were also frequently viewed as identical to present-day human figures and types and so coins were completely detached from their historical origins and social functions. In this case, which is also pertinent to the reading of the coin portrait in Cavafy’s “Orophernes,” the modern viewer of the ancient artifact is “not interested in what it has meant or done for all the years between its inception and the now,” but only “in what the object means in the precise moment of encounter” (Zimmerman, 2012, p. 70). Profiles engraved on coins usually appear more familiar than statues and other forms of ancient art, offering the illusion of a more direct and almost experiential connection to antiquity. This sense of intimacy is further enhanced by comparisons of coin depictions of kings, deities or nymphs, to various modern individuals. Ruskin, for example, in a lecture at the University of Oxford, compared the renderings of mythical female figures on ancient coins to present-day English girls, arguing that the latter surpass in beauty some of the most successful idealizations of the ancient world: But will you look again at the series of coins of the best time of Greek art, which I have just set before you? Are any of these goddesses or nymphs very

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beautiful? Certainly the Junos are not. Certainly the Demeters are not. The Siren, and Arethusa, have well-formed and regular features; but I am quite sure that if you look at them without prejudice, you will think neither reaches even the average standard of pretty English girls. (1905, pp. 341–342)

Similarly, in Oliver Gogarty’s “With a Coin from Syracuse,” the famous coin portrait of Arethusa Fountain is described in detail and found inferior to the even more beautiful features of the speaker’s Irish lover, to whom the poem is addressed (1954, p. 153). But sometimes the affinity of ancient coin portraits to the features of modern individuals inspires desire for the ancient portrait itself, suggesting a motif of agalmatophilia (see Blanchard, 2010, p. 30). This is the case with Walter Pater’s “An English Poet,” the incomplete imaginary portrait he composed in 1878 but was first published in 1931, long after its author’s death (Pater, 2009, pp.  21–37). In this story, a young Englishwoman married to a plain French farmer in Normandy finds in her field “a golden Roman coin with a clear high profile on it, which looked to her as might an image of immortal youth” and is thereby immersed in daydreams (p. 23). The village pastor to whom she takes the coin chastises her, speaking of the ancient pagans and their dark longings for “the perishable beauty of the body.” But soon afterwards the “bright figure” of an aristocratic young man from Paris appeared on an afternoon “and leaned upon the gate, a slim figure with delicate hands and golden hair growing crisply half down his forehead, and just such a profile as that on the golden medal” (p. 24). The strange visitor returns and then disappears forever, leaving the woman “with nothing but the ashes of her fire, and the medal with the old Pagan face” (p.  25). Not long after that, the enamored woman gives birth to a languid son, who grew up to become an English poet and eventually found his own muse in the face of a beautiful young man. Pater’s manuscript stops abruptly at the point where the young poet comes to realize his feelings for his coveted friend and is sexually aroused. As critics have speculated, this overly revealing and erotically charged plot twist was probably the reason why Pater left his semi-autobiographical story unfinished (Østermark-Johansen, 2011, pp.  280–281; Fontana, 1996, p. 15).

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Authentic Art by Obscure Artists As many commentators noted, ancient coins are authentic and original works. They are not copies “like the Latin translations of Greek originals” available in sculpture; moreover, they are intact and not altered by restorations (Poole, 1885, p. 3; Walters, 1906, p. 223). Coins reflect the handwork of independent craftsmen, some of whom were “artists of the highest order” and famous well beyond the borders of their towns. Most of these artists, however, are unknown to us, since “not a single ancient writer has thought of recording the name of any one of these great masters of the art of engraving” (Head, 1885, pp. 36, 37–38). By virtue of this argument, coins emerge as “monuments of the unknown figures” of the ancient world in two ways—with respect to some of the historical characters they depict and also to the invisible artists who produced them. The Question of Verisimilitude The shift of attention toward the stylistic elements of coin portraits and to their function as state monuments undermined their antiquarian perception as authentic and reliable images of ancient historical figures. A major break to this effect was the distinction between “idealistic” and “realistic” coin portraits that was introduced in the late nineteenth century and is still operative today. Idealistic portraits present Hellenistic rulers as beautiful young gods or heroes; the realistic style, on the other hand, depicts them as rather ugly. Realism was apparently introduced in coin portraiture with the depiction of the eunuch Philetaerus, founder of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon, of which B. V. Head wrote with gusto: “Here, at last, is realism pure and simple. The huge fat face and vast expanse of cheek and lower jaw carry conviction to our minds that this is indeed a living portrait” (1885, p. 31). Portraits in the same category include those of Euthydemus of Bactria and his descendants and of Pharnaces II of Pontus, which is considered as “one of the least flattering human representations ever made” (Morkholm, 1991, p.  28). In the context of late nineteenth-­ century numismatics, therefore, a coin portrait like that of Orophernes would be instantly recognized as a prime example of idealistic portraiture rather than an accurate depiction of the historical figure’s actual features, as it is perceived in Cavafy’s antiquarian reading.

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Aesthetic Features and Moral Judgment It is clear to us today that “any attempt at establishing the character of a ruler from his coin portraits must be regarded with skepticism. More often than not, it only means that preconceived ideas, whether modern or ancient, are read into the representation” (Morkholm, 1991, p.  28; Haskell, 1993, pp.  66, 151). However, the transfer between aesthetic characteristics and moral values ​​has been central to the reading of coin portraits for centuries. As Joseph Addison expressed this prevailing perspective in 1721: You here see the Alexanders, Caesars, Pompeys, Trajans, and the whole catalogue of heroes, who have many of them so distinguished themselves from the rest of mankind that we almost look upon them as another species. It is an agreeable amusement to compare in our own thoughts the face of a great man with the character that authors have given us of him, and to try if we can find out in his looks and features either the haughty, cruel, or merciful temper that discovers itself in the history of his actions. (Addison, 1830, p. 63)

Despite the recognition of ancient coins as art objects with distinct stylistic features, the antiquarian view of coin portraits as authentic reflections of countenances and values continued to have a strong impact in the thinking of late nineteenth-century numismatists. As Poole wrote, through coins “we have not merely the satisfaction of knowing the faces of some of the chief characters of antiquity, but we can form clearer ideas of their mental and moral qualities” (1861, p. 578). The portrait of Artaxerxes II Mnemon, for example, “does not show indications of vigour or resolution” and is “rather the head of a philosopher than an administrator or conqueror,” thus confirming “what history tells us of this king” (p. 577). Similarly, B. V. Head would refer to Cleopatra’s coin portrait as proof that her “irresistible charm lay rather in her mental qualities and alluring manner, than in any mere outward beauty” (1885, p. 33). This approach is also reflected in literature, as for example in the sonnet “Médaille” by José-Maria de Heredia (1893; 1942, p. 40), whose speaker observes the famous portrait medals of the Rimini condottiero Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and his beloved Isotta degli Atti and imparts antiquarian ruminations on their personalities. Readings of Hellenistic coins were further complicated by the fact that the figures depicted on them are seldom commendable as moral exempla.

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This problem arises, for instance, in the discussion around Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus (the king of the poet Phernazes, in Cavafy’s poem “Dareios”), who was idealistically portrayed on a famous tetradrachm. Commenting on this coin, Poole referred to the “inhuman and unscrupulous” king, whose “thoroughly Asiatic cruelty makes it impossible for us to feel pity as we read of his disasters.” Yet he also felt obliged to remark that Mithridates’ portrait “is one of the most remarkable that antiquity affords” and “an extremely fine work,” concluding that this coin portrait “shows in full exercise the fire, energy, and daring, that are the key to the career of the King of Pontus, and is quite unrivalled by the medallic portraits of modern times” (1861, p.  577). Poole’s attempt to reconcile a moralistic reading of history with his appreciation of the coin as a fine artifact was targeted by John Ruskin when he commented on the same coin a few years later, in his famous lectures at Oxford in 1870: The third coin will, I think, at once strike you by what we moderns should call its “vigour of character.” You may observe also that the features are finished with great care and subtlety, but at the cost of simplicity and breadth. But the essential difference between it and the central art, is its disorder in design—you see the locks of hair cannot be counted any longer—they are entirely dishevelled and irregular. […] The effort at portraiture is good for art if the men to be portrayed are good men, not otherwise. In the instance before you, the head is that of Mithridates VI. of Pontus, who had, indeed, the good qualities of being a linguist and a patron of the arts; but, as you will remember, murdered, according to report, his mother, certainly his brother, certainly his wives and sisters, I have not counted how many of his children, and from a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand persons besides; these last in a single day’s massacre. The effort to represent this kind of person is not by any means a method of study from life ultimately beneficial to art. (Ruskin, 1905, p. 281)

Ruskin’s argument suggests that the coin portrait of a disgraceful king could never be aesthetically perfect. This view of coin portraiture, in which aesthetic quality is heavily predetermined by the moral character of the portrait’s subject, recalls Ruskin’s earlier comments in Modern Painters, where he judged artistic greatness or failure by the artist’s choice of subject rather than by his representation of it: “It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is to be finally

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determined” (Ruskin, 1903, p. 88). And elsewhere: the artist “who represents brutalities and vices (for delight in them, and not for rebuke of them), [is] of no rank at all, or rather of a negative rank, holding a certain order in the abyss” (Ruskin, 1904, p.  49). Cavafy was aware of these remarks and reacted to them in his reader’s comments on Ruskin, written between 1893 and 1896. As the poet claimed, “Many great works of art were achieved singularly by the manner of representation or speech. Form […] may possess beauty independent from the Idea, and so liberated it offers to the observer or the reader stimuli for assumptions and reveries. Having no fixed ideas of its own, it evokes ideas.” Cavafy also noted that “the true artist is not obliged to choose, as the mythical figure, between Virtue and Vice […]; but they will both serve him and he will be equally fond of them both” (in Tsirkas, 1982, pp. 228, 238. My translation). Bearing the strong influence of Ruskin’s moralism, while also trying to avoid the artistic depreciation of Hellenistic coin portraits to which it inevitably led, Victorian commentators looked for an idiom that would allow some recognition of artistic value even in portraits of figures whom ancient historical sources depict as scoundrels.2 This effort is manifest, among other examples, in the commentary on Orophernes’ coin portrait offered in 1885 by E. L. Hicks, an epigraphist at the British Museum and a friend of Ruskin’s (Neville, 1998, pp.  1–2, 16, 29, 172). As discussed in the previous chapter, Hicks’ aesthetic description of this coin portrait was part of his article on Judith and Holofernes and has been erroneously identified as a definite source of Cavafy’s poem by Filippo Maria Pontani (1991, pp. 58–59, 199–200, 247): Certainly Polybius, who knew the facts, described the character of Orophernes in no pleasing terms. Brought up in Ionia, an exile and a pretender, he early developed the vices of an adventurer. In public life he was unscrupulous; as a ruler, selfish and extortionate; in private, a hard drinker. His portrait on the coins is finely modelled, and does not conflict with this view of his character. It is the portrait of a handsome, clever, and capable man, young in years, but not in experience of the world. His chin is unbearded, but his forehead is lined with care. The fine profile bespeaks a resolute will and energetic purpose. The nostril is delicately moulded, and, like the mouth, suggests a nature sensitive to pleasure though refined in taste; but the lower lip has a sensual expression, and there is a certain restlessness and impatience marked upon the whole face, which suits well with his chequered career. (Hicks, 1885, p. 271)

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Hicks’ argument begins with a presentation of Orophernes’ character, which he proceeds to verify in the course of his aesthetic analysis of the coin portrait. Confirming that the portrait’s aesthetic features closely reflect the account by Polybius, Hicks essentially reads it as an allegorical image. In this way, the coin as material evidence is fully subjected to the ancient textual testimony, but in a way that allows recognition of its aesthetic quality and perhaps a hint at the charm with which it renders the subject’s moral decline. This is indeed a masterful rhetorical attempt to reconcile the conflicting priorities of Victorian readings of Hellenistic coin portraits, i.e. historical moralism vs aesthetic appreciation. But despite Pontani’s claim that this commentary is “in remarkable accordance” with Cavafy’s reading (1991, pp. 58–59), Hicks’ account, as we will discuss at length later on, has little in common with what the poet’s gaze looked for and found in the portrait of Orophernes.

3  Cavafy Reads a Coin Portrait Cavafy was familiar with the presence of compering discourses in readings of Hellenistic coin portraits, which usually tended to balance aesthetic descriptions with a rather heavy dose of moralism. One such instance he had studied attentively was a description of the coin portrait of Ptolemy I Soter by the Irish classicist John Pentland Mahaffy. In a passage Cavafy carefully pencil-marked on his copy of Mahaffy’s The Empire of the Ptolemies that has survived in his library, the author acknowledged that Ptolemy’s idealistic coin portraits are not reliable as evidence for the king’s actual appearance. Still, he could not resist drawing conclusions about Ptolemy’s character from them: We have no portrait of him, either literary or artistic, except upon his coins […]. His portraits on Ptolemaic coins are probably somewhat idealized and therefore not trustworthy in giving us an accurate reproduction of his countenance. Yet the face, even so, is not handsome, in the sense that the Alexander-type on the coins of the same king are, which is more like a god or hero than an actual man. Ptolemy’s features on coins are very marked, and the face is not classical in its features. The forehead is remarkably fleshy over the eyes; the eyebrows arched; the nose is too short, but thick and with very wide nostrils. The mouth is firm and the chin rather prominent. If asked to guess his character from these coins, I should say that energy and kindness are the most prominently indicated qualities. (Mahaffy, 1895, pp. 107–108)

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Apart from being aware of the tension between aesthetic appreciation and historical moralism, to which  his “Orophernes” clearly responds, Cavafy was also familiar with several of the major themes and motifs associated with coin portraits in his time, some of which are implied  in his work. The poem certainly suggests a perception of the coin as a memorial imprint, which uniquely preserves the trace of a human figure from “a whole lost civilization” (Ricks, 2003, p. 137). As evident in its speaker’s emotionally charged tone, it also appears to recognize Orophernes’ portrait as familiar and perhaps reminiscent of faces one could see in the streets of a modern city. But Cavafy’s poem is far more intricately and subtly related to cultural numismatic insights of its time. We may now attempt to contextualize the poet’s reading, exploring the ways in which he appropriated and revised elements from available discourses to shape his own, radically aestheticized way of looking at Orophernes. In Cavafy’s poem, the ancient tetradrachm is not treated as a material object, with attention to its historical course or to its monetary value and social circulation, but singularly as a surface that preserved the image of a beautiful face. This was, also, the only aspect of the coin the poet was aware of, from the miniature photograph he saw printed in Bevan’s book. And yet, Orophernes’ countenance is clearly treated by Cavafy as a piece of alternative historical evidence. In fact, the portrait is the only evidence examined in the poem, since the account of the protagonist’s life and times is not presented from a source, but appears to be effortlessly recalled (albeit with impressive accuracy) by the narrator as he gazes at the coin portrait. This point suggests a significant difference between Cavafy’s poem and Robert Browning’s “Protus” (1996, pp. 94–95), a poem that has sometimes been considered as the prototype of “Orophernes” (see Ricks, 2003; Tomprou, 2003). Browning’s poem does not refer to coin portraits, as has sometimes been claimed by Cavafy critics (see for example Ricks, 2003, pp. 137, 145, 146), but clearly to the sculptural busts of two fictional emperors of the 5th c. BCE.3 These were the porphyrogenite but subsequently dethroned child Protus, whose end is supposedly unknown, although the poem makes various speculations about it, and John the Pannonian, the illegitimate son of a blacksmith who snatched the throne from Protus and remained in power for six years, until he was poisoned by his own sons. Browning’s imaginary protagonists may allude to an actual episode from late Roman history since, as his editors note,

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in 476, the barbarian leader Odoacer (c.433–93) deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus (whose father had in fact usurped the title for him), effectively ending the Western Roman Empire. Odoacer spared the boy, gave him a pension, and sent him to live with his relatives in a region of southern Italy called Campania. His subsequent fate is unknown. (Browning, 1996, p. 401)

Apart from other discrepancies (on which see Ricks, 2003, pp. 137–140), we observe that the two poems refer to the past and manage historical evidence in completely different ways. Browning’s poem is put forth through the simultaneous reading of an old chronicle (and an annotator’s comments on it) and only secondarily refers to the facial attributes of the two sculpted figures. On the contrary, the single object of reading in Cavafy’s poem is the profile engraved on the coin. In this respect, Cavafy’s reading of Orophernes’ coin fully accords with the definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of graphic representation” (Heffernan, 1991, p. 299) and his poem may indeed be considered “as a combination of lyrical ekphrasis and historiographic diêgêsis” (Roilos, 2009, p. 191), whereas “Protus” has been accurately described by an early critic as “more a page from history than a study in the fine arts” (Dowden, 1904, p. 189). We also observe that in Cavafy’s text the “beautiful, delicate face” that “appears to affect a smile” on the coin’s surface is seen as  Orophernes’ true countenance. The poem’s speaker is clearly unaware of the complications posed by the idealistic style in Hellenistic coin portraiture. He does not see “radiance,” for example, as an artistic achievement, but rather as a physical feature of the historical figure. The poem, in other words, gazes at a human face rather than at a state-monument crafted by an anonymous artist, and so it reads allure, radiance and aesthetic memory as qualities of a face rather than an artifact. This peculiar rendering of the coin portrait may be further elucidated by comparison to Cavafy’s “Philhellene” (1906, 1912), a dramatic monologue which presents the planning of an ancient coin’s engraving in realistic terms and thus contradicts some of the central assumptions of “Orophernes”: PHILHELLENE See to it that the engraving be skilfully done. The expression serious and dignified. The diadem preferably rather narrow;

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those broad Parthian ones are not to my liking. The inscription, as usual in Greek;      5 nothing exaggerated, nothing pompous— lest the proconsul, who always pries about and reports to Rome, take it the wrong way— but nonetheless, of course, honorific. Something very choice on the other side;     10 some handsome ephebe, discus-thrower. Above all, I bid you pay attention (Sithaspes, in god’s name, don’t let this be forgotten) that after the words “King” and “Savior” be engraved in elegant lettering: ‘Philhellene.’    I5 And now don’t start your witticisms on me, like: ‘where are the Greeks’ and ‘where is Greek spoken around here, this side of Zagros, way beyond Fraata.’ Since so many others, more barbarous than we, write it, we will write it, too.      20 And finally, do not forget that on occasion there come to us sophists from Syria, and poetasters and other pretentious pedants. Thus, we are not lacking in Greek culture, I do believe. (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 103)

This poem conveys the detailed instructions left by the anonymous potentate of a remote Eastern province of the Roman Empire to a subordinate by the name of Sithaspes, who has been commissioned to supervise the striking of a new coin (Kostiou, 2014a; Sifaki, 2013). Cavafy focuses here on the issues involved in the production of an ancient coin, drawing on contemporary numismatic and historical sources.4 The coin is clearly depicted as a moveable state-monument, crafted on the basis of specific aesthetic and ideological directions that reflect its desired social function. Cavafy is also aware that, although some of the coin’s minor features may reveal the ruler’s personal taste, its main elements, including the coin portrait, are designed to serve the coin’s “documentary purposes,” that is, “to establish the identity of the current reigning power and to consolidate that authority by making the appearance ubiquitous” (West, 2004, p. 57). In this particular case, the protagonist’s priorities, as he tries to envision the coin, clearly waver between his anxiety over the Roman Proconsul’s perception of the coin’s political implications and his own desire to embrace philhellenism as a fading and overused but still valid cultural capital in his

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region (on other aspects of this poem see McKinsey, 2010, pp.  21–27; Halim, 2013, pp. 65–66; Mufti, 2021, pp. 189–90). In 1916, however, when he published “Orophernes,” Cavafy chose to ignore the terms of production of Hellenistic coin portraits he had so eloquently presented four years earlier. The later portrait reflects neither the king’s expediencies nor the inspiration and skill of its engraver; it is perceived as the human trace of the historical figure, an imprint rather than a product of craftsmanship. In this quasi-transcendental self-portrait, Orophernes somehow “left” the qualities and features he possessed as an “Ionian boy.” Here lies the difference between the “beautiful, delicate face” we encounter in the poem and the “handsome and delicate features” that a later numismatist, commenting on the same portrait, saluted as an achievement of its engraver’s art (Bieber, 1961, p. 88). The verb “left” (l. 46) in Cavafy’s poem naturalizes and substitutes a whole series of processes and actions: the fact that Orophernes organized, financed, commissioned, supervised, and approved this coin, meaning to project by it both his newly gained political power and his defiant narcissism. Moreover, taking advantage of the obscurity and anonymity of the coin’s engraver, Cavafy erases him completely from the reader’s vision, along with every other trace of the artifact’s historicity. The poem also gives its reader the impression that Orophernes’ alluring visage as an “Ionian youth” was preserved on the coin before it was altered by his catastrophic subsequent involvement in the realm of power and history (see for example Keeley, 1996, p. 170). In other words, the poem sees on the coin Orophernes as he was before he became king, which of course could not be the case since coin portraits presuppose and manifest existing political power.

4  Antiquarianism, Physiognomy, Photography Cavafy’s double reading—the coin carries a quasi-transcendental imprint of a human face and that face is prime historical evidence—draws from a long tradition of visual culture still popular as a way of reading images at the poet’s time. As we saw earlier, antiquarian interest in ancient coins was primarily focused on the portraits of kings and emperors on their obverse, which were read for centuries as “authentic likenesses produced by the subjects themselves to convey their virtus to posterity” (Cunnally, 1999, p. 16; see also Haskell, 1993, pp. 60–67). Coins were thus mainly perceived as mediators that “could link the antiquarian to the moral and

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spiritual power of the ancients, and induct him into a secret visual history not available through texts” (Cunnally, 1999, p. 25). Their meaning was not subject to interpretation but intuitively disclosed to the experienced viewer: it “is as palpable as the coin’s materiality that preserves it from being altered” (Alvarez, 2005, p.  529). In contrast to textual sources, coins were valued for not lying, not erring and not omitting and also for conveying their truth instantly, as they managed to “sum up a whole volume in twenty or thirty reverses” (Addison, 1830, p. 69). Such notions shaped the strong and lasting antiquarian belief that ancient coins teach themselves, and even the history of their time, on their own merits. By merely observing them in serial display a viewer may communicate directly and intuitively with the past and learn its truth. This figuration was circulating in the late seventeenth century, as manifest in John Evelyn’s Numismata. A Discourse of Medals, Ancient and Modern (1697), “the first British study of numismatics, which also provides the first history of England told entirely through coins and medals” (Silver, 2015, p. 332). “With Evelyn, and the class of professional collectors like him, there arose a particularly conservative and curatorial version of history: history as visual tableau, as a certain mode of arranging material fragments” (p.  338). In Cavafy’s time, and in his specific cultural surroundings, this antiquarian concept was still very much in circulation as a popular commonplace that highlighted the historical and educational value of ancient coins. It is manifested, for example, in the letter by which a well-known Greek collector in Egypt, the Cairo-based lawyer Efstathios Glymenopoulos, announced his donation of a large part of his collection of Hellenistic and Roman coins to the Averoff School of Alexandria, in 1900. These coins, Glymenopoulos wrote, “inscribed with Greek emblems and letters, and bearing the busts of approximately one hundred Kings and Queens, with chronologies and representations of the religion or welfare of Alexandrians, will teach, simply by being displayed in order, the local history of two distinct periods (324–31 BC—296 BCE)” (Anon., 1901, p. 1; my emphasis).5 Simply by being chronologically arranged in a display, then, ancient coins could teach the history of their time, while portraits on their obverse revealed the true story of obscure kings and queens of the past. Such antiquarian concepts were embedded in the cultural matrix of the Egyptiote Greek paroikia that formed Cavafy’s immediate cultural milieu and which, also, was the first and most significant reading community to receive his poems. In this case, Cavafy’s use of antiquarian figurations  aims to

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legitimate a reading of Orophernes’ coin portrait that is clearly modeled on Walter Pater’s aesthetic impressionism. The specific qualities the poem’s speaker finds on this portrait and, more significantly, the emotional intensity manifest in his tone and in his passionate personal engagement with it might scandalize his reader, if that reader had not already been acculturated to the venerable antiquarian tradition that subjected coin portraits to its own wildly impressionistic, albeit usually heteronormative and moralistic, readings. As he would often do in his work, Cavafy appropriated a traditional and prevalent conceptual frame and then went on to subvert it, by subtly shifting its focus, its aims and its evaluative criteria. In this case, however, his use of antiquarian expectations was enhanced and his sensual portrayal of Orophernes further legitimated by the prestige enjoyed by physiognomy in his time. Antiquarian convictions gained new force during the nineteenth century by the revival of physiognomy as a social practice and by its repackaging as a scientific method. The broad circulation of Johann Caspar Lavater’s late eighteenth-century book Essays on Physiognomy, which claimed that a person’s specific character traits are revealed through careful observation of his or her face or printed image and was translated into many languages, had a profound and lasting effect not only on the production and reception of the visual arts but also on the literary imagination and on a broad range of sciences, social practices and aspects of everyday life (Percival and Tytler, 2005; Pearl, 2010; Hartley, 2001; Cowling, 1989). In early nineteenth-century Europe, this book “was reprinted, abridged, summarized, pirated, parodied, imitated, and reviewed so often that it is difficult to imagine how a literate person of the time could have failed to have some general knowledge of the man and his theories” (Graham, 1961, p. 562). The new trend placed the human face at the center of its attention but it was mainly practiced through engravings, so (just as observed in Cavafy’s “Orophernes”) it tended to fumble the distinction between a person’s actual face and its portrait. Physiognomy was in fact defined as “the sensation and the conjectures which certain physiognomies produce, from which we form a judgment of the moral character which they announce, of the interior of the man whose face or portrait we examine” (Lavater, 1793, p. 86; my emphasis). As Lavater further theorized, Nature has not only bestowed on man voice and tongue, to be the interpreters of his thoughts; but, out of a certain distrust, conceiving he might abuse them, she has contrived to depict in his face, in the various conformations of

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his countenance, a demonstration to give the others the lie, in case they should not prove faithful. In a word, she has exposed his soul, to be observed on the outside; so that there is no necessity of any window to discover his motions, inclinations, and habits since they are apparent in his face and are there written in such visible and manifest characters. (1793, p. 25)

Physiognomy was not meant to be practiced just by common intuition, but after some basic training. Lavater “implied that readers have to learn, improve themselves and be receptive” (Erle, 2010, p. 35). As Elizabeth Eastlake elucidated, the human face is “like other pictures, it can only be fully enjoyed and understood by the cultivated eye” (Eastlake, 1851, p. 69). The ability to discern a person’s character traits by carefully observing his or her face, body or even clothes (Pearl, 2010, pp. 172–173) was thus recognized as a virtue that distinguished the trained physiognomist’s gaze from the eyes of common viewers. The gaze that reads Orophernes’ coin portrait in Cavafy’s poem, the narrator who boldly ignores every trace of the coin’s historicity to look at a human face, as if it had miraculously surfaced from the depths of time, and is subsequently enraptured by this face’s aesthetic charm, is grounded on the long-established double tradition of antiquarian decipherings of ancient coin portraits and physiognomic readings of faces and images. Both these outlooks were very much alive as modes of looking at the poet’s time and often fused into each other. But Cavafy obviously does not read the coin portrait as a traditional antiquarian or physiognomist would and he certainly does not share their values. He makes use of these long-­ established if slightly quaint ways of looking at images to shape and validate his own aesthetic reading of the Hellenistic coin portrait, which counteracts, subverts and parochializes their fundamental presumptions. In addition to these traditional  viewpoints, the speaker’s gaze in “Orophernes” also reflects a more recent and innovative manifestation of visual culture, to which I will now turn. As earlier established, Cavafy did not see Orophernes’ coin as a material object in a museum’s showcase; he did not hold it in his hands, as a visitor in a private collection, nor did he encounter it in a numismatic publication, accompanied by documentation and commentary that would inevitably highlight its materiality. All the poet saw was a portrait of the young ruler, in a photograph of the coin’s obverse, which was printed in Bevan’s study to illustrate the historical figure. This contingency is clearly reflected in Cavafy’s poem, as a key feature of the coin’s reading is the narrator’s

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metonymic perception of the engraved portrait as a photographic representation.6 In Cavafy’s time, photographs were conceptualized as “images of objectivity” (Daston and Galison, 1992) that reflected a person’s or thing’s most authentic representation. Already in 1838, the daguerreotype was thought to give nature “the power to reproduce herself” (Louis Daguerre, quoted in Sontag, 1979, p. 188), while as Elizabeth Eastlake famously stated in 1857, photography “is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view. […] What indeed are nine-tenths of those facial maps called photographic portraits, but accurate landmarks and measurements for loving eyes and memories to deck with beauty and animate with expression, in perfect certainty, that the ground-plan is founded upon fact?” (1996, p. 161). Because of their extensive use as material for physiognomic exercises, photographic portraits were generally thought to reflect the deeper or hidden truth of the faces they depicted—living or dead, modern or historical: “By freezing bodies in time and space, the photograph was thought to enable a closer reading of the physiognomic details of human being” (Seitler, 2004, p. 76). Much of the discussion on photography in Cavafy’s time focused on its status as an art. But both sides of this raging debate, which as Kostas Ioannidis (2019) has shown was also popular among Greek intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century, equally promoted photography’s unique ability for accurate depiction of its subjects. Those who refused its artistic claims saw photography as merely copying the beauty of its models; but its supporters also thought of its artistry as augmenting and enhancing rather than reducing the photograph’s fidelity to what it depicted. Cavafy himself must have shared this view, as he was often photographed by artists in Alexandria (Fettel & Bernard, Bernard Masson), especially during the last decade of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, aiming to preserve his image at its prime (Savidis, 1983). But if the range of technicalities and negotiations involved in the production of a photographic portrait does not reduce its truthfulness to the human face, why should a photographed ancient coin portrait be any different? Since in popular physiognomic culture “the photography of sculpture was never distant from the photography of human types” (Bergstein, 2010, p.  215), the modern and private method of memorializing human features could easily be transposed on and confused with the ancient terms of institutional coin production. All the more so since ancient coins were frequently perceived as “photographs of antiquity” (Anonymous, 1879, p. 20), whereas random references to them as photographs were not uncommon even in

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much later times. In 1958, for example, Marguerite Yourcenar would inadvertently mention the photograph of Orophernes’ face, rather than of his coin or coin portrait, which of course is what she had in mind (1978, p. 17). A brief mention in a 1906 note by Cavafy has given rise to the inaccurate impression that the poet was “against photographic representation” altogether (Tsakiridou, 1991, p. 87): What a deceptive thing Art is, when you wish to apply sincerity. You sit and write – often out of speculation – about emotions, and later, with the passing of time, you question whether you might have been deceived.… Descriptive poetry —historic facts, the photography (what an ugly word!) of nature  — is perhaps safe. But it is a minor and somewhat fleeting thing. (Cavafy, 2010, p. 134)

This comment certainly does not suggest a “blunt rejection of photography” (Papargyriou, 2011a, p. 74). In fact, Cavafy’s note does not refer to visual photographic representations at all, but to photography in the figurative sense, i.e. as “a primary metaphor for objective truth” (Rosen and Zerner, 1984, p. 108). Reading Cavafy’s brief comment in its textual context, we find that while arguing on the frequently deceptive nature of emotional sincerity in poetic composition, he turned to the case of poetry that merely presents historic facts or attempts to copy nature through “photographic” descriptions, which struck him as a safe but also limited alternative. Cavafy’s references to actual photographs, in poems like “That is How” (1913), “From the Drawer” (1923) and “The photograph” (1924), do not manifest any sense of discomfort with the camera lens or mistrust for the depictions of human figures produced by it. These poems focus on photographs of young men and mainly on the thoughts and feelings they cause to their viewers, confirming both photographic fidelity as a value and the usefulness of photographs as incentives for personal and poetic retrospection. Contrary to this, painted portraits in Cavafy’s poems sometimes privilege the gaze and taste of the artist over the beauty of the depicted person (as for example in his poem “Picture of a twenty-three year old man, painted by a friend of the same age, an amateur artist” of 1928). Cavafy’s appreciation of photography is not focused on its value as an art form, but on its ability to offer accurate imprints of human figures, which will later serve as aids to memory, fantasy and art. Orophernes’ coin

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portrait, just as the “lewd photograph” in the poem “That is How,” incites poetry “to create yet another material testimony of the depicted man’s existence and to save his sensuality from oblivion” (Papargyriou, 2011b, p. 82). In fact, Cavafy’s understanding seems rooted in Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited observation that “Photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being” (1969, p. 255). A poem in which this idea is pivotal, although by historical necessity thinly disguised as a feature of portrait painting, is “The tomb of Lanes” (1916, 1918): THE TOMB OF LANES Oh, Marcus! The Lanes that you loved is no more in this place, within the grave where you come and weep and stay long hours. The Lanes that you loved once, you have him closer to you when you shut yourself at home and gaze at his portrait that somehow has preserved what of him was of value,    5 that somehow has preserved what of him you so cherished. Remember, Marcus, when you brought from the Proconsul’s palace the Cyrenian painter who was of great renown, and with what guileful artistry he immediately endeavored, as soon as he had seen your friend, to persuade you both    10 that he must - by all means - portray him as Hyakinthos (in this way his painting would be much better known). Your Lanes, though, did not lend out his beauty in this manner and steadfastly opposing this, he bade to be presented not in the least as Hyakinthos, or indeed as any other,      15 but only as Lanes, Rhametichos’ son, of Alexandria.          (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 191)

Like Orophernes, the Egyptian Lanes left in his portrait “what of him was of value,” because he insisted that the artist paint him as himself and not in the form of a mythological figure. This motif may actually be a loan from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, in whose ninth chapter the famous portrait’s painter, Basil Hallward, confesses to Dorian: I had drawn you as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman’s cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had

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sat on the prow of Adrian’s barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile. You had leant over the still pool of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water’s silent silver the marvel of your own face. And it had all been what art should be, unconscious, ideal, and remote. One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time. Whether it was the Realism of the method, or the mere wonder of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or veil, I cannot tell. But I know that as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. (Wilde, 2006, p. 98)

By treating Lanes’ portrait as a picture that preserves the man’s permanent trace, Cavafy addresses ancient art through the mediation of his own time’s photographic culture. At this poem’s center we do not find an image, but a gaze: the physiognomic aptitude of the poem’s experienced narrator, who can read Lanes’ precious trace in his portrait and tries to share it with the young man’s bereaved lover (lines 3–6). A similar negotiation of the effect of modern photography with reference to Hellenistic antiquity may be traced in the poem “Craftsman of Craters” (1903, 1912, 1921).7 In this instance, a craftsman attempts to represent his dead lover as Narcissus, but his memory fails him; all this artist needed to keep his lover’s trace alive in his memory was his photographic portrait: CRAFTSMAN OF CRATERS Upon this very crater out of the purest silver – that’s crafted for the house of Herakleides where delicacy of taste is highly prevalent – behold: elegant blossoms and rivulets and thyme and right there in the middle I put a handsome youth,    5 naked and erotic; one of his legs immersed knee-deep in the water.-- I begged of you, oh Memory, to be my best assistant, so that I might fashion, as it was, the face of the young man I loved. The difficulty proved considerable, because     10 as many as fifteen years have gone by since that day when he fell, a soldier in the Magnesian defeat.           (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 259)

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Writing in the age of photography, Cavafy looks at antiquity through photography’s absence, staging the craftsman’s futile effort to forge a substitute by means of his art: a memorial picture of his lover’s face, which a trained physiognomist might recognize under its mythological guise. Addressed from a different perspective, both “The tomb of Lanes” and “Craftsman of Craters” project the notion that some specimens of ancient art (specifically, the pictures of beautiful young men preserved on various Hellenistic antiquities) were in fact encrypted images of the artists’ lovers and so may serve as evidence for the largely suppressed, silenced and undocumented history of homoerotic desire. In these and other poems (as for example in his “Temethos, Antiochian, A. D. 400” of 1925) Cavafy actually reflects on the method by which many poets and artists of his own time were able to express homoerotic desire by disguising it in ancient mythological pretenses. As has been noted, “it was through representations of myth that images of the beautiful and sexually desirable boy were reconciled with the Greek ideal and also with the accepted moral codes of Victorian society. Such reconciliations are apparent in the visual sphere and even more pronounced in works of literature” (Barrow, 2001, pp. 124–125).8

5  Reading as an Antiquarian: Cavafy and Andrea Fulvio Returning to “Orophernes,” we may proceed to consider how Cavafy treats the discrepancy between the radiance and allure he discovers on the coin portrait and the darker register of Orophernes’ character and conduct. This discrepancy is embedded in the poem’s narrative structure. Cavafy’s poem commences with observations on the coin portrait, it moves on to examine the hero’s life and times, and then it returns to the portrait to convey the narrator’s conclusive opinion. In fact, this structure is closely modeled on the traditional format of material created for antiquarian physiognomic exercises, as for example Andrea Fulvio’s popular collection Illustrium Imagines (1517). In this famous book, Fulvio published woodcut reproductions of 205 coin portraits, each followed by a short biography based on textual ancient sources that highlighted the depicted figure’s virtues or flaws (see Weiss, 1968, pp. 185–186; Haskell, 1993, pp. 28–30; Cunnally, 1999, pp. 52–69). The volume’s typographic

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Fig. 3.1  A page from Andrea Fulvio’s Illustrium imagines (1517)

layout, as manifest in Fulvio’s page on Tiberius Caesar Augustus that I take as an example here (Fig. 3.1), invites the reader to begin by observing the coin portrait, which occupies a dominant position on the upper part of the page; then the reader moves on to the biographical data listed below the portrait, and after that she returns to the portrait, in order to examine what it reveals in comparison to biographical data and to express her conclusion. The structure of Cavafy’s “Orophernes” clearly imitates this

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popular antiquarian format, although the conclusions drawn by the poet in the poem’s end are, of course, entirely alien to those of a sixteenthcentury antiquarian reader. As noted earlier, physiognomic routines would invariably lead to the discovery of elements that confirmed historical testimonies on the virtues or flaws of the portrayed individual. Ruskin recalled this, when he argued that “the effort at portraiture is good for art if the men to be portrayed are good men” (1905, p. 281), as did Hicks, who reviewed the aesthetic details of Orophernes’ coin portrait seeking to confirm his character’s flaws, as testified by Polybius. Contrary to this, Cavafy uses the traditional parallel of the coin portrait with the portrayed figure’s biography to highlight the discrepancy and incompatibility rather than the convergence of these two forms of testimony. The values that the speaker’s gaze discovers on Orophernes’ face reveal an altogether different sense of history and a level of emotional engagement entirely alien to ancient textual sources. In fact, the antinomy on which this poem is founded is not between Art and History, as has frequently been suggested (e.g., Kostiou, 2005, pp.  146–148; Mackridge, 2007, xxvi; Jusdanis, 1987, p. 110), but between two different perceptions of history. Drawing on the antiquarian recognition of coins as historical testimonies whose value equals that of textual sources, and investing this perception with the physiognomic and photographic cultural validation of coin portraits as trustworthy bearers of truth, the poem presents two alternative answers to the implied question, “Who is Orophernes?” Cavafy juxtaposes the picture drawn by the historical record to the image on the coin, which the narrator clearly opts for in the poem’s conclusion (Mackridge, 2008, p. 220). The coin that preserves Orophernes’ sensual and aesthetic trace, and the narrator’s experienced gaze that responds to its allure with empathy and passion, are thus employed as an alternative way of recovering history, one which challenges the record of the historical figure’s moral and political conduct. In fact, this challenge has been prepared from the poem’s beginning as the narrator, instantly recognizing the unmediated trace that Orophernes “left” on the coin, transforms his impression into the quasi-historical episode of “exquisite Ionian nights” and “utter sensual bliss” (lines 9–17), which intensifies the aesthetic trace on the coin and supplements it with a story: the story that complicates and ultimately counterbalances the historical record.

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Notes 1. Bolingbroke’s famous phrase was in fact a translation of an epigram by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (see Hicks, 1987, p. 457n). 2. An attempt to weave the two conflicting perspectives in the same discourse is manifest, for example, in G. F. Hill’s commentary on Mithridates’ coin: “The coins with the head of Mithradates are the last fine works of art produced by the coin-engraver in Greece. They, especially the silver tetradrachms, on which the work can be better appreciated owing to their larger size, indeed stand almost alone in the first century. Nothing approaching them had been produced since the time of Philip V. But although the technique is good, the treatment is rather showy, so that the eye, although at first attracted, soon tires of the subject. [See the excellent criticism in Ruskin’s Aratra Pentelici, 120]” (1906, p. 162). 3. Browning’s poem literally refers to busts: “Among these latter busts we count by scores, / Half-emperors and quarter-emperors, / Each with his bay-leaf fillet, loose-thonged vest, / Loric and low-browed Gorgon on the breast” (Browning 1996, p.  94). Some ancient coins depict figures from sculpted busts, but in this case the details mentioned in the poem (such as the Loricae, i.e. the leather breastplates worn by Roman soldiers) would be hard to discern on a coin. Browning’s critics have consistently read the poem as referring to busts displayed in galleries, such as the Pinacotheca in the Vatican (see, for example, Dowden, 1904, p. 139; Orr, 1927, p. 154, Browning, 1996, p. 401). 4. Malanos located this poem’s source in certain passages from Bevan’s The House of Seleucus (Malanos 1957, p. 308; Bevan 1902, v. 2, pp. 159, 265, 274). A. N. Oikonomides suggested as its source an article published in 1904 at the Journal Asiatique as Cavafy’s source (Oikonomides, 1986; Dussaud, 1904; Dallas, 2000, pp. 63–65). 5. The absorption of antiquarian views is sometimes evident in contemporary numismatic discourse, as for example  in the following passage: “Coins, despite their scarce individual elements and their small size, present a gallery of the figures of eminent mortals as well as the immortal masters of the celestial Pantheon. … The encounter with the historical figures of Greeks from three eras ... will also give the reader the opportunity for a pleasant and in-depth overview of the history of Hellenism” (Penna, 2014, p. 11). 6. In January 1904, just before composing the first draft of “Orophernes,” Cavafy had written a poem entitled “The Photograph” (Savidis, 1987, p. 79). A draft bearing the same title but apparently composed in 1924 has been published by R. Lavagnini (Cavafy, 1994, pp. 173–176). 7. Interesting remarks on this poem in Mackridge (2008, pp.  219–220); Kostiou (2014b, pp. 103–108); and Tzortzi (2021, pp. 76–80).

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8. In the anonymously published erotic novel Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal. A Physiological Romance of To-day (1893) that is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, the artist Briancourt wishes to paint Socrates and Alcibiades on a pendant in order to depict on the latter the features of the novel’s gorgeous young hero (Anon, 2006, p. 95).

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Hardy, T. (1979). Complete Poems. Variorum Edition (Ed. J.  G. Macmillan). London: Macmillan. Hartley, L. (2001). Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-­ Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haskell, F. (1993). History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Head, B. V. (1885). Greek Coins. In S. Lane-Poole (Ed.), Coins and Medals. Their Place in History and Art (pp. 10–41). London: Elliot Stock. Heffernan, J. A. W. (1991). Ekphrasis and Representation. New Literary History, 22(2), 297–316. Heredia, J - M. de (1942). Les Trophées. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hicks P. (1987). Bolingbroke, Clarendon, and the Role of Classical Historian. Eighteenth-Century Studies 20(4), 445–471. Hicks, E.  L. (1885). Judith and Holofernes. Journal of Hellenic Studies, 6, 261–274. Hill, G. F. (1906). Historical Greek Coins. London: A. Constable. Ioannidis, K. (2019). Μία «υπερόχως νόθος» τέχνη: ποιητικές της φωτογραφίας, τέλη 19ου – αρχές 20ού αιώνα. Athens: futura. Jeffreys, P. (2015). Reframing Decadence. C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Jusdanis, G. (1987). The Poetics of Cavafy. Textualism, Eroticism, History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kalter, B. (2012). Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England 1660–1780. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press. Keeley, E. (1996). Cavafy’s Alexandria. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kostiou, K. (2005). Ο Οροφέρνης, οι Λακεδαιμόνιοι και ο αμφίθυμος αφηγητής. In M. Mike et al (Eds.), Ο λόγος της παρουσίας: τιμητικός τόμος για τον Παν. Μουλλά (pp. 143–152). Athens: Sokolis. Kostiou, K. (2014a). Ανάμεσα στη μίμηση και την αυτοσυνειδησία: Η λειτουργία του προσωπείου στο ποίημα ‘Φιλέλλην’. In Νεοελληνική Λογοτεχνία και Κριτική από τον Διαφωτισμό έως σήμερα. Πρακτικά ΙΓ Επιστημονικής Συνάντησης, Α.Π.Θ., 3-6 Νοεμβρίου 2011. Μνήμη Παν. Μουλλά (pp. 636–643). Athens: Sokolis. Kostiou, K. (2014b). Ο γλύπτης, ο τεχνίτης, το αισθητικό ιδεώδες και η αγορά στην καβαφική πολιτεία. Kondiloforos, 13, 77–109. Lavater, J. C. (1793). Essays on Physiognomy (trans. C. Moore). London: W. Locke. Mackridge, P. (2007). Introduction. In C. P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou, pp. xi–xxxiii). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackridge, P. (2008). Εκμαγεία της ποίησης. Σολωμός Καβάφης Σεφέρης. Athens: Estia. Mahaffy, J.  P. (1895). The Empire of the Ptolemies. London and New  York: Macmillan. Mahoney, K.  M. (2006). Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption. Criticism 48(1), 39–67.

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Malanos, T. (1957). Ο ποιητής Κ. Π. Καβάφης. Ο άνθρωπος και το έργο του. Athens: Difros. McKinsey, M. (2010). Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination. Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott. Madison & Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Mørkholm, O. (1991). Early Hellenistic Coinage from the Accession of Alexander to the Peace of Apamea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mufti, A. R. (2021). Constantine Cavafy in the Colony: Hellenism at the Margins of Empire. boundary 2, 48(2), 177–203. Neville, G. (1998). Radical Churchman: Edward Lee Hicks and the New Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newton, C. T. (1871). On an Inedited Tetradrachm of Orophernes II, King of Cappadocia. The Numismatic Chronicle, and Journal of the Numismatic Society (New Series), XI, 19–27. Oikonomides, A.  N. (1986). Hellenistic Numismatics and ‘The Philhellene’ of C. P. Cavafy. The Ancient World, 13(1–2), 41–46. Østermark-Johansen, L. (2011). Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Papargyriou, E. (2011a). Cavafy, Photography and Fetish. Κάμπος: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek, 18, 73–91. Papargyriou, E. (2011b). Αστικές περιπλανήσεις και λογοτεχνικές ταυτότητες: όψεις πόλεων σε σύγχρονα ελληνικά φωτογραφικά και λογοτεχνικά λευκώματα. In K.  A. Dimadis (Ed.), Πρακτικά του Δ΄ Ευρωπαϊκού Συνεδρίου Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών (Γρανάδα, 9-12 Σεπτεμβρίου 2010) (v. 1, pp. 75–86). Athens: European Society of Modern Greek Studies. Pater, W. (2009). An English Poet. In R.  J. Allinson (Ed.), Three Imaginary Portraits (pp. 21–37). Baltimore: Noumena Press. Pearl, S. (2010). About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Penna, V. (2014). Η ποίηση του Καβάφη και ο θαυμαστός κόσμος των νομισμάτων. In S. Geroulanos, Απόκρυφη Ιστορία (pp. 9–11). Athens: Militos. Percival, M. & Tytler, G. (2005). Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Politou-Marmarinou, E. (1984). Ο Καβάφης και ο γαλλικός παρνασσισμός. In Πρακτικά τρίτου συμποσίου ποίησης (pp. 315–346). Athens: Gnosi. Pontani, F.  M. (1991). Επτά δοκίμια και μελετήματα για τον Καβάφη 1936-1974. Athens: MIET. Poole, R.  S. (1861). Coin Collecting. Once a Week, an Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Art, Science and Popular Information, v. 5, 576–578. Poole, R.  S. (1864). On Greek Coins as Illustrating Greek Art. Numismatic Chronicle (N.S.), 4, 236–247. Poole, R. S. (1880). Editor’s Preface. In B. V. Head, A Guide to the Select Greek and Roman Coins Exhibited in Electrotype (pp. iii–v). London: Trustees of the British Museum.

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Poole, R.  S. (1885). The Study of Coins. In S.  Lane-Poole (Ed.), Coins and Medals. Their Place in History and Art (pp. 1–9). London: Elliot Stock. Ricks, D. (2003). How It Strikes a Contemporary: Cavafy as a Reviser of Browning. Κάμπος Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek, 11, 131–152. Roilos, P. (2009). C. P. Cavafy. The Economics of Metonymy. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. Rosen C. & Zerner, H. (1984). Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art. New York: Viking. Rosenberg, J.  D. (1985). Carlyle and the Burden of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ruskin J. (1903). Modern Painters. Vol I. In E.  T. Cook and A.  Wedderburn (Eds.), Works of John Ruskin, Vol. III. London: George Allen. Ruskin J. (1904). Modern Painters, Vol III. In E.  T. Cook and A.  Wedderburn (Eds.), Works of John Ruskin, Vol. V. London: George Allen. Ruskin J. (1905). Lectures on Art and Aratra Pentelici with Lectures and Notes on Greek Art and Mythology. In E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (Eds.), Works of John Ruskin, Vol. XX. London: George Allen. Salvesen, H. (1991). Tetradrachm of Orophernes is Regarded by Some as the Ultimate Hellenistic Portrait Coin. The Celator, 5(4), 6–8. Savidis, G. P. (1983). Photographs of C. P. Cavafy, His Family and Home. Grand Street, 2(3), 127–142. Savidis, G. P. (1987). Μικρά καβαφικά, Β’. Athens: Ermis. Seitler, D. (2004). Queer Physiognomies; Or, How Many Ways Can We Do the History of Sexuality? Criticism, 46(1), 71–102. Shell, M. (1993). The Economy of Literature (2nd ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sifaki, E. (2013). Self-Fashioning in C.  P. Cavafy’s ‘Going back Home from Greece’ and ‘Philhellene.’ Synthesis, 5, 29–48. Silver, S. (2015). John Evelyn and Numismata: Material History and Autobiography. Word & Image, 31(3), 331–342. Sontag, S. (1979). On Photography. London: Penguin Books. Sutherland Orr, [A]. (1927). A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed). London: Bell and Sons. Tomprou, M. (2003). Καβάφης και Μπράουνινγκ. Nea Estia, 1756, 787–809. Tsakiridou, C.  A. (1991). The Photographic Dimension in Some Poems of C.P. Cavafy. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 17(2), 87–95. Tsirkas, S. (1982). Ο πολιτικός Καβάφης (4th ed.). Athens: Kedros. Turner (Tennyson), C. (1988). Collected Sonnets (eds. F. B. Pinion and M. Pinion). London: Macmillan. Tzortzi, M. (2021). ‘Αποταμίευμα ποιητικής ύλης’: Αναζητώντας τον Φιλόστρατο στην ποίηση του Κ. Π. Καβάφη. Σύγκριση / Comparaison / Comparison, 30, 70–86.

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Walters, H. B. (1906). The Art of the Greeks. London: Methuen. Weiss, R. (1968). The Study of Ancient Numismatics During the Renaissance (1313–1517). The Numismatic Chronicle, v. 8, 177–187. West, S. (2004). Portraiture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Wilde, O. (2006). The Picture of Dorian Gray. J.  Bristow, (Ed.). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Yourcenar, M. (1978). Présentation critique de Constantin Cavafy, 1863-1933. Paris: Gallimard. Zimmerman, V. (2012). ‘Time Seemed Fiction’ – Archaeological Encounters in Victorian Poetry. Journal of Literature and Science, 5(1), 70–72.

CHAPTER 4

What Is a “Poet-Historian”?

I am a poet-historian. I could never write a novel or a play, but I feel in me a hundred and twenty-five voices telling me that I could write history. (Cavafy as quoted in Lechonitis, 1977, pp. 19–20.)

1   Cavafy’s Use of Historical Sources Having demonstrated that E. R. Bevan’s 1902 history of the Seleucids was Cavafy’s main source for “Orophernes,” we may turn to examine the way in which the poet worked with the historical texts he consulted. Cavafy’s primary source was the only reliable study of the Seleucid kingdoms available at the time of the poem’s first writing and remained “still the only comprehensive work on the Seleucids in English” almost a century after it was published (Magill et al., 1998, p. 87).1 Bevan was the first scholar to attempt a thoroughly researched and comprehensive account of a slice of ancient history on which ancient sources are particularly scarce and fragmentary. As Andrew Erskine comments, The poverty of the available evidence for the Seleukid empire is a permanent drawback. No proper account of the dynasty’s history has survived. The nearest to a continuous narrative of the ‘Hellenistic period’ is Justin’s medi© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Kayalis, Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7_4

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ocre and rhetorical Epitome of the Philippic Histories of Pompeius Trogus. The only available outline of Seleukid history is a sketchy summary in Appian’s Syrian History 45-70. Neither writer gives the slightest indication of what contemporary sources ultimately lay behind their material. Other literary evidence is very scattered  – Diodoros, Livy, Plutarch, Polybios, Strabo and others. Coins, archaeological evidence and above all inscriptions contribute important sidelights. In general, the source material is characterized by its randomness, its unevenness in time and space (information becomes increasingly sparse the further east one looks), the Greek slant of the evidence (the vast majority of inscriptions come from the Greek world, and above all from western Asia Minor), and the lack of information about the personalities of the rulers themselves and of their followers. (Erskine, 2003, p. 133)

Faced with this textual ecology, a poet would find it very hard to put together meaningful historical sketches based on ancient sources alone, as many critics have argued that Cavafy did. In fact, this task is difficult even for professional historians. As one of the first reviewers of Bevan’s work wrote, “Even students who go to original authorities will find it advisable not to read their Polybius without their Bevan” (Richards, 1903, p. 317). Since, as more recent scholars have argued, the long-standing value of Bevan’s work lies “in the competent and exhaustive use it makes of written Greek sources” (Sinor, 1967, p. 103), Cavafy had little need to consult ancient sources for historical verification (although he probably used them for texture and detail). These facts allow us to recognize the overall significance of Bevan’s history for the development of Cavafy’s poetry. As the poet was quick to discern, this work made available a new “storehouse of poetic material,” as he had earlier written of Philostratus and of the archaeological findings in Egypt (Cavafy, 2003b, pp. 66, 86). Unearthing remote figures and stories from the Hellenistic East which carried enormous potential for original literary exploration, Bevan’s history served Cavafy as a guidebook to an era that was remarkably akin to the modern sensibility but had been silenced and forgotten in the course of many centuries. It provided him with a palette of original and culturally relevant historical themes that he could call his own. At the same time, Bevan’s work offered a priceless collection and discussion of ancient citations, which was useful to Cavafy as he forged his preferred persona of an antiquarian scholar-poet who discovers new meanings deciphering obscure texts, inscriptions and coins.

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Not surprisingly, Bevan deals with Orophernes briefly, in the course of his argument on Demetrius I Soter. His account involves most of the information presented in Cavafy’s poem, including: a. the shaping of the young Orophernes’ personality traits in Ionia (probably Priene) where, according to Bevan, he was sent “to be educated” (Bevan, 1902, v. 2, p. 157). As Bevan comments, drawing on Polybius and Diodorus, “His manners, acquired in Ionia, outraged the feelings of the Cappadocian barons. He trampled upon their religious and moral traditions, and they were shocked to see him following wild and dissolute cults unknown to their fathers” (p. 206); b. that Orophernes was set up as king of Cappadocia by Demetrius I Soter of Syria, who ousted his brother Ariarathes V from the throne (p. 205); c. the usurper’s terrible misuse of power (ll. 18–26) since, as Bevan wrote, he “proved a ruler of the worst kind. He wrung all the money he could from the country by the most violent extortion, and lavished what he got upon favorites and strangers” (p. 206); d. the upstaged Orophernes’ flight to Syria (Antioch), under the protection of Demetrius (pp. 208, 209); and also, e. his failed attempt to dethrone his protector, which Cavafy reworked in ll. 30–40 of his poem (p.  209), and which culminated in Demetrius’ decision to spare his life, which is in fact the last piece of information on Orophernes in the historical record. Evidence in the poet’s archive and library shows that, alongside Bevan, Cavafy also used the entry on Orophernes (and possibly those on Demetrius Soter and Ariarathes V) in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1880), a book that survives in the poet’s library and which he also consulted, together with Bevan’s work, as a source for other poems. The entry on Orophernes, contributed by Edward Elder, clarifies that he “was sent away into Ionia” so that he would not claim the throne of Cappadocia, adding that during his Ionian sojourn “he does not appear to have improved his morals” (Smith, 1880, v. 3, p. 21). Elder also suggests that Orophernes’ short reign “was signaled by a departure from the more simple customs of his ancestors, and by the introduction of systematic debauchery, like that of the Ionians,” and

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argues that “to supply his lavish extravagance, he oppressed and pillaged his subjects, putting many to death, and confiscating their property” (ibid.). Occasionally, as for example when commenting on the young boy’s expulsion to Ionia (l. 5–8), Cavafy appears to opt for Elder’s account in Smith; in other instances, he seems to weave elements from both Elder and Bevan in his narrative (as for example when he describes the hero’s attempt to usurp the throne of Syria, in ll. 30–40). There are also cases in which the poet appears to invent his own story. Cavafy’s version of Orophernes’ ousting, for example (“The Cappadocians soon removed him,” l. 27), contradicts Bevan’s clarification that Orophernes was expelled by an opponent of Demetrius, Attalus II Philadelphus of Pergamon (Bevan, 1902, v.2, pp.  207–208); on this Elder simply reports that Orophernes “did not hold the kingdom long” (Smith, 1880, v. 3, p. 21). However, Bevan’s suggestion that “it was impossible that the protégé of Demetrius should hold his throne long” (Bevan, 1902, v.2, p. 206) lends some plausibility to Cavafy’s version, which seems to trade Hellenistic political conditions for modern notions of popular uprisings. Clearly, these two historical commentaries served Cavafy as summaries of, and guides to, ancient sources on the topic. Although the poet may have consulted some of the ancient sources in the original and perhaps, at some point during revisions, the history of Bouché-Leclercq (1913), his main sources for “Orophernes” were Bevan and Smith, whom he appears to have used in the way he had employed Gibbon a few years earlier: as a primary source, alongside the text of Constantine Paparrigopoulos’ History of the Greek Nation and occasionally following Gibbon’s citations to consult ancient sources (see Haas, 1982, pp. 31–33). In fact, Cavafy himself illustrated the method by which he used modern sources in many of his historical poems, including “Orophernes,” in a note documenting the composition of another poem, “Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.)”: The historian Bevan says – referring to this battle – that showing no sign of surrender, he sank at last full of wounds, dying worthily of the race of fighters from which he sprang. Josephus says that he fought bravely. But he received so many wounds that he could not endure any longer, so he fell. Smith says that “he is said to have displayed the utmost personal valour, but was ultimately defeated, and slain.”

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I draw the conclusion that having lost conviction in his plans, he sought at least to demonstrate in his defeat his dignity, the dignity of his lineage. I focus on a situation before the battle, my decision based on Josephus and Smith, and approving of Bevan’s opinion that his end was worthy of his descent. (Cavafy, 2019a; my translation) 2

Since “Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.)” was originally composed in 1915 and drew from the same historical sources as “Orophernes,” we may assume that Cavafy revised the latter poem at around the same time, i.e. shortly before its first printing. Despite contrary assurances by many critics and scholars (Pontani, 1991, p. 59; Malanos, 1957, pp.  314, 333; Delopoulos, 1978, p. 75; Apostolidis, 2006, p. 125; Lechonitis, 1977, p. 34), Bouché-Leclercq’s history of the Seleucids was clearly not Cavafy’s singular or main source for these poems. Stratis Tsirkas was correct in assuming the poet mainly worked with sources from his personal library which, as he noted, did not feature a copy of Bouché-Leclercq’s work (1982, pp. 39, 111, 113). But even if Cavafy did have a chance to look through the French historian’s work during revisions of “Orophernes,” he would not have found in it new information, aside from what he already knew from Bevan and Smith, whom he apparently continued to use as parallel historical sources for the rest of his life (a stack of notes preserved in the poet’s archive indicates that Cavafy used the works of Bevan and Smith, together with a set of encyclopedic dictionaries, as sources for a poem he composed in 1930) (Cavafy, 2019b). Rather than historical facts, Cavafy may have drawn certain narrative tropes from Bouché-Leclercq’s work, as for example the phrase “Justin assure que, d’accord avec les Antiochéniens, l’intrigant voulait détrôner son bienfaiteur. Il est possible. Oropherne, de par une généalogie qui faisait foi pour le peuple, n’était-il pas le petit-fils d’Antiochos le Grand?” (Bouché-Leclercq, 1913, p. 330) which may have informed lines 30–35 of the poem, or “On n’entend plus parler par la suite de cet aventurier, ce qui autorise à penser qu’il ne sortit pas vivant de sa prison” (ibid.), which may be reflected in lines 41–44 of Cavafy’s text. But Cavafy’s text also passes over a lot of relevant information, including, for example, the testimonies that Demetrius was paid 1000 talents to put Orophernes on the throne of Cappadocia; Orophernes’ pillage of the inviolate great temple of the Cappadocian Zeus on Mount Ariadne; his repeated attempts to assassinate his brother, Ariarathes V; his ruthless oppression of his subjects, which included “putting many to death, and

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confiscating their property” and more (Bevan, 1902, v. 2, pp. 205–209; Smith, ibid.). Brushing off such historical particulars, Cavafy effectively redeems Orophernes from the hubris of his actions, in order to present him as an essentially passive character, with no will of his own and narcissistically absorbed in his greed and crude hedonism. But the most radical departure of Cavafy’s narrative from historical accounts of Orophernes surely lies in his bold separation from his brother and rival Ariarathes V, to whom his historical profile is closely attached but who is banished from the poem and generally absent from Cavafy’s work. In the historical record, Orophernes is usually treated as an unfortunate brief episode in the first stages of Ariarathes’ long and happy reign of Cappadocia, a lowly usurper who essentially features as his brother’s Doppelgänger and whose singular claim to historical memory lies in his beautifully engraved coin. Cavafy’s text is probably the first to single out Orophernes and to treat his life story separately from that of his far more important and esteemed brother. This choice in itself produces the illusion of a historical discovery and at the same time it allows Cavafy to avoid the challenge of comparing Orophernes to his younger brother, who has been acclaimed as a distinguished philosopher-king. Cavafy surely read in Bevan that Orophernes’ brother, who remained on the throne of Cappadocia until 130 BCE, was “a man of whom our authorities speak highly, as having inherited from his mother Antiochis a love of Hellenic culture without her unscrupulous ambition. The Cappadocian court now for the first time attracted Greek men of letters. Ariarathes himself seems to have studied philosophy, and even applied its precepts to his practice” (Bevan, 1902, v. 2, p. 195). The poet probably also read in Smith’s Dictionary that Ariarathes “was distinguished by the excellence of his character and his cultivation of philosophy and the liberal arts” (Smith, 1880, v. 1., p. 284). In Mommsen’s History of Rome (another work he had in his library) Cavafy may have read that Ariarathes “was the means of introducing [Hellenic] culture into the hitherto almost barbarous Cappadocia” (Mommsen, 1863, p. 57. See Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, p. 139). As George Rawlinson had written: The character of Ariarathes V stands out in remarkable contrast to those of almost all his contemporaries. […] No cruel or perfidious deed of his doing is upon record. He conciliated the affection of his subjects and commanded the respect of his neighbours. The history of the three centuries after Alexander shows us no other monarch who led so pure and blameless a life. (Rawlinson, 1869, p. 300)

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The sharp contrast of the two brothers’ personalities acquires an ironic dimension once it is transferred to the field of numismatics, since Ariarathes’ tetradrachm, which is “strikingly similar and just as skillfully engraved” as that of Orophernes (Carter, 1983, p. 233), may have actually been the model to which the more famous coin described in Cavafy’s poem was “a reaction” (Gemini Numismatic Auctions, 2012, p. 43).

2   Historical Data and Poetic Narrative Despite its rich historical texture,  Cavafy’s portrait of Orophernes is clearly not compatible with the one projected in historical accounts. In place of the corrupt and ruthless usurper testified by ancient sources and described by modern historians, the poet offers a weak, idle and greedy childlike figure, who can do little more than “delight himself and boast,” “basking in revelry and idleness”; the poem’s protagonist is unable to control himself, let alone rule the state or even conspire effectively. This portrait is largely shaped by means of Cavafy’s narrative handling of the historical data he incorporated in the poem. As Helen Catsaouni has aptly noted, Cavafy’s historical perception is generally founded on appearances: “What matters is not what a person or a situation really is but how this person or this situation is presented to the eyes of other people. This presentation of historical events is based on Cavafy’s perception of the relativity of historical truth. According to his viewpoint, there are only ‘appearances,’ ‘perspectives,’ ‘aspects’ of historical events” (Catsaouni, 1983, p. 116). In contrast to historical accounts, which tend to highlight the character’s actions and trace their consequences, the narrator of “Orophernes” gives us glimpses of the hero’s internal life mostly through psycho-­narration3; this treatment brings forth the hero’s own sensations, feelings, emotions and occasional thoughts, and steers the reader toward empathetic understanding. In l. 9 (“Oh! Exquisite Ionian nights,”), Cavafy’s use of this technique verges on consonant narrated monologue, 4 as the narrator’s admiring perspective and warm, almost yearning, tone seems to fuse with the character’s Ionian experience and inner discourse. Consequently, the poem’s reader is constantly aware of how Orophernes felt: as a child, when he was expelled from the palace, as a “youth” in Ionia, later on, as an alienated king void of political interests and skills, and still later, as a castaway hiding in Syria. Psycho-narration builds sympathy for the hero, an undercurrent of emotional understanding that is at work even when the narrator

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appears to criticize his actions. This may be what George Seferis had in mind, when he referred to Cavafy’s “affective use of history” (1981, p. 399). As Haas has observed (1996, p. 311), Cavafy’s poetic rendering of Orophernes’ life seems to reflect his earlier observation on the poetry of Georgios Stratigis: “A great power, ‘the poetry that forgives’! The poetry that alone gives immortality –true, broad, unwavering immortality – and comprehends truth more fully because it thinks  – if I am allowed the expression – through the heart” (Cavafy, 2003b, p. 88; my translation). We also observe that, throughout the poem, Orophernes is presented as mostly receiving and suffering from rather than performing action: “they drove him out,” “they sent him away,” “declared him king,” “removed him,” “was overwhelmed.” The position of the “child” who was expelled “from the great ancestral palace” to “be forgotten among strangers” seems to stay with the hero throughout his adulthood and to re-interpret his disastrous political choices as symptoms of a childlike feebleness and a failure in self-determination. Cavafy’s Orophernes is unable to affirm his will against the stronger will of others, which constantly seems to determine his existence. What action is directly attributed to him (as, for example, in “he flung himself upon the kingship”) further exposes his lack of judgment and will, whereas its sole purpose is to allow him “to indulge,” “to gather,” “to delight himself and boast” etc. Orophernes is consistently portrayed as a child-king wasting all sorts of capital (aesthetic, sexual, political, and economic) and driven by a coarse and instinctive type of hedonism. His conduct contrasts sharply to the mature, refined and reserved hedonism manifest in the narrator’s tone and in his aesthetic handling of the hero’s portrait and story. “But let no one think that in the acquisition of wealth they were petty and avaricious,” Cavafy had written of the ancient Sophists, noting their excessive appreciation of “the good things of everyday life.” “Artists have their faults, but the two aforementioned were not among theirs. Moreover, the Sophists were true artists” (Cavafy, 2010, p. 114). Despite the beauty of his transcendental portrait, Orophernes was certainly not a true artist himself. In his historical poetry Cavafy often imitates an experienced antiquarian’s tone of voice, but he never reproduces historical narrative, which tends to acknowledge the gaps and contradictions of primary sources and to manifest a degree of interpretive uncertainty. This precarious tone is sometimes reflected in historical poems by other writers, as for example in Robert Browning’s “Protus,” whose narrator, as we saw in a previous

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chapter, appears to tell a story while simultaneously trying to make sense of the contradictions in the historical sources he uses. But in “Orophernes” the only piece of evidence read in the poem is the coin portrait. The hero’s biography is seemingly narrated from memory, and so the speaker’s words are more akin to personal testimony than to a historian’s idiom. Cavafy’s sympathetic narrative treats its childlike hero with the tenderness of a fairy tale: a tale of a beautiful, enchanting, wronged, weak, wasted and finally exhausted prince of Cappadocia. Just as the countenance engraved on the coin is read as a natural imprint that preserves the memory of a human face, the selective, apologetic and inward-looking storytelling of Orophernes’ life seeks to restore his memory by an act of “aesthetic redemption” (Roilos, 2009, p. 193). The poem’s commemorative drift is characteristically manifest in the speaker’s near-absurd insistence on the unregistered circumstances of the hero’s death (ll. 41–44), which I will now examine.

3  The Historical Archive and Its Antiquarian Shortcomings Lines 41–44 of “Orophernes” have often been read as a key for the interpretation of this poem and even for Cavafy’s historical poetics in general: His end was recorded somewhere and then lost; or perhaps History passed it by, and - with good reason - a thing as trivial as that she didn’t deign to record.   (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003a, p. 147)

Clearly, at a literal and historical level, there is neither loss nor want of information on Orophernes’ death. Ancient testimonies leave him defeated and imprisoned in Antioch by Demetrius, after the latter chose to spare his life. Some sources speculate that he died there, while others do not mention anything, because there is simply nothing more to say on this matter. The assumption put forth in l. 41 of the poem (“His end was recorded somewhere and then lost”) is actually rather awkward; is history required to record the demise of every single individual who enters its archive? Unlike the case of the emperor Severus, on whom Gibbon wrote that “History has scarcely deigned to notice his birth, his elevation, his character, or his death” (a phrase that Cavafy’s comment on Orophernes may

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indeed imitate, as suggested; Haas, 1996, p. 416), history has not overlooked the circumstances of Orophernes’ death. This is not a real historical void, but the poet’s fabrication; Cavafy here seems to picture History in true antiquarian fashion as an endless line of recorded tombstones. The main function of l. 41 is to color with irony the following three lines of the poem, creating the impression that history has somehow ignored or mistreated Orophernes. This impression is often taken up by critics who read this passage as a critique of “traditional,” “conventional” or “dominant” historiography (see for example Jusdanis, 1987, p. 110; Roilos, 2003, p. 623; Chryssanthopoulos, 2013, pp.  686–688), while interpreting the poem as a retrospective justification of the marginal historical figure through art or even as a triumph of Art over History (see Lagoudis Pinchin, 1977, p. 51; Kostiou, 2005, p. 148). As one commentator put it, This penultimate stanza, with its somewhat brutal conclusion, brings sharply to the fore the difference between history and the modernist poem: history chose not to commit to writing the end of Orophernis (or many other details of his life); it ignored him and allowed him nearly to disappear. By contrast, art preserved his beauty by inscribing it on the coin, and then devoted an entire poem to this obscure figure. (Jusdanis, 1987, pp. 109–110)

Cavafy’s protest against the inadequacy of the historical archive in “Orophernes” is a variation of the theme of romantic antiquarian melancholy at the annihilation of the past from human memory. In the age of historicism, the grief caused by the inevitable decay and elimination of the past due to the workings of time, nature or mortality has often evolved into remorse at the inadequacy of history, which inevitably betrays the task entrusted to it by humanity. What history registers and retains from the past is never enough, since it may never be recovered in all its varied facets and manifestations. In this vein, the selective compilation of the historical archive has been repudiated as a trivial and futile undertaking, not only by artists but also by historians. Thomas Carlyle, for example, writes in an elegiac tone in 1830 that “of our History the more important part is lost without recovery; and – as thanksgivings were once wont to be offered ‘for unrecognized mercies’- look with reverence into the dark untenanted places of the Past, where, in formless oblivion, our chief benefactors, with all their sedulous endeavors, but not with the fruit of these, lie entombed” (Carlyle, 2002, p.  6). This melancholy sentiment is at the heart of the

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antiquarian urge to register and collect anything and everything possible, in order  to create the universal  archive that historical narratives cannot establish. In this sense, Cavafy’s criticism of History poses a challenge against modern history’s aloofness and lack of concern for the individual subject in the name of an art that has inherited the typically antiquarian mode of addressing the past, through empathy, emotion and passion. Capitalizing on the imperfect nature of History, modern poetry has often claimed its own vital space and validity by authorizing an array of alternative historiographical projects, which usually call for a more direct form of access to the past, based on intuition or insight. Such an attempt may also be discerned in “Orophernes,” as a visual historical source (the coin portrait) and its intuitive aesthetic reading are designated to reveal compelling aspects of the past which are beyond the grasp of professional historians. We also note that in  lI. 41–44 History is personified as an overtly strict if not ruthless woman (Ricks, 2003, p. 139), who arbitrarily decides what part of human experience deserves to be committed to memory and what not. By virtue of this personification, the central segment of the poem (ll. 5–44) closes in a circular manner, since ll. 41–44 appear to mirror ll. 5–8 and to complete their meaning. The first cruel woman, the mother, who is present in the hero’s consciousness (l. 33) but absent from his life, lets him be expelled from the ancestral palace and sent away to “be forgotten among strangers” (my emphasis). As Cavafy read in Bevan, in Cappadocia “Antiochis was queen, and seems to have had her mild husband, Ariarathes IV Eusebes, completely in her hands” (1902, v. 2, p.  157). The second cruel woman, personified as History, passes by Orophernes’ end without deigning to record it and thus makes sure that he will be forgotten forever. Attuned to Orophernes’ childlike description, both of these acts are implicitly presented as forms of punishment (Dallas, 1987, p. 88). Only the poem’s speaker stands outside the vicious circle of female cruelty that condemns Orophernes to oblivion. He discovers the young man’s original mark on the tetradrachm, he deciphers its meaning and then he uses his art to make the “stele”: the poem, whose typographic form resembles a column and which of course memorializes Orophernes as a retrospective epitaph. As has been observed, Cavafy’s funerary poems often appear as “a textual grave, which receives the deceased in its bosom and offers him a second life through its ‘stelae’” (Tsirimokou, 2000, p. 319); this is probably the “second life” that History refused Orophernes, by ostracizing him from its archive.

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4  A Poet or a Historian? “Orophernes” has been interpreted as a critique of historical writing from the viewpoint of art or as a poem celebrating the triumph of poetry over history. In fact, the antinomy “Poetry vs. History” is at the center of Cavafy’s two surviving “self-comments,” which to a very large extent continue to direct the poem’s readings to this day. 5 Let us examine these comments, beginning with the notes A. Singopoulo recorded around 1918: I will deal with the poem “Orophernes” briefly. This is not about the character of an artist, but rather about artistic perception. The poem begins with a hymn to Orophernes: [Insert of lines 1–17] Yet this hymn is limited to the countenance of Orophernes. Then, from line 18 up to line 44, the artist fully regains his composure and describes this unworthy character in bleak colors. If the poem ended there, it would not tell us much as a perception of art; it would present the artist’s dual character as an admirer and idolizer of beauty and also as capable to see and to render reality. It would manifest nothing peculiar to C’s art. The last 5 verses change things completely; the poet first praises the beautiful youth and then describes the unworthy man. But after doing that he concludes with the following verses: [Insert of lines 45–49] That is, he circles back to the beginning of the poem. All the previous denunciation of Orophernes’ course is put to one side. It was recited in order for the presentation to be complete. It was recited with historical accuracy but not as having the importance it would have for the historian. The artist said these things, but he did not devote his attention to them. He is captivated by the coin on which was left a grace of beautiful youth, a light of poetic beauty, an aesthetic memory of an Ionian boy. (Savidis, 1987, p. 268; my translation)

We may also examine the brief comment on the same poem that Cavafy is thought to have shared with G. Lechonitis in 1930: A historical poem …. Remarkable is the contrast between the first four verses, which praise the beauty of Orophernes, the last five, which give us a nice aesthetic impression, and the main body of the poem in which the hero is described as he was, that is a scoundrel. (Lechonitis, 1977, p.  31; my translation)

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The brief comment by Lechonitis focuses on the contrast between Cavafy’s reading of the coin and the main body of the poem, which is here claimed to present Orophernes realistically as a scoundrel. In the far more analytical comment by Singopoulo, the coin portrait causes the artist-­narrator to lose his composure and to devote a hymn to Orophernes (ll. 1–17). In the main body of the poem, on the other hand, the narrator is presented to condemn Orophernes “with historical accuracy” for the sake of completeness and to prove that the artist is able to see and render reality. However, this condemnation does not have “the importance it would have had for the historian,” and in the poem’s conclusion it is set aside, as the infatuated narrator returns to the coin portrait and to the worship of the idealized boy of Ionia (ll. 45–49). Despite their slight differences, both of these “self-comments” focus on the contrast between the aesthetic features of the portrait which captivate the speaker and the historical figure who is condemned in the comments -although not in the poetic text—as “unworthy” and “a scoundrel.” Yet none of these claims is accurate. As shown especially by the sensual fantasy related in ll. 9–17, what the speaker sees in the portrait and is captured by is beyond aesthetic appreciation of a face’s beauty. The hero’s poetic biography, on the other hand, as previously discussed, is not historically precise and complete, while it tends more toward empathetic exoneration rather than condemnation of a “scoundrel.” As George Seferis generally observed in the 1940s, the explanations Cavafy appears to have offered in his “self-comments” must be read with great caution: “I say that Cavafy never opened his heart to anyone, nor his thinking, and I have made up my mind never to feel constrained by ephemeral or ulterior statements, unless his poems verify them” (Seferis, 1981, p. 437; my translation). Cavafy’s “self-comments” on “Orophernes” clearly vindicate this view. The so-called self-comments that Cavafy dictated to his entourage and usually meant for wide distribution need to be distinguished from some notes of the poet that were clearly not meant to be read by others, but are unfortunately referred to by the same term (see, for example, Haas, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018). Comments of the former type, including those by Singopoulo and Lechonitis, are not expressions of the poet’s genuine understanding of his poems’ meaning, as they have commonly been thought of ever since Malanos argued, in 1933, that Singopoulo’s comments reflect “Cavafy’s personal interpretations” of his poems (1957, p. 16). This of course is not to say that these texts are “traps” that were

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deliberately planted by the poet to perplex future generations of his readers or to show “‘the intellectual elite’ of his and later times for the precocious windbags they really were” (Phillipson, 2013, p. xli). Cavafy’s self-explanatory glosses were meant to promote selected specimens from his poetry to a broader audience by simplifying, making palatable and even trivializing the poems’ content. If these comments reveal something about the poet, that is not what he read in his poems, but rather how he assessed the readers of his time and place: their intellectual capacity, their horizon of expectations and the range of their tolerance. Through these texts the poet tried to “instruct the Alexandrian public how it should read his poetry” (Tsirkas, 1963, p. 694), yet he did this by offering his own detailed misreadings of his work. Cavafy’s ostensibly elucidating comments are fascinating exercises in self-censorship. The poet engaged in a radical interpretive reworking  to adjust his work to the preferences, expectations and prejudices of his audience. These glosses, together with the steadfast promotion of some of his more innocuous early poems, were part of Cavafy’s intricately woven protective strategy and as such they testify to his “rare diplomatic dexterity.” The reasons that compelled him to develop such a strategy were eloquently explained by his friend Yiannis Sareyannis in 1944: I knew well how prudish the Alexandria of his time was. Before 1914, in his city and particularly within his class, there prevailed an imitation of Victorian morality – of the most narrow minded, anti-aesthetic kind. In such an atmosphere, a scandal such as that of Oscar Wilde could easily have been repeated. Cavafy ran the risk of seeing his relatives’ homes closed to him, of being ostracized, of no longer being greeted on the street, or even – and I have in mind specific facts  – being banished from the city he loved. And yet he dared. Moreover, he managed not only not to be ostracized or banished, but to die as an honored man in an Alexandria that had grown proud of him. That achievement must have caused him many pains, endless calculations, and infinite time, which must have been valuable to a poet-craftsman like himself. To bring it off, he developed a rare diplomatic dexterity. I remember that, as a young man, I would be annoyed by the perpetual publishing and republishing of the tiresome poem “Candles” – and by seeing Cavafy allow this republishing to take place. Much later on, I realized what an important screen this was. Behind the curtain of the “Candles,” Cavafy hid and fortified his entire work. In his whole lifetime he never gave out one of his “dangerous” poems more than once to the general public and to

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periodicals. His poems were published slowly, a drop at a time, until the public had become immune to their poison and no longer had the strength to be shocked, to react, to cry scandal. “Cavafy may be forgiven for many things, since he wrote ‘Candles,’ the most beautiful poem written in our language,” is a typical remark which I heard frequently from old and well-­ established Alexandrians. (Sareyannis, 1983, pp. 125–126)

In his self-comments on “Orophernes” Cavafy engages in interpretive self-censorship on three levels: (a) by carefully eliminating all homoerotic insinuations from his text, whether implicit, as in the emotional charge of the speaker’s tone, or more explicit and risqué, as in the account of the hero’s Ionian phase; (b) by assuring his readers that the poem condemns its protagonist as an unworthy scoundrel, thus preempting the accusation that he absolves a notorious historical character blinded by his beauty; and (c) by effectively reducing the poem to a contrast between the aesthetic charm of a historical  figure’s countenance and his moral and political unscrupulousness. These comments seem to set aside the actual poem in order to present the item that inspired it; they might indeed be part of a conventional antiquarian presentation of a Hellenistic coin depicting a handsome but worthless prince. It may be useful here to compare Cavafy’s comments on “Orophernes” to an unfinished poem of his, provisionally entitled “The item in the newspaper,” which appears to have been composed in 1918: THE ITEM IN THE NEWSPAPER Melancholy, in the tram, he was reading the news item. The crime took place last night, about eleven o’ clock. The murderer had not as yet been found. Something was written also about blackmail. At which point the newspaper once more underlined its utter disdain for the profligate, the dissolute and corrupted morals. Its disdain… And he, grieving inwardly, recalled an evening from the year before they’d spent together in a room at a lodging house (part hotel, part brothel):

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they never met afterwards — not even in the street. Its disdain…And he recalled the sweet lips, the white, exquisite, heavenly flesh which he didn’t kiss long enough. At eleven o’ clock, at night, they found the body, at the wharf. It wasn’t certain that a crime had been committed. He went on reading. The newspaper was mistaken, it couldn’t have been eleven, but much later. Until twelve they were together (for the first time — they barely knew each other by sight). The newspaper expressed its pity, yet, self-righteously, showed all its disdain for the most profligate life of the victim.       (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou, © 2023 Onassis Foundation)

Despite its very different setting and outlook, this poem also centers on the conflict between a private-sensual and a public-moral perception of the same text, as a man’s longing for his lover is contrasted to the latter’s condemnation in the  report of his violent death. Cavafy’s comments on “Orophernes” seem to fold in his poem the newspaper’s attitude, which “expressed its pity, yet, self-righteously,/ showed all its disdain for the most/ profligate life of the victim,” precisely because these comments are addressed to such a newspaper’s readers. Few of the critics who have commented on “Orophernes” would agree with Roilos’ accurate observation that Cavafy’s account “despite its purported historicity, remains highly poetic and fictitious” (2009, pp. 191–192). The poem’s critical reception usually confirms its historical accuracy. This false impression is partly due to the awkward method by which critics tend to test a poem’s historicity, comparing isolated phrases or verses to fragments from ancient sources. By virtue of this practice any factual correspondence, as for example between the “stupor” in l. 36 of the poem and Aelian’s portrayal of Orophernes as a drunkard, may be seen to verify “Cavafy’s extreme accuracy” (Dallas, 1987, p.  56; see also Phillipson, 2013, pp. 280–282). This leads to the conclusion that Cavafy

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is “accurately drawing the historical portrait of Orophernes” (Phillipson, 2013, p. 282) or that the poem’s speaker functions as a “mouthpiece for [Orophernes’] prevalent perception, which is the perception of History” (Kostiou, 2005, p. 145). Ultimately, the poem is read as a paraphrase of Cavafy’s self-comments: a confrontation between History and Art, which ends in the latter’s triumphant victory over the former (Kostiou, 2005, pp. 145–152; Phillipson, 2013, p. 282). More refined critical approaches seem to find in Cavafy’s text a clash between actual historical accounts and the desire for an alternative “history of artistic depictions (the coin as image), of the senses and the emotions,” which was not part of the historians’ craft in Cavafy’s time (Chryssanthopoulos, 2013, p.  688). In a similar vein, Cavafy’s “poet-­ historian” has been argued to subvert “the work of the historian in order to see, by means of sensual intuition, something different in it, something personal, individual, and subjective, and to present an alternative view to the prevailing one” (Mackridge, 2007, xxvi). But of course Cavafy’s historicism is also, to a large extent, committed to homoerotic desire. His historical figures are not merely “marginal” or “mediocrities” (Jusdanis, 1987, p. 110); they are also often capable of sexually attracting the poem’s modern speaker. In this sense, Cavafy’s alternative history is not generally oriented toward the senses and emotions, or toward subjectivity and its artistic manifestations; it is far more closely focused on the urge to construct a genealogy of homosexual feelings and their cultural manifestations. The poet’s historicism aims to recover the silenced histories of individuals and communities who expressed such feelings, usually by means of suggestion or codification, or who lived by them in the past. But even so, no poetic history possesses the means or the power to challenge and substitute the narratives of historians, to which alternative poetic histories are usually greatly indebted. Cavafy’s challenge to History is generally manifest through his adoption and re-imagining of aspects of the antiquarian legacy, with its special attention to the subjective, the partial and the particular. In this he was in line with many modern poets who, like antiquaries, “saw their work as complementary to that of the historians and claimed to add dimensions of knowledge about the past that were highly useful to history, but only available” by their own methods (Eriksen, 2014, p. 30). Cavafy’s historical project would hardly be original if it were merely a critique of “the way in which historical narration is constructed,” i.e. of

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“the history of rulers, their wars, the administration of their lands” (Chryssanthopoulos, 2013, p. 688) or limited to “designating as subjects the failures and the forgotten” against “traditional historiography,” which “primarily records sensational events, golden ages, and great men” (Jusdanis, ibid.). As Ann Rigney has shown, opposition to the history of kings and their wars and the imperative to recover and retell the silenced facets of past human experience were pursuits that were commonly voiced in literature as well as historiography in the early nineteenth century. J. Sarazin, as she reminds us, “summed up in 1835 the principal developments in French historiography of the previous decades with the motto: ‘It is not enough, therefore, for the historian to relate in an interesting fashion the course of wars and diplomatic missions, the deaths and coronations of kings’” (Rigney, 2001, p. 71). But Cavafy was not philosophically concerned with the inevitable incompleteness of the historical record or the undocumented lives of people whose memories are erased with time’s passing. Such antiquarian sentiments were mostly superimposed on his work, as protective shields or naturalizing agents. The neglected persons, passions and emotions Cavafy brings to light are specifically coded, whether visibly connected to homoerotic desire or not. Themes like social isolation, the frustration of hopes and the failure of plans, or even historical obscurity in itself may induce the modern homosexual reader to acknowledge and engage in aspects of his own historicity. As Bruce Frier suggests, Cavafy evidently associates his own preoccupations as a homosexual poet with his perception of how the Hellenistic world was politically marginalized as a result of Roman conquest. There is, he implies, or at least suggests, a broad parallel between these disparate phenomena, one that he can then use in order to bring his own marginalized sexual persona into alliance with his marginalized social and political persona. (Frier, 2010, p.  32; see also Papanikolaou, 2014, esp. pp. 232–245)

Insofar as Cavafy holds a grudge against historians this is not really focused on their methods and processes, but rather on the prudish ethos that often governs their writing and on the harshness of their judgments for men who fell victim to their passions. Cavafy’s response to this is articulated in two ways, both of which are manifest in “Orophernes.” First, by the elaboration of an alternative martyrology: a series of memorial portraits that commemorate sensual, hedonistic and impassioned figures from

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the distant past intermingled with similar present-day figures; young men whom time, the absence or erosion of monuments, their own weaknesses and passions or those of their friends wiped out from collective memory. And second, by highlighting the value of voyeuristic pleasure for aesthetic historical reflection and for the development of the artist’s sensual fantasy. As Cavafy’s poetry affirms, coin portraits and ancient objects and artworks, just as modern photographs and even chance observations of men on the street, may afford a visceral kind of understanding and a seemingly immediate sense of connection to objects of erotic desire which are either lost in the depths of History or otherwise inaccessible in the social present.

Notes 1. For more recent accounts of Orophernes’ history see Habicht (2006) and Facella (2012). 2. For this note’s transcription see Haas (2018, pp. 101–102). 3. This method of consciousness portrayal involves “the narrator’s discourse about a character’s consciousness” (Cohn, 1978, p.  14). It is a relatively indirect mode of consciousness depiction, compared to other relevant techniques (internal monologue, for example), but also particularly flexible. It allows for combinations of omniscience and fixed internal focalization (or even external focalization), as well as seamless transitions from the representation of thoughts to “other mind stuff” (p. 11), such as memories, sensations, emotions, unuttered feelings, the subconscious, visual images, dreams etc. Thanks are due to Katerina Karatassou for her help in this analysis. 4. According to Cohn, narrated monologue “like psycho-narration […] maintains the third-person reference and the tense of narration, but like the quoted monologue […] reproduces verbatim the character’s own mental language” (1978, p. 14). 5. Savidis, who published Singopoulo’s comment on “Orophernes” in 1983, suggests that it was intended for publication together with Singopoulo’s lecture on Cavafy (delivered in Alexandria, on 23.2.1918) and presumes that “Cavafy dictated brief comments” which Singopoulo “subsequently developed further,” while Cavafy also made “corrections to the final version” (Savidis, 1987, p. 250). Tsirkas, who suggested that Singopoulo’s lecture “was written by the poet,” considered it “the most authentic interpretation” of his poems (Tsirkas, 1963, p. 694). Lechonitis’ comments were first published in 1942. As the author suggested, they were provided by Cavafy in response to his request “to give me some clarifications on a number of his poems” (Lechonitis, 1977, p. 14).

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References Apostolidis, R., Apostolidis, I. and Apostolidis, S. (Eds.) (2006). Κ. Π. Καβάφης, Άπαντα τα δημοσιευμένα ποιήματα. Athens: Ta Nea Ellinika. Bevan, E. R. (1902). The Ηouse of Seleucus (Vols 1-2). London: E. Arnold. Bouché-Leclercq, A. (1913). Histoire des Séleucides (323-64 avant J.-C.) (V. 1-2). Paris: E. Leroux. Carlyle, T. (2002). Historical Essays (Ed. Chris R. Vanden Bossche). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Carter, J.  C. (1983). The Sculpture of the Sanctuary of Athena Polias at Priene. London: Society of Antiquaries and British Museum. Catsaouni, Η. (1983). Cavafy and the Theatrical Representation of History. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 10, 105–116. Cavafy, C. P. (2003a). 154 Poems (Trans. E. Sachperoglou). Athens. Cavafy, C. P. (2003b). Τα Πεζά (1882; - 1931) (ed. M. Pieris). Athens: Ikaros. Cavafy, C. P. (2010). Selected Prose Works (translated and annotated by P. Jeffreys). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cavafy, C.  P. (2019a). Notes by Cavafy. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF01-­S03-­F10-­0008 Cavafy, C.  P. (2019b). Notes by Cavafy. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/ca-­sf01-­s03-­f10-­0013 Chryssanthopoulos, M. (2013). ‘Ποιητής ιστορικός.’ Το καβαφικό κείμενο ως στοχασμός επί της ιστοριογραφίας. Nea Estia, 1860, 663–688. Cohn, D. (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dallas, Y. (1987). Σπουδές στον Καβάφη. Athens: Kedros. Delopoulos, K. (1978). Καβάφη ιστορικά και άλλα πρόσωπα (2nd ed.). Athens: ELIA. Eriksen, A. (2014). From Antiquities to Heritage: Transformations of Cultural Memory. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Erskine, A. (2003). A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Oxford: Blackwell. Facella, M. (2012). Orophernes of Cappadocia. In R. S. Bagnall et al (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (pp. 4940-4941). Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Frier, B. (2010), Making History Personal: Constantine Cavafy and the Rise of Rome, Cavafy Forum, Window to Greek Culture: University of Michigan Department of Modern Greek. https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/ modgreek-­assets/modgreek-­docs/CPC_Frier_Makinghistorypersonal.pdf. Gemini Numismatic Auctions (2012). Gemini Numismatic Auctions: Auction X. Chicago, IL: Harlan J. Berk. Haas, D. (1982). Cavafy’s reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Folia Neohellenica, 4, 25–96. Haas, D. (1996). Le Problème religieux dans l’oeuvre de Cavafy. Les années de formation (1882–1905). Paris: Presses de l’Universite de Paris-Sorbonne.

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Haas, D. (2012). Κ.Π. Καβάφης: Ανέκδοτο αυτοσχόλιο στο ποίημα “Η ναυμαχία.” Logeion, 2, 200–215. Haas, D. (2013). Κ.Π. Καβάφης: Ανέκδοτο αυτοσχόλιο στο ποίημα “Tα δ’ άλλα εν Άιδου τοις κάτω μυθήσομαι.” Logeion, 3, 132–144. Haas, D. (2015). Κ.Π. Καβάφης: Ανέκδοτο αυτοσχόλιο στο ποίημα “Φωνὲς.” Kondiloforos, 14, 101–129. Haas, D. (2018). Κ. Π. Καβάφης: Αυτοσχόλια στα ποιήματα “Δημητρίου Σωτήρος (162-150 π.Χ.” και “Η Δυσαρέσκεια του Σελευκίδου.” Kondiloforos,16, 97–140. Habicht, C. (2006). The Hellenistic Monarchies: Selected Papers. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Jusdanis, G. (1987). The Poetics of Cavafy. Textualism, Eroticism, History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Karampini-Iatrou, M. (2003). H Bιβλιοθήκη Κ.Π. Καβάφη. Athens: Ermis. Kostiou, K. (2005). Ο Οροφέρνης, οι Λακεδαιμόνιοι και ο αμφίθυμος αφηγητής. In M. Mike et al (Eds.), Ο λόγος της παρουσίας: τιμητικός τόμος για τον Παν. Μουλλά (pp. 143–152). Athens: Sokolis. Lagoudis Pinchin, J. (1977). Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lechonitis, G. (1977). Καβαφικά αυτοσχόλια (2nd ed). Athens. Mackridge, P. (2007). Introduction. C.  P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems (trans. E. Sachperoglou, pp. xi-xxxiii). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Magill, F.  N. et  al (Eds.) (1998). Dictionary of World Biography (vol. 1. The Ancient World). London: Fitzroy Dearborn. Malanos, T. (1957). Ο ποιητής Κ. Π. Καβάφης. Ο άνθρωπος και το έργο του. Athens: Difros. Mommsen, T. (1863). The History of Rome (Trans. W.  P. Dickson, vol. 3). London: Bentley. Papanikolaou, D. (2014). “Σαν κ’ εμένα καμωμένοι”: Ο ομοφυλόφιλος Καβάφης και η ποιητική της σεξουαλικότητας. Patakis: Athens. Phillipson, J. (2013). C.  P. Cavafy: Historical Poems. A Verse Translation with Commentaries. Bloomington, IN.: Author House. Pontani, F.  M. (1991). Επτά δοκίμια και μελετήματα για τον Καβάφη 1936-1974. Athens: MIET. Rawlinson, G. (1869). A Manual of Ancient History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Richards, F.  T. (1903). Bevan’s House of Seleucus. The Classical Review, 17(6), 317–321. Ricks, D. (2003). How It Strikes a Contemporary: Cavafy as a Reviser of Browning. Κάμπος: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek, 11, 131–152. Rigney, A. (2001). Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Roilos, P. (2003). Επιθυμία και μνήμη στο έργο του Καβάφη. Nea Estia, 1761, 607–623.

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Roilos, P. (2009). C. P. Cavafy. The Economics of Metonymy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sareyannis, J.  A. (1983). What Was Most Precious  - His Form [1944]. Trans. D. Haas. Grand Street, 2(3), 108–126. Savidis, G. P. (1987). Μικρά καβαφικά, Β’. Athens: Ermis. Seferis, G. (1981). Δοκιμές Α’ (4th ed.). Athens: Ikaros. Sinor, D. (1967). Review of E. R. Bevan, The House of Seleucus , vols. I–II. Journal of Asian History, 1(1), 103–104. Smith, W. (1880). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (Vols. 1-3). London: John Murray. Tsirimokou, L. (2000). Εσωτερική ταχύτητα. Δοκίμια για τη λογοτεχνία. Athens: Agra. Tsirkas, S. (1963). Κ. Π. Καβάφης. Σχεδίασμα χρονογραφίας του βίου του. Epitheorisi Technis, 108, 676–706. Tsirkas, S. (1982). Ο πολιτικός Καβάφης (4th ed.). Athens: Kedros.

PART II

Cavafy Reads Inscriptions

CHAPTER 5

“Caesarion” as Palimpsest

1   Caesarion in History “Caesarion” (1918) has long been hailed as “virtually a key to our whole understanding of Cavafy’s work” (Robinson, 1988, p. 86). The poem’s title refers to Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor, son of the seventh and most famous Cleopatra and allegedly Julius Caesar and nominally the last monarch of the Lagid dynasty in Egypt. He was born in 47 BCE and was put to death by Octavian seventeen years later, shortly after the suicides of Antony and his mother.1 The poem begins with a reading of Ptolemaic inscriptions and ends with the word “Πολυκαισαρίη” (“too Many Caesars”). According to Plutarch, this term was coined after Homer’s Iliad by an advisor to Octavian, Areius Didymus, as a warning against letting the boy live; it is often quoted by historians and critics alike as a code-word that signaled Caesarion’s cruel destiny. Cavafy’s appropriation of this ancient word in the Modern Greek text brings to the poem an aura of authenticity and also enhances his own pose as a scholar-poet, who converses directly with ancient sources, unearthing lost treasures from historical oblivion. Yet, despite its almost unanimous critical validation, this was indeed a pose. Cavafy was a brilliant artist and surely a modernist, for reasons which include the shrewd interplay with scholarly and other texts he carries off in his poetry, but he was neither a historian nor a scholar.2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Kayalis, Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7_5

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CAESARION In part to examine an era, and in part to while away the time, last night I picked up to read a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions. The copious praises, the flatteries                  5 befit them all. All are illustrious, glorious, mighty, beneficent; their every endeavors the wisest. As for the females of that line, those, too, the Berenices, the Cleopatras, all are admirable.               10 When I had finally examined the era, I would have put the book away, had not a small, insignificant mention of King Caesarion at once attracted my attention … Oh! Here you came with your indefinable             15 allure. In historic records only a few lines are dedicated to you, and thus more freely I could form you in my mind. I made you to be beautiful and sentimental. My art imparts upon your face                  20 a dreamlike, congenial grace. And so fully I envisaged you that late last night, as my lamp died out – I deliberately let it die out – I imagined that you entered my room;               25 it seemed as if you stood before me, as you would have been in vanquished Alexandria, pale and weary, ideally beautiful in your sorrow, still hoping they would show you mercy, the villains who were whispering: ‘Too Many Caesars!’        30 (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 187)

Most readings of this popular poem are based on two false assumptions. The first of these is that Caesarion was an obsolete historical figure, lost in the depths of antiquity until Cavafy drew attention to him. Jusdanis, for example, refers to Caesarion as a “marginalized figure” and places him

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among “the mediocrities of the world” (1987, pp. 107, 110). Robinson refers to “History’s failure to notice the boy” and considers Caesarion “almost untouched by History” (1988, p. 83). This notion is sometimes embellished into a philological romance of sorts, in which Cavafy’s poetry is praised for saving the young Prince from historical amnesia: “For while history pitilessly abandons Caesarion to oblivion, poetry not only rescues him but also recreates him for modern times” (Jusdanis, 2015, p. 116). Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, Caesarion’s disappearance from collective memory is a purely fictional construction. Caesarion is indeed a historical figure about whom scarce information exists, due to the lack of dependable primary sources (which is largely true for all the Ptolemies, including the famous Cleopatra VII);3 but this does not make him “barely known” or “forgotten” (Jusdanis, 1987, pp.  107, 108). As we will see later on, contrary to popular belief, the young Ptolemy Caesar was wellknown to nineteenth-century audiences and enjoyed a broad circulation in European letters, both as historical and as literary character, long before Cavafy expressed an interest in him. The second popular assumption about “Caesarion” holds that the poem is a confession of an actual incident in the poet’s life, which somehow reveals his method of composing historical poems. As a long line of critics have assumed, Cavafy spent many a night perusing books of inscriptions and other scholarly works, in which he discovered rare references to all-but-forgotten historical figures (e.g., Phillipson, 2013, p.  447). The poet later fantasized about these figures, presumably engaging in some form of sexual self-gratification before transforming the whole experience into a poem.4 As C.  Th. Dimaras affirmed, back in 1932, “Caesarion” shows “how, and with what persistence, the poet’s eroticism had been crystallizing for years around the same fantasy. … it really is a lyrical confession, a description of the way in which the poet draws sensual pleasure from history” (Dimaras, 1983, p. 154). Through such literal readings, the intricate mechanism of Cavafy’s historical poetics is explained away as pure reverie and his homosexuality, conveniently dissociated from any conjecture of physicality, is turned into a matter of pure fantasy. Cavafy, however, was not a confessional late-Romantic poet; these common critical fallacies dissolve into thin air when we probe into the poem’s actual cultural and textual substratum.

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Caesarions Everywhere In 1914, when Cavafy wrote the first draft of “Caesarion,” which was entitled “Of Ptolemy Caesar” (Cavafy, 2019; see Lavagnini, 2017, pp. 123–148) (Fig. 5.1), Egypt’s long-established appeal to the European colonial imagination was gathering new force by the growing production of academic disciplines such as numismatics, epigraphy, papyrology and of course Egyptology, as well as by the impact of new trends and practices in museum exhibitions. These were the high times of Egyptomania, in which the public’s thirst for mystery and romance blended with the British Empire’s will to amass, organize and classify ancient material objects to produce a yearning for popularized scholarship and a taste for all things Egyptian (see Reid, 2002; Colla, 2007; Parramore, 2008; Brier, 2013). This trend influenced almost every aspect of Western culture, including “painting, photography, clothing styles, travel literature, novels, popular songs, classical music, word’s fairs, guidebooks, postcards, and postage-­ stamps” (Reid, 2002, p. 12). In this cultural context, it was not easy to ignore the story of an Alexandrian “ephebe” who was the presumed offspring of one of the most famous pairings in ancient history and also the last Ptolemy and last Pharaoh of Egypt and a young man whose assassination is said to have signaled the end of the Hellenistic era. In Cavafy’s time, Caesarion was a familiar and highly recognizable historical figure mentioned or more extensively portrayed in a large spectrum of texts, which ranged from reference works and scholarly studies to popular culture. Cavafy did not need to consult ancient sources in order to retrieve historical information on Caesarion; all he had to do was open his copy of William Smith’s Dictionary (1880, p.  556), still shelved in his library (Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, p.  121), to find out most of what is known about the boy from Dio Cassius, Suetonius and Plutarch. The poet did not have to go to Plutarch even for the word “polukaisarie”; it features as an entry in the Greek lexicon by E. A. Sophocles (1870, p. 905) which also survives in Cavafy’s library (see Karampini-Iatrou, ibid., p. 119). Caesarion was discussed in many of Cleopatra’s biographies (Houssaye, 1890; Sergeant, 1909; Weigall, 1914 and others) and also in works of popular culture, like Douglas Sladen’s Queer things about Egypt (1910). Cavafy may have seen Auguste Bouché-Leclercq’s Histoire des Lagides (1903–1907), whose second volume treats Caesarion’s story and the circumstances of his death and has been erroneously claimed as the poem’s

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Fig. 5.1  “Of Ptolemy Caesar.” First page of Cavafy’s manuscript © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation

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main scholarly source (Malanos, 1957, p. 327; Tsirkas, 1982, pp. 111–112; Delopoulos, 1978, p. 78; Dallas, 1987, p. 76). But he was more familiar with J. P. Mahaffy’s The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895), which he owned and certainly used in composing the poem. More material on Caesarion was available to the poet from Greek publications. As Stratis Tsirkas has suggested (1982, p. 112), Cavafy was surely familiar with the Alexandrinos Diakosmos, an extensive biographical compendium “of Greeks and Hellenists who flourished in ancient Alexandria” in the span of almost a millennium, from 331  BC to 645  AD.  This work was compiled by the medical doctor and journalist Dionysios Oikonomopoulos and published in Alexandria, in 1889. In it, Cavafy would have found most of what we know about Caesarion from ancient sources and also the assertion that “his name is not mentioned in any Greek inscription, nor has a coin been found carrying his image” (Oikonomopoulos, 1889, pp. 241–242. Also, see Tsirkas, 1982, p. 112). Clearly, then, Caesarion’s historical status in Cavafy’s time was neither marginal nor null, as we have been accustomed to believe. On the contrary, he was a highly recognizable figure, especially through the spread of the myth of Cleopatra, whose name had become “a signifier for Egypt itself” (Wyke and Montserrat, 2011, p. 173), and one that often sprung up in various occasions and manners. In 1866, for example, the same year in which the French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan hailed Caesarion as the “national Messiah” of Hellenistic Egypt (1866, p. 284), fans of London’s musical theater could see him on stage as a seven-year-­ old boy, in F. C. Burnand’s exotic burlesque “Antony and Cleopatra; or, His-tory and her-story in a modern Nilo-metre” (1866; see also Wyke and Montserrat, 2011, pp.  176–177). A few years later Caesarion’s name would be given to a horse, which ran in the newly built race course of Kempton Park, in Surrey (Anon., 1878). Surely, Cavafy could not have been unaware of the heavy circulation of his hero’s name and story when he sat to write his own “discovery” of Caesarion, first in 1914 and then again in 1918. The poem’s interpretation as a literal account drawn from Cavafy’s personal experience has tempted many researchers to look for the elusive book of inscriptions in which the poet could have found that “insignificant mention” of Caesarion. To this end, F. M. Pontani (1991, p. 61) examined collections of inscriptions by Letronne (1842–48), Strack (1897) and Dittenberger (1903) (see also Frier, 2010, p. 28; Phillipson, 2013, p. 446); others (see  Apostolidis et  al., 2006, pp.  173–174) checked Boeckh’s

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collection (1853) and Breccia’s catalogue (1911). Yet all these efforts were to no avail, as the poem clearly sets up a fictional reading of a made­up book. Cavafy’s purported reading of Ptolemaic inscriptions is indeed convincing (and has convinced generations of readers and critics) because it was not entirely improvised by the poet. Instead, Cavafy appropriated and transformed this reading from a true expert’s commentary on Ptolemaic inscriptions that he found in a historical study (whose author he also probably used as an autobiographical narrative persona in the poem’s first part). Cavafy’s ingenious handling of a historical source thus invested his poem with a truer-than-life quality but also contributed to its common trivialization as an autobiographical episode. Cavafy Reads Mahaffy The book Cavafy used as a blueprint to compose “Caesarion” is, beyond a shade of doubt, The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895) by the legendary Irish classicist John Pentland Mahaffy, a papyrologist and Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College, Dublin (Fig. 5.2). Cavafy owned this book and his copy is still shelved in his library (Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, 67). Mahaffy was an eccentric and ebullient polymath, and also a protestant clergyman, Unionist Tory and fervent supporter of the British Empire (see Stanford and McDowell, 1971). He was famous for many things, including his snobbism and wit, as well as his influence on his student Oscar Wilde whom he brought with him to Greece in April 1877, to save him from the allure of Catholicism. Mahaffy was a frequent visitor to Egypt and in 1892 he delivered a lecture at the “Athenaeum” Club (a short-lived precursor to the Archaeological Society of Alexandria). As Tsirkas assumed, Cavafy probably attended this lecture, was impressed by Mahaffy and so obtained his book on the Ptolemies as soon as it was published (1982, pp. 112–113). However, Tsirkas’ astute suggestion that Mahaffy’s book is “the most probable source” for the composition of “Caesarion” (p.  81) generally went unheeded by subsequent critics. Reading marks on the poet’s copy of Mahaffy’s book show that Cavafy read it very carefully and probably also used it for other poems. In the case of “Caesarion,” however, he did not treat it as a source of historical information, but rather as a storehouse of narrative patterns, tropes and motifs, which he appropriates, mimics and revises in the poem’s initial stanzas. Cavafy’s bold and inspired artistic reworking of a scholarly historical

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Fig. 5.2  John Pentland Mahaffy, c. 1910–1919. The Keogh Photographic Collection, National Library of Ireland

narrative reveals an important aspect of his writing method, which is worth examining in more detail. A brief passage from Mahaffy’s book may have originally stimulated Cavafy’s interest in Caesarion and ultimately entered the poem as “a small, insignificant mention” (l. 13). In it, the historian refers to the lack of evidence on Caesarion’s looks, character and life in an almost elegiac tone: Caesarion is one of those figures about whom we should gladly learn more, but about whom history preserves an obstinate silence. […] He had reached an age when several of his dynasty had not only sat upon the throne, but led armies, begotten children, and engaged in councils of state. Yet not one word of his appearance, of his habits, of his betrothal in marriage to any princess, is recorded. (Mahaffy, 1895, p. 481)5

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Clearly, a major trope used in Cavafy’s poem, the paradoxical figuration of Caesarion as a fascinating character because of all that we don’t know about him, was already formulated in Mahaffy’s narrative. We may also note that Mahaffy’s comment on History’s “obstinate silence” refers to the lack of archaeological and textual evidence on Caesarion, whereas Cavafy’s variation of this phrase (“In historic records only/ a few lines are dedicated to you”) has generally been read as referring to the negligence of modern historians rather than to the dearth of ancient sources. There is more evidence to suggest that the collection of inscriptions in Cavafy’s poem is in fact Mahaffy’s book in disguise. The dating of Ptolemaic inscriptions is a challenge even for experts, so it is highly improbable that anyone familiar with this kind of material would go to a collection of this sort to check on a date. But Mahaffy’s book is an excellent source for such information, as it contains a useful chronology, from 322 to 30  BC (pp. xvii–xxv), which we may safely assume that Cavafy consulted whenever he needed to check a date on the Ptolemies. So, we may infer that the poem’s fictional book of inscriptions stands for Mahaffy’s historical study, in which Cavafy found a “small, insignificant mention” of Caesarion and which he would also casually consult for chronological information. But Cavafy’s use of Mahaffy’s book, as we will now see, was not limited to the retrieval of data. In fact, Mahaffy’s idiosyncratic style and the interweaving of his historical narration with excerpts and readings of inscriptions and papyri were more useful to the poet than the historical information offered in his book. Mahaffy writes the history of the Ptolemies mainly on the basis of newly discovered inscriptions and papyri which, as he noted, “are finding their way into our museums every year” as “a vast body of isolated facts” that must be put in order, deciphered and explained (p. 3). As he also stated, “Instead of stuffing my pages full of isolated references to classical and post-classical authors … I have rather striven to cite in full such evidence as is not easily accessible; hence the extant Ptolemaic inscriptions, which are important, will be found textually in this volume” (vii–viii). This method was not common in academic practice at the time. As George Goodspeed, a Professor of Ancient History at Chicago wrote in his 1896 review of Mahaffy’s book, Mahaffy has a peculiar method of writing history. He is discursive, garrulous, and at the same time does not hesitate to insert in the body of his text

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original documents, snatches of philological and paleographic lore. The combination makes somewhat difficult reading, especially when the subject is intrinsically complex. (Goodspeed, 1896, pp. 519–520)

Mahaffy frequently interrupts his proper historical narrative to insert extracts from inscriptions and to present his own inferences or to counter the assumptions of previous commentators, or even to make humorous or sarcastic remarks. As a result of this, the historian’s text often reads like an epigrapher’s field journal, as it amply illustrates both the difficulty of reading inscriptions and the precarious nature of their interpretation. This somewhat erratic approach may have annoyed some of Mahaffy’s colleagues, but was very useful to Cavafy, as it exemplified, in a manner that the poet could comprehend and imitate, how inscriptions are casually processed by experts. In fact, Cavafy may have made use of these insights on several occasions, perhaps including the composition of his poem “In the month of Athyr” in which, as we will see in the next chapter, he staged a reading of an early Egypto-Christian inscription supposedly in situ. Mahaffy does not read inscriptions as a dispassionate scholar; sometimes he reacts to the exorbitant flattery of these texts and to their general tendency to attribute identical values to different rulers. Referring to an Arsinoe, for example, he proclaims: “I give no credit to the epigrams of flatterers declaring her beauty to be incomparable”; on a different occasion he scoffs at “the habit of the flatterers of the second king [Ptolemy II], who loved to ascribe to him all the great founder’s ideas” (1895, pp.  141, 75). This antiquarian flair is absorbed in Cavafy’s poem, especially in the early draft of 1914 (“Of Ptolemy Caesar”), in which the ironic lines “all their campaigns and their victories are great/ and everything they built magnificent” (Cavafy, 2019) reflect the subject matter of laudatory inscriptions more closely than the poem’s final text. There is, however, a major difference between Mahafy’s narrative style and the speaker in Cavafy’s poem, who rejects flattering inscriptions on aesthetic and moral grounds. Mahaffy’s exasperation is caused by concerns of a practical nature. The inscriptions are full of recurring clichés, which impede the historian’s effort to subtract information from them, and so he tries to decipher formulas of flattering stereotypes (e.g., 1895, p. 322) and to discern their mutations in time, as for example in “we now have further evidence … that it was the year 27, in which the earlier formula: ‘In the reign of Ptolemy, son of Ptolemy, and of his son Ptolemy,’ was exchanged for: ‘In the reign of Ptolemy, son of Ptolemy Soter’” (p.  155). Also,

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Mahaffy’s text does not present Caesarion as “denied the platitudinous epithets” of the other Ptolemies, as Cavafy’s text suggests (Beaton, 1983, p. 34). In fact, this honorary exception is a fictional effect of the poem and not supported by historical evidence. As Cavafy probably read in the Alexandrinos Diakosmos, Caesarion’s own “pompous titles” included: “Ptolemy Caesar, The Perennial, The Beloved of Ptah and Isis, Lord of the Universe, Son of the Sun, Lord of Diadems: God Philopator” (Oikonomopoulos, 1889, p. 241). Mahaffy is also often frustrated by the common names given to the Kings and especially the Queens of the Ptolemaic Dynasty (four Arsinoes, another four Berenices, seven Cleopatras), as these interfere with his task to date inscriptions and to identify the ruler mentioned in them. As he writes, for example, with reference to the first Cleopatra, “unfortunately she brought by her name another confusion into the annals of the Lagidae. Old historians, and we too, are puzzled enough with the recurring Arsinoes and Berenikes. Now come the Cleopatras, who add to the older names a new confusion of their own” (1895, p.  307). And in another instance: Our difficulties have been increased by the absurd habit of repeating the same names. Cleopatra, the wife of Epiphanes, in other respects a sane, and perhaps able woman, thought fit to call her two sons Ptolemy and her daughter Cleopatra, so that we have to distinguish Ptolemies and Cleopatras, without the obvious mark of a distinct name. It is no wonder that we hear of the habit of giving nicknames as very prevalent in Alexandria. The smart wits of the people are not so obvious a cause as the necessities of life. (p. 330)

In line 10 of “Caesarion” Cavafy borrows from Mahaffy the use of the plural and the tone of disdain, but he invests his own “Berenices” and “Cleopatras” with entirely different meaning. In contrast to Mahaffy, who protests because he finds it hard to tell which Queen is mentioned in each inscription, the poet reads the identically named and praised Queens as signs of a prevalent ethos of cliché and indistinguishable adulation. Cavafy reworks Mahaffy’s comments to present the flattering rhetoric of inscriptions as evidence of the shallowness and mediocrity of the Ptolemies (and/or their grammarians), 6 and to contrast this pompous and murky lot with the unique individuality of Caesarion as manifest in his humble mention. The poet appears to read Ptolemaic inscriptions as a

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decadent genre, suggesting that their faults reflected the decline of the dynasty they purported to praise. Mahaffy did not and could not share such a view; after all, these were laudatory inscriptions and flattery was their purpose. But Cavafy’s point is once again based on the historian’s book, albeit in a different section of it. The speaker of Cavafy’s poem browses through Ptolemaic inscriptions as a historical connoisseur who is after original expressions of true feeling. He reads inscriptions but clearly thinks of poems; in fact, he reads inscriptions re-enacting Mahaffy’s own reading of the Ptolemies’ court poets. These poets, Mahaffy wrote, produced “court effusions” and “lying flatteries which gave the sovran every imaginable virtue” (1895, p. 169). To them, “the favour of the king [was] far more vital than the favour of the muse”; and so, “to base arguments upon the veracity of a court poet is … absurd” (pp.  169, 489). Cavafy clearly transfers Mahaffy’s contempt of Ptolemaic court poetry to their laudatory inscriptions, which he simply presents as bad poems. Cavafy appropriated various elements from Mahaffy’s text and radically revised them, as he transformed a historical account into a discontented reading of a fictional collection of inscriptions. But the poet also seems to have adopted Mahaffy’s voice as a narrative persona. As many critics have noted on the grounds of textual evidence (but without tracing the connection to Mahaffy), in the poem’s initial stanzas Cavafy seems to mimic somebody else’s (and probably a historian’s) voice. According to Christopher Robinson, the speaker’s language here is “stilted” (1988, p. 83); as Roderick Beaton comments, these verses introduce “(impeccably) the language of the historian” and also describe an activity which “belongs to the academic historian; it is not part of everyday experience for most of us” (1983, p. 33). And Margaret Alexiou: “what other poet could begin by casting himself in the role of pedantic nitpicker (checking a date) or idle antiquarian (passing the time), introduced by the formal – almost academic  – adverbial phrase ‘en merei…en merei…’?” (1985, p. 183). This language, and this activity, is actually Cavafy’s travesty of the Irish historian’s style. In some respects, Mahaffy is just the type of person he might envisage as narrator of his poem: an expert antiquarian, who would keep at home collections of Ptolemaic inscriptions and who might actually leaf through them on an evening “to while away the time.” But more importantly, Cavafy mimics Mahaffy’s idiosyncratic style, in which the voice of an expert handler of primary sources alternates with that of an

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old curmudgeon, who is quite capable of complaining about the ancients or cracking a joke at their habits. Cavafy’s reworking of Mahaffy in “Caesarion” was complex and extensive; links to the historian may certainly be found in more of Cavafy’s poems. But Mahaffy’s shadow may have been at times too overbearing for the poet. This is perhaps why Cavafy was occasionally tempted to impress his visitors by showing off as a better reader of ancient sources than the Irish classicist. According to a testimony, Cavafy would occasionally bring out one of Mahaffy’s volumes from his library to amuse his guests by exhibiting “a number of mistakes the English [= Irish] historian had made, owing to an imperfect knowledge of the language and a poor translation of the texts” (Sareyannis, 1983, p. 113).

2   Literary Caesarions Caesarion’s presence in European literature can be traced back to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606), where the hero is briefly mentioned twice. His story is more extensively presented in other dramatic works of the same era, including the 1607 edition of Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedy of Cleopatra (2011),7 in which he “appears from the start as one of the primary concerns of the play” (Hatchuel, 2011, p. 86) and later on in Jean-François Marmontel’s Cléopâtre (1750). But Caesarion also features as a literary figure in several more recent texts, which were published a few decades or even some years before the composition of Cavafy’s poem. These texts seem to form a literary palimpsest, on which Cavafy’s own depiction of Caesarion was originally inscribed; but, as is usually the case with palimpsests, the older writings eventually vanished under the potency of the new work, so few of them are remembered in our times. We will now turn to examine some major examples of texts treating Caesarion as a literary character before Cavafy’s portrayal of him, in an attempt to discern the different traits they exhibit but also some of the key elements they share in portraying the famously elusive son of Cleopatra. Landor The English poet Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) may be almost forgotten in our day but in his time was a well-known and influential literary figure. One of Landor’s more popular works was a series of over one

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hundred dramatic dialogues featuring mainly Literary Men and Statesmen, which he called Imaginary Conversations. These texts were among Walter Pater’s favorites (and may have inspired his own Imaginary Portraits) (Monsman, 1967, p. 36; also Bann, 2005, p. 182) and later found a following among modern writers, including W.  B. Yeats and Ezra Pound (Roberts, 2003, pp. 13, 27; Tryphonopoulos and Adams, 2005, pp. 102, 110, 124, 160). As E. M. Forster wrote in Howards End, “The only thing that made life worth living was the thought of Walter Savage Landor, from whose Imaginary Conversations she [Margaret] had promised to read at frequent intervals during the day” (1921, p. 11; also see Forster, 1923, p. 26). Cavafy owned a selection of thirty-three Imaginary Conversations, in an edition of 1886 (Landor, 1886; see Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, p. 65). Although Caesarion does not make an appearance in this edition, he is the main character in a similar dramatic work by Landor, entitled Antony and Octavius: Scenes for the Study (1856). This text, which in fact was to be Landor’s last composition, may also have been known to Cavafy. Landor depicts Caesarion as a particularly handsome boy, with “hair in hue like cinnamon,” a mirror image of his father in his youth, and also courteous and brave in spirit, though “not strong enough for sword and shield” (1856, pp. 45, 66, 69, 70). Above all, Landor’s young prince is innocent, totally uninterested in political affairs and particularly naive (to the extent that he imagines his own and his mother’s humiliating procession in Octavius’ Triumph through the streets of Rome as an honorary event, with the crowds cheering on them) (p. 67). The boy’s death scene comes off as pure melodrama, as the young victim’s purity of heart and his repeated declarations of love for his paid assassin ultimately lead the latter to insanity (pp. 81–82). As has been observed, Landor’s text is tinted with suggestions of homosexuality. Sarah Hatchuel has noticed the implicit “homoerotic tension” between Antony and Octavius in Landor’s drama and commented on Caesarion as “embodying the physical bond that existed between Caesar and Cleopatra” and pictured “almost as an intermediary in their love-­ making” (Hatchuel, 2011, p. 88). The feminine overtones of Caesarion’s portrayal were tactfully noted already in 1869 by Landor’s biographer, John Forster; “the lad has never left the side of Cleopatra and her women” he wrote, noticing that Caesarion expresses “all the feminine enjoyment of a nature which is nothing without something it can trust to and love.” Thus, Forster concluded, “the scene where the boy, betrayed and

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murdered, yet trusts and loves to the last the man who murders him, is as pathetic as anything ever written by Landor” (1869, pp. 506–507). In 1875 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), an English poet whose work exerted a strong influence on Cavafy (Jeffreys, 2015, pp. 7–11; Haas, 1996, p. 260), wrote a “Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor.” One of this poem’s fifty stanzas focuses on Caesarion, demonstrating that his depiction stood out from the great multitude of historical figures treated in Landor’s work: Toward Spenser or toward Bacon proud or kind He bared the heart of Essex, twain and one, For the base heart that soiled the starry mind Stern, for the father in his child undone Soft as his own toward children, stamped and signed With their sweet image visibly set on As by God’s hand, clear as his own designed The likeness radiant out of ages gone That none may now destroy Of that high Roman boy Whom Julius and Cleopatra saw their son True-born of sovereign seed, Foredoomed even thence to bleed, The stately grace of bright Caesarion, The head unbent, the heart unbowed, That not the shadow of death could make less clear and proud. (Swinburne, 1880b, pp. 57–58)

On a different occasion, Swinburne expressed his admiration for Landor’s depiction of Caesarion, writing that “perhaps the most nearly faultless in finish and proportion of perfect nature […] is Landor’s portrait of the imperial and right Roman child of Caesar and Cleopatra. I know not but this may be found in the judgment of men to come wellnigh the most pathetic and heroic figure bequeathed us after more than eighty years of a glorious life by the indomitable genius of our own last Roman and republican poet” (Swinburne, 1880a, p. 76). Ebers Caesarion’s next literary incarnation takes us to Germany, more specifically to the University of Leipzig and its distinguished Professor of

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Egyptology, Georg Moritz Ebers (1837–1898). At the side of his important academic work, and in addition to his other popularizing books, Ebers published a string of historical novels which are perfect examples of the intersection between Egyptology and Egyptomania (Reid, 2002, p. 12). These currently forgotten novels (Beutin et al., 1994, p. 277) were immediately translated into English and then to other languages (including Greek)8 and were “wildly popular” with Victorian readers (Parramore, 2008, p. 127). Ebers’ first novel, An Egyptian Princess (1864), was published eighteen times in thirty-five years and was translated into fourteen languages (Marchand, 2009, p. 204). These novels surely owed a lot to Ebers’ academic formation, which set them apart from most other Egypt-­ inspired fiction of the time. As  Simon Goldhill  comments, “for Ebers, Egypt was not the lascivious, corrupt, and dangerous East but a complex sophisticated civilization, with a rich material and intellectual culture” (Goldhill, 2011, p. 232). Also, much like Cavafy’s poetry, Ebers’ historical novels treated ancient Egypt as distinctly multicultural; in his prose, Egyptian characters mingle with Greeks and Jews, sometimes also with Syrians and people from other origins (see Marchand, 2009, p.  204), while his novels often focus on the intricacies resulting from the mix of pagan and Christian elements (Marchand, 2007, p. 183. Also see Goldhill, 2011, 232). Ebers was a pioneer in the construction of the cosmopolitan Hellenistic Egypt which Cavafy also adopted and, as we will discuss later on (in Chap. 8), is a largely fictional notion with interesting ideological and political repercussions at the turn of the twentieth century. Ebers’ novel Cleopatra (1892), published in English in 1894, captures Caesarion and Cleopatra during the last months of their lives and is considered the most accurate fictional rendering of the legendary Queen in Victorian times (Wyke and Montserrat, 2011, pp. 173–174). Caesarion’s facial features are once again presented here as identical to his father’s (a detail that Ebers, like Landor before him, drew from Suetonius, Caesar 32). However, the young prince is also introduced as a “weakling” who “never appeared in the Palaestra” and “had not understood how to win the favour of the Ephebi” (Ebers, 1894, v. 2, p. 18). Caesarion was apparently just as weak in politics since, despite having been proclaimed King of Kings, “he was permitted neither to rule nor even to issue orders, for his mother kept him aloof from affairs of state, and he himself had no desire to hold the scepter” (Ebers, 1894, v. 1, p. 2). Ebers’ Caesarion is a romantic figure, pale, silent and with dreamy eyes; he wears a melancholic smile and exhibits a numb conscience. His

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frustrated love for a frivolous female singer drains his emotions, causes the “total loss of his dignity” (v. 2, p. 115) and brings him close to suicide. “The fruit of every tree I planted degenerated and decayed,” says Cleopatra as she contemplates her son’s pathetic nature. “Caesarion is withering in the flower of his youth” (v. 2, p. 154). Shortly before his assassination, this naïve and love-consumed Caesarion fantasizes that Octavian would soon bestow on him an estate in Rome, full of fishponds, where he would live as a private citizen, devoting his time to fishing and his books, with a wife of humble origin at his side (v. 2, p. 140). Arius’ famous condemnation (“polukaisarie”) is quoted in the conclusion of the novel, as in most other historical and literary depictions of Caesarion (v. 2, p. 154). Ebers depicts Caesarion through a range of feminine clichés and at the same time as madly in love with a woman; but representations of homosexuality through heteronormative emplotments are not unusual in nineteenth-­century fiction. In a different novel, Ebers would interpret one of the most famous Western myths of homosexuality, the Emperor Hadrian’s love for young Antinous, as an instance of fatherly affection and have the latter man kill himself in the Nile over his unrequited love for a Christian woman (see Goldhill, 2011, p. 233). In this sense, the feminine stereotypes Ebers attributes to Caesarion (as Landor also did before him) may well be read as tacit hints at homosexuality, which of course could not be depicted or discussed more openly at that time and by these authors. Ebers’ portrayal of Caesarion as a feeble boy, totally uninterested in politics and with a fondness for fishing, may have inspired his depiction in Vincent P. Sullivan’s play The Siren and the Roman (Cleopatra and Anthonius) or Luxury, Love and the Lost (1911). In this text, Caesarion appears “tired as usual”; he “abhors everything pertaining to government,” considers ambition a mortal disease and worries Cleopatra, who sees the “prospect of having him one day acknowledged Julius Caesar’s rightful heir, grow remote and ridiculous.” Sullivan’s Caesarion enters the stage with “a Nubian who carries his fishing rods” and ponders: What should I do with a kingdom? Can I fish with it? No! Give me mine angle, ha! Set me by the Nile where my bait is beloved, ah! Let none trouble me, and I’ll not give you my smallest catch for your whole Roman Empire. (Sullivan, 1911, pp. 17, 15)

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Frederick and Friends Another version of Caesarion, this time completely divorced from Ptolemy Caesar’s historical and cultural surroundings, was originally composed in the mid-eighteenth century but was unearthed and brought to the attention of a wider public 150  years later. Caesarion was portrayed as a symbol of homoerotic desire in a series of French poems that Frederick the 2nd (or the Great) of Prussia (1712–1786) printed privately in 1750 at his palace of Sans Souci, in Potsdam. Some of these poems are addressed to Frederick’s friend, attendant and assumed lover Dietrich von Keyserlingk (1698–1745), whom he affectionately called Caesarion (Fraser, 2001, p.  44; see also von Meerheimb, 1882, pp. 701–702). Frederick’s poems to Caesarion reached a broader public in the year 1900, when the Baltic German artist Elisar von Kupffer (1872–1942) included some of them in the first (and subsequently famous) anthology of homoerotic literature from antiquity to the twentieth century, which he edited under the title Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (roughly translated as: Love of Favourites and Love between Friends in World Literature) (von Kupffer, 1900; see Aldrich and Wotherspoon, 2001, pp. 294–295, and Smalls, 2003, pp. 41–45). This book was published in Berlin as a reaction to the sexological theories of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld and perhaps also as a protest against Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in England. Its second edition, of 1903, was initially confiscated and circulated only after an appeal by the great philologist Wilamowitz (Tobin, 2015, pp. 55–56). “And Frederick the Great, that unique man?” wrote von Kupffer in his Introduction. “Truly he is no symptom of decadence, he who created the foundation of today’s German Empire against a world of enemies. No, he is the manliest man of action, although he loved a Caesarion and did not feel obliged to be a mistress of the state” (von Kupffer, 1992, p.  38). At the same time, von Kupffer coined for himself the pseudonym Elisarion, obviously after Caesarion (Aldrich, 1993, p. 112). Some years later, and inspired by von Kupffer, the English socialist poet and homosexual activist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) compiled his own popular Anthology of Friendship, which he tellingly called Ioläus after Hercules’ mythical nephew, companion and lover. The book’s second edition, of 1906, featured two of Frederick’s poems for Caesarion, taken from von Kupffer’s anthology and translated into English (as Carpenter

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noted, the second text is a brief extract from Frederick’s “long and beautiful ode ‘To the shades of Cesarion’” (1906, pp. 207–208): 1. Cesarion, let us keep unspoiled Our faith, and be true friends, And pair our lives like noble Greeks, And to like noble ends! That friend from friend may never hide A fault through weakness or thro’ pride, Or sentiment that cloys Thus gold in fire the brighter glows, And far more rare and precious grows, Refined from all alloys. 2. O God! how hard the word of Fate! Cesarion dead! His happy days Death to the grave has consecrate. His charm I mourn and gentle grace. He’s dead – my tender, faithful mate! A thousand daggers pierce my heart: It trembles, torn with grief and pain. He’s gone! the dawn comes not again! Thy grave’s the goal of my heart’s strife; Holy shall thy remembrance be; To thee I poured out love in life; And love in death I vow to thee.

As this evidence manifests, well beyond the feminine insinuations of Landor and Ebers, Caesarion’s name had assumed distinct homosexual connotations (and an exemplary status in early historical compilations of texts expressing homoerotic desire) long before Cavafy’s poem was composed. Carpenter “was the only English writer before World War I who publicly and openly defended homosexuality and the homosexual’s rightful place in society” (Aldrich and Wotherspoon, 2001, p. 105). His often-­ reprinted anthology was famous among British homosexuals in the early twentieth century and casually referred to by second-hand booksellers as “The Bugger’s Bible” (ibid.). Also, Cavafy’s friend E. M. Forster was personally acquainted with Carpenter since 1913 and admired him (see

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Bradshaw, 2007, passim). It is highly unlikely that a work of such recognition as Carpenter’s anthology could have escaped Cavafy’s attention, although it was obviously not one of the books he would have openly displayed in his library. Michaud d’Humiac The last and most extensive transformation of Caesarion before the composition of Cavafy’s poem to be presented here is a melodrama in three acts, entitled Caesarion, by the elusive French dramatist Léon Michaud d’Humiac (1865?–1913), published in Paris in 1913. This play focuses on Caesarion’s final days and presents the hero’s affair with Nadia, the daughter of a priest of Isis, in whose temple he is hiding when the play begins and where he is killed at the end. As in Cavafy’s poem, but contrary to his common portrayal, Caesarion is presented by Michaud d’Humiac on his own, cut off from Cleopatra, Antony and Octavian. Mahaffy’s brief reference to Caesarion which, as we saw earlier, probably played an important role in the shaping of Cavafy’s poem, was also acknowledged in this version and quoted in the author’s preface (Michaud d’Humiac, 1913, pp. 3–4). In Michaud d’Humiac’s rendering, Caesarion is once again portrayed as polite and generous, sensitive but brave, thoughtful and melancholic— and also seen by the Egyptian people as “Our Supreme Hope” (p. 16), which probably alludes to Renan’s reference to Cleopatra’s son as the “national Messiah” of Hellenistic Egypt (Renan, 1866, p.  284). This Caesarion denounces the darker aspects of the Ptolemaic dynasty and specifically Cleopatra and Antony’s moral degradation (p. 17). According to Michaud d’Humiac, the fifteen-year-old ephebe was traumatized as he “observed, with shame and fear, the unbridled lechery of the Roman Emperor and his mother” (p.  2). Sad and pale throughout the play, Caesarion repeatedly defines himself as a victim and a phantom (“Caesarion! hélas! c’est le nom d’un fantôme…”) (p. 24), which brings to mind his portrayal as victim and as conjured ghost in Cavafy’s text. Michaud d’Humiac’s portrayal of Caesarion as a hybrid in which Caesar’s and Cleopatra’s qualities were fused leads, once again, to intimations of effeminacy. In the author’s preface Caesarion is declared to represent “the exciting contrast of a great and strong soul in a body full of attractive grace, feminine” (p. 1). This hint is highlighted in the play’s final scene, in which the hero takes the stage disguised as a young girl, to hide

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from the Roman soldiers who have invaded the temple. After Caesarion is forced to reveal his identity (and while still being cross-dressed), the Roman officer Lucius kills him with his sword, shouting: “He dies in a woman’s clothes, the effeminate youngster!” (p. 94). Caesarion’s double portrayal, as a man in a feminine body and as a female impersonator, may well be read as a codified reference to homosexuality. Furthermore, in this case effeminacy is connected to public humiliation and victimization, which relates Caesarion’s story to the highly topical issue of the persecutions of homosexual men in the early twentieth century. One might think that a play on Caesarion by a minor writer of Parisian melodramas, about whom very little information is available today, would have few chances to be known to Cavafy. But this is clearly not so. Michaud d’Humiac published in France but lived in Egypt, at least from 1904 onwards, as in that year the French journal Nouvelle Revue d’Égypte, which was published in Alexandria, included him in the list of its main local contributors (Anon., 1904). In ensuing years he also contributed to other French-Egyptian journals (see for example Michaud d’Humiac, 1905) and published a play in four acts, also set in ancient Egypt (Michaud d’Humiac, 1911). An obituary in a French newspaper announced Michaud d’Humiac’s death, in April 1913 in Ismailia, about 100 kilometers from Cairo, where he had worked for the Suez company. As mentioned in the same note, the author had just completed a new dramatic work, Caesarion (Anon, 1913). Although we may never find out whether Cavafy ever met the French writer personally, a book on Caesarion that appeared in this context and by a writer who lived in Egypt is more than likely to have attracted his attention. Summing up this survey of Caesarion’s literary palimpsest, we may conclude that Cavafy’s version, the “beautiful and sentimental” youth with the “indefinable allure” and the “dreamlike, congenial grace,” “pale and weary” and “ideally beautiful in [his] sorrow,” who has been critically recognized as a “beautiful but passive victim” (Alexiou, 1985, p. 184) and as imbued “with a decadent melancholia and almost metaphysical sadness” (Jeffreys, 2015, p.  17) is a composite portrait, most of whose elements were in circulation long before the poem’s composition. As we saw earlier, in many of his renderings before Cavafy Caesarion tends to be pictured as politically uninvolved and naive, an innocent victim of circumstance who is sentimental, pale and melancholic; in one instance he is identified as a phantom. His personality is always defined in retrospect, via his tragic death, and he is never linked to conventional masculine stereotypes. On

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the contrary, a significant feature of this figure’s portrait consists of insinuations or direct attributions of effeminacy, which may reflect Caesarion’s enfoldment in the legend of Cleopatra (which was also manifest, among other ways, in his frequent portrayals as a winged Cupid in the lap of, or hovering over, Venus/Cleopatra) (see Roller, 2010, pp.  107, 116, 216 n.17). Caesarion, then, appears to have been traditionally perceived, in some respects, as Cleopatra’s male equivalent, and thus to have absorbed a measure of the quintessential feminine qualities that his mother was represented to embody in the Western public imagination. But at the same time, the young man’s supreme dignity and purity contrast sharply with his mother’s common depiction “as a seducer and manipulator, first by Graeco-Roman historians and later by literary writers” (Youngkin, 2016, pp.  19–20), which renders Caesarion a perfect candidate for idealized homoerotic contemplation. This powerful and complex mirroring may explain why Caesarion is the only historical figure from antiquity in Cavafy’s poetry to be explicitly treated as an object of homoerotic desire (and to be acknowledged as such by the poem’s speaker). Caesarion’s privileged treatment as an ancient lover is boldly manifest in the early version of Cavafy’s poem, in which we encounter references to “you who every so often fascinate me,” the apostrophe “I loved you” and phrasing that could be read as sexually suggestive, as for example in the verse “My poetry you have already entered twice” (Cavafy, 2019).

3   Contexts for “Caesarion” Caesarion Among the Statues Caesarion’s first appearance in Cavafy’s poetry takes place in “Sculptor of Tyana,” a poem composed between 1893 and 1903 and published in 1911, in which the hero is presented in the form of a statue. SCULPTOR OF TYANA As you might have heard, I am no novice. Quite a lot of stone passes through my hands. And in Tyana, my country, they know me well; here, too, I’ve been commissioned for many a statue by senators.

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         And let me show you a few right now. Look closely at this Rhea, venerable, all-forebearing, primeval. Notice Pompey, Marius, Aemilius Paulus, Scipio Africanus. Likenesses created as faithfully as I could. Patroclus—I’ll retouch him a bit. Near those pieces of yellowish marble, that’s Caesarion. And for some time now, I’ve been busy working on a Poseidon. I’m giving particular thought to his horses, how to fashion them. They ought to be made so light that their bodies, their hooves, clearly appear not to touch the ground, but to run upon the waters. But here is the work that I love most, on which I labored with deepest feeling and greatest care; this one here—on a warm summer day, when my mind was ascending towards the ideal— I was dreaming of this one here, this young Hermes. (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 89)

As Mendelsohn has noted, in this poem Caesarion “stands out as something of an anomaly among this gallery of great Romans” (Cavafy, 2012, p. 367). The sense of discrepancy becomes more acute once we take into account Cavafy’s “self-comment,” as recorded by Lechonitis, which puts a date to the events taking place in the poem: “The scene of the poem is in Rome, and the existence of Caesarion’s statue among the others gives us the chronology, i.e. a few years A.D. or just B.C.” (1977, p. 25). This description places the showing of Caesarion’s statue in a Roman sculptor’s studio about thirty  years after his death and while Augustus was still in power (27  BCE–14  CE). Historically speaking, it is inconceivable that anyone in Rome would dare to order or to show a statue of Caesarion at that time, as his story was still politically sensitive and such an impertinence would put them at great risk. Precisely for this reason, for example, a famous fresco in the house of Marcus Fabius Rufus in Pompeii, which depicts Cleopatra/Venus with Caesarion/Cupid, was found behind a wall specially built to conceal it (Walker, 2008; also, Roller, 2010, p. 175).

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In this case, then, Cavafy seems to have risked a historically unsound reference in order to project Caesarion as a figure that was important and popular enough to be featured among the idols of Rome’s artistic pantheon, or what the poet termed, via Singopoulo, “the gods, demi-gods, heroes and eminent men” of the time (Savidis, 1987, p. 258). Such prominence hardly befits Caesarion’s status in Rome a few decades after his assassination, but it depicts quite accurately his cultural presence and broad circulation in Cavafy’s own time, as we traced it earlier in this chapter. In “Sculptor from Tyana” Cavafy may have  transposed to the Roman times the literary and cultural fascination with Caesarion at the fin de siècle. Based on this insight, Cavafy’s line “ah, there, you came again, you who every so often fascinate me” from “Of Ptolemy Caesar” (Cavafy, 2019) may be read as an allusion to the poet’s frequent encounters with Caesarion’s multiple historical and literary portrayals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A sculptural analogy is also implicitly at work in “Caesarion,” particularly in the terms marking the hero’s fanciful invocation by the narrator in the second part of the poem. As it has been suggested, the poem’s phrasing in ll. 18–20 (“I could form you,” “I made you to be,” “My art imparts upon your face”) presents this act of poetic reclaiming as an imagined sculptural operation (Alexiou, 1985, pp. 183–184). Furthermore, It is as if the poet is using sculpture to show us how he is giving the dead youth new life through his own work. In the poem [“Caesarion”] Cavafy uses sculptural vocabulary in order to give us a metaphorical account of how artistic imagination works. The fragmented image of the young Caesarion is remoulded into a new existence by the poet’s sculptural imagination. (Giannakopoulou, 2007, p. 131)

Clearly, Caesarion’s chimeric re-imagining was not Cavafy’s way to confess the nature of his solitary sexuality and/or his sensual perception of history, as it has conventionally been interpreted, but rather a manifestation of Pygmalionism: an “imaginative gesture whereby someone who is absent or dead is brought back to life through an act of language” (Hillis Miller, 1990, p. 47). In Cavafy’s time, as Alastair Blanshard has observed, stories of statue love were so striking that the earliest writers on sexology believed that they pointed to a genuine psychological condition. The pathology went under a

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number of names. In addition to agalmatophilia, the condition has been termed Pygmalionism, Venus statuaria, and statuophilia. Most of the key writers on sexology such as Richard von Krafft – Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Havelock Ellis treated it as a real disease. (2010, p. 30)

A Ghost Conjured Cavafy’s erotic invocation of a historical figure and Caesarion’s eerie but also illusionary return seem to exemplify the modern artist’s nostalgic return to the past, as elaborated in Against Nature (À Rebours), J. K. Huysmans’ “manifesto of French decadence”: Unable to attune himself, except at rare intervals, to his environment, and no longer finding in the examination of that environment and the creatures who endure it sufficient pleasures of observation and analysis to divert him, [the artist] is aware of the birth and development in himself of unusual phenomena. Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfilment in reflection and study. Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape and assert themselves with imperious authority. He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord. In some cases there is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others there is a pursuit of dream and fantasy, a more or less vivid vision of a future whose image reproduces, unconsciously and as a result of atavism, that of past epochs. (Huysmans, 2004, pp. 166–167)

In this light, Cavafy’s imaginary reawakening of a historical figure who, like Caesarion, has long been dead, may be further connected to the motif of “aesthetic vampirism” (Eastham, 2011, pp.  36–60). As a “decadent symbol,” the vampire haunts “the literary and artistic culture of the Victorian fin de siècle” through its multiple manifestations, including Pater’s famous depiction of “the Mona Lisa as a vampire who had existed with sublime indifference throughout the turbulent evolutionary movement of world history” (Eastham, 2011, p. 36). Furthermore, this trope has strong erotic connotations, as the vampire’s “eerie extra-sensory effect” typically performs its conjurer’s “contemplative submission to the eroticized object” (Paglia, 1992, p. 519).

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Caesarion’s reawakening in Cavafy’s poem has been connected to an abundance of similar literary manifestations, ranging from “the visit of Patroklos’ ghost to Achilles” in the Iliad (Gutzwiller, 2003, pp. 80–81) to the spectral appearance of Willie Hughes in Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (Duff, 2021, p. 175; Ekdawi, 1993, p. 298). A more suitable analogy to Cavafy’s text, which also recalls the motif of aesthetic vampirism and its erotic connotations, may be traced in the “amorous invocation” of the narrator by an ancient Roman woman in Théophile Gautier’s short story “Arria Marcella: A Souvenir of Pompeii.” In this text, first published in 1852, a man visits Pompeii and is transported by “a dream-like experience” to the past, back there in the vital year of 79 CE, just before the eruption. There he miraculously recognizes that same exquisite breast and the flawless curves of that perfect female form, now resurrected in the tangibly flesh and blood form of the narrative’s eponymous Arria Marcella, with whom he experiences a brief erotic encounter before witnessing her ‘death’ and disintegration. (Liveley, 2011, p. 107)

Like Caesarion, Arria Marcella is not a statue-come-to-life, yet “she is repeatedly described in Gautier’s story as ‘statue-like’” (Liveley, 2011, p. 109). After she draws her retrospective lover to the remote past, she informs him, in words strongly reminding Caesarion’s conjuring, that “One is truly dead only when one is no longer loved. Your desire has restored life to me. The mighty invocation of your heart overcame the dim distances that separated us” (Gautier, 1906, p.  207). Also, just like Gautier’s story, Cavafy’s poem manifests “the highly erotic archaeology of filling the hollow impression of an antique relic with completing fantasies of reconnection, transforming an aesthetic of absence into an erotically charged full-presence” (Colby, 2009, p. 52). Cavafy, however, does not present the historic figure’s reawakening as an epiphany, but with a high measure of ironic distancing, as the result of the speaker’s copious exercise (“And so fully I envisaged you”) and diligent scene-setting (“as my lamp/ died out – I deliberately let it die out –”). Also, Cavafy carefully portrays Caesarion’s apparition as a momentary and perhaps illusory impression (“I imagined,” “it seemed as if”), thus avoiding any extra-sensorial insinuation. In this respect, Cavafy’s imaginary invocation of Caesarion to the present is more akin to Pater’s aesthetic historicism and his

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“acknowledgement of the impassable chasm between past and present” (Colby, 2009, p.  81) than to Gautier’s fantasy fiction. As Sasha Colby comments, In Gautier, we see characters moving freely into the past through the vehicle of the subconscious. For Pater, however heated the impression of antiquity may be and however freely the conversations between great minds may continue through art, the actual reinstatement of the past in the present is impossible due to the layered sedimentations separating one epoch from the next. (p. 81)

In Cavafy’s poem, then, Caesarion is invoked by a combination of conjuring artistry and meticulous study, which mirrors the double function of the poem’s “room,” as a space for study as much as one for erotic reverie (Dallas, 1987, p.  97). Through this conjugation, the homoerotically charged impressionistic reading of an ancient inscription appears to be momentarily reconciled with homosocial academic discourse as a viable method for re-imagining antiquity (Dowling, 1994, pp. 80–81). On the other hand, the speaker’s pointed retreat from sexual fantasy to textual history, in the poem’s conclusion, clearly calls attention to the archaeological condition: “the modern viewer’s inability to fully reconstruct the obsolete past through its remains” and more specifically the untraversable “distance between his gaze and the object of his desire” (Plantzos, 2014, p. 224).

4   Cavafy Goes to the Movies As we previously discussed, in Cavafy’s time Caesarion was frequently treated by academic historians, popular scribblers and literary authors alike; his name was distinctly familiar and intimately connected to one of the most famous love affairs in history. But if this is so, we may now wonder, how was Cavafy’s urge to save him from oblivion justified? Where could the very idea of Caesarion’s erasure from the historical register have sprung from, since he was a figure of such broad cultural circulation? A possible answer to these questions may follow from the recognition that “Caesarion” was composed just at the time when what we now call public history assumed new force and social impact as a result of its association with new media. More specifically, Cavafy’s poem appeared at the moment when the broader public’s historical consciousness was being massively

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reshaped through historical representations in the motion pictures. In this process, the much-discussed and familiar figure of Caesarion, as crafted in the context of book culture, begun to fall into oblivion and Cavafy’s poem may have been originally inspired as an attempt to re-instate its fading allure. Caesarion’s vanishing from History in the early twentieth century was not caused by the neglect of historians or other writers; rather, it may have been enacted by cinematic renderings of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, for which the depiction of Caesarion became problematic. On the one hand, Cleopatra’s powerful screen image as a symbol of demonic sexuality and manipulative craftiness could not be easily reconciled with her role as a mother, which led to the shrinking of that aspect in her motion-picture representations. On the other hand, early twentieth-century cinematic accounts of Cleopatra’s fall tended to reflect the viewpoint of Imperial Rome and so were not eager to present the young and innocent son of Julius Caesar being “butchered without compunction” on Octavian’s orders (Green, 1985, p. 167). In 1913, the Roman production house Cines, “the most prestigious film company of the time in Italy” (Wyke, 1997, p. 142; see also Wyke, 2002, esp. pp. 244–266), distributed a particularly successful silent film, called “Marcantonio e Cleopatra,” directed by Enrico Guazzoni (who had recently completed his influential blockbuster “Quo Vadis?”) and starring the diva Gianna Terribili-Gonzales. This film has often been studied in recent years because of the two-fold colonial perspective it embraces. On the one hand Cleopatra, through her demonic schemes (and also through the eroticism emanating from the cinematic exposure of her body) is refigured “within a nineteenth-century ‘colonialist imaginary’ … as an Orient inviting penetration” (Wyke, 1997, pp. 146–147): Appropriated for orientalism, Cleopatra authorizes the articulation of the Orient as Woman, as separate from and subservient to the Occident. Feminized, the Orient can take on, under a gendered western gaze, a feminine allure and penetrability. The colonialist project is provided with an ancient and successful precedent, and geographical conquest of a land is naturalized as sexual possession of a woman’s body. (p. 147)

On the other hand, this film presents “a pro-Roman reading of the classical story” and ultimately celebrates the conquering of Egypt as “a triumph of civilization,” i.e., in the terms routinely used by modern

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imperialist propaganda. These choices betray the workings of a powerful contemporary subtext, which is the rise of Italian nationalism on the eve of the Great War, with its claims to the inheritance of the Roman Empire and its dreams for new conquests (García Morcillo, 2013, p.  202). Released shortly after the Italian annexation of Libya, Guazzoni’s historical motion picture was “a uniquely appropriate vehicle for both the legitimation and the celebration of Italy as once again mistress of the Mediterranean” and described by a contemporary critic as “equivalent to waving the Italian above the Egyptian flag, quite slowly for two hours” (Wyke, 2002, pp. 254, 263). In this context, and as a result of such pressures, Caesarion was exempt from the prevalent story of Antony and Cleopatra and gradually erased from public imagination, whose historical repertory was now mainly shaped by cinematic constructions. Readers accustomed to the image of Cavafy as an old-school antiquary, who hardly ever left his room and spent his nights leafing through arcane scholarship, may find it hard to believe that “Caesarion” could have been originally inspired as a response to Italian historical revisionism manifest in a silent film. Yet, despite the widespread circulation of his persona as a modern-day hermit, Cavafy was surely interested in the cinema (Garantoudis, 2016; Karampini-Iatrou, 2016). We know, for example, that in 1931 he was among the judges in a contest between fiction, theater playwriting and movie scripts organized by the Alexandrian journal Panegyptia (Garantoudis, 2016, p. 41), while one of his later unfinished poems, “Abandonment” (1930) refers to a visit to the movie house as the beginning of a night out for a gay couple: One night, after the cinema and the ten minutes they spent at the bar, a carnal desire lit up their eyes and made their blood boil, and they left together, and that “forever” was proclaimed.   (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou, © 2023 Onassis Foundation)

Cavafy is likely to have frequented cinemas in Alexandria, which featured several Greek-owned movie houses. Prominent among these was Iris, which was established in October 1912 and lasted for fifteen years, mainly showing films of the Cines company. It attracted aristocrats and socialites and was famous for its full orchestra and for the quality of its equipment, having introduced three-colored films to Egypt. Iris occupied number 13

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on Rosette Street, just a few steps from number 17, where Cavafy and his brother Paul lived a few years earlier. As the Egypt-based journalist Iraklis Lahanokardis testifies, the Italian film “Marcantonio e Cleopatra” had an extremely successful run at this cinema, as it played for a consecutive ten weeks, which apparently was a record for the time (Lahanokardis, 1927, pp.  155–157). This was shortly before Cavafy wrote his first version of “Caesarion.” As this evidence shows, “Caesarion” may well have been Cavafy’s response to a disappearance which was not evident in the realm of books, but was very conspicuously and tangibly enacted on the screen. If this is so, Cavafy’s response to Caesarion’s gradual fall into oblivion may be discerned on three levels. On a first level, his poem emphatically embraces and promotes traditional antiquarianism over contemporary mass culture as a means of coming to direct contact with the past (we may consider what the act of reading a “collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions” may have signified at a time when practically everyone was running to see the half-­ naked Cleopatra in the movies). On a second level, to the extent that “Caesarion,” especially in its early draft, enacts the drama of an honest “child of an exhausted dynasty of the Greeks” persecuted by “vile” Roman conquerors (Cavafy, 2019) the poem seems to defy Italian historical revisionism that was concurrently expressed in various ways, including recent Italian motion pictures, by reclaiming a Hellenic stake in Egypt. This plot thickens once we consider that at the time of the poem’s writing Italian imperialism did not occupy only parts of North Africa, but also the Dodecanese. More importantly, Cavafy’s Alexandria hosted a very strong Italian community, whose population was second only to the Greeks among European minorities and who directly antagonized the Greeks in their claims to Hellenistic Egyptian antiquity. Italian directors run the Graeco-Roman Museum of Alexandria from its inception in 1892 and for the following six decades, whereas Italian collectors tried to revive the legacy of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Augustus and Hadrian (Reid, 2002, pp. 151–152). Lastly, on a third level, Cavafy’s final version of the poem offers Caesarion’s persecuted and melancholic figure as a powerful homoerotic symbol that conveys innocence, purity and a flair for aristocratic dignity. Caesarion’s victimization triggers an emotionally charged response, which seems to restore the dignity of Hellenistic rule in Egypt in full contrast to the vulgar sexuality and the conniving traits commonly attributed to the major heteronormative cultural idol of the time: his mother Cleopatra.

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Notes 1. For a detailed historical portrait of Caesarion see Gray-Fow (2014). 2. Cavafy’s portrayal as quasi-historian was set off by the poet’s own remarks but also validated by early commentators; see, for example, Sareyannis (1983, pp. 112–113). 3. As Duane W. Roller notes, for example, “the iconography of Cleopatra VII is elusive, although the subject of much scholarship. […] As with the biographical details of the queen’s life, the information is frustratingly limited” (2010, p. 173). 4. See, for example, Phillipson (2013, p.  447): “Surely the point has been already made that Cavafy’s reference to ‘a set of Ptolemaic inscriptions’ is no idle claim, but a simple description of what actually happened in this and in many other similar occasions […]. For this is how he spent many a lonely night during his later years, reading the verbose inscriptionese declaring ‘the most of this’ and ‘the highest of the other,’ chuckling at the ‘lovely barbarisms’ of the ancient stones […]. Until perhaps, if he were lucky, a minor mention or some detail about a character or another captured his fancy, and thus tired but wistful, he let his lamp wane, put away the book, and turned in for a bit of more amiable companionship.” 5. A brief note from Mahaffy’s book (1895, pp. 463–464) in Cavafy’s hand, featuring a reference to “Ptolemy Caesar, the God Philopator Philometor,” has been kept in the poem’s folder at the Cavafy Archive. See Cavafy, 2019. 6. M. Alexiou (1985, p. 184), suggests that “in the first stanza, the self-image of past rulers is subverted,” whereas D. Haas (1982, p. 33, n. 32) thinks the poem’s sarcasm is directed at the scribblers of inscriptions. 7. On the differences between the 1594 and 1607 editions of the play see Wiggins and Richardson (2013, pp. 216–219). 8. An Egyptian Princess was published in Greek translation in Athens, in 1875, and Serapis in Cairo, in 1890.

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Michaud d’Humiac, L. (1911). La coeur de Se-Hor. Paris: E. Figuière. Michaud d’Humiac, L. (1913). Caesarion. Paris: E. Figuière. Monsman, G. (1967). Pater’s Portraits; Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater. Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Oikonomopoulos, D.  I. (1889). Αλεξανδρινός διάκοσμος: ήτοι πίνακες των εν Αλεξανδρεία ακμασάντων Ελλήνων και Ελληνιστών από της κτίσεως (331 π.Χ.) μέχρι της αλώσεως αυτής (645 μ.Χ.) υπό των Αράβων. Alexandria. Paglia, C. (1992). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London and New Haven: Yale University Press. Parramore, L. (2008). Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillipson, J. (2013). C.P.  Cavafy: Historical Poems. A Verse Translation with Commentaries. Bloomington, IN.: Author House. Plantzos, D. (2014). Οι αρχαιολογίες του κλασικού. Athens: Ekdoseis tou Eikostou protou. Pontani, F.  M. (1991). Επτά δοκίμια και μελετήματα για τον Καβάφη 1936–1974. Athens: MIET. Reid, D.  M. (2002). Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Renan, E. (1866). Les Apôtres. Paris: Michel Lévy. Roberts, N. (Ed.) (2003). A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell. Robinson, C. (1988). C.P. Cavafy. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Roller, D.  W. (2010). Cleopatra: A Biography. New  York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sareyannis, J.  A. (1983). What Was Most Precious  – His Form [1944], trans. D. Haas. Grand Street, 2(3), 108–126. Savidis, G. P. (1987). Μικρά καβαφικά, Β’. Athens: Ermis. Sergeant, P. W. (1909). Cleopatra of Egypt, Antiquity’s Queen of Romance. London: Hutchinson. Sladen, D. (1910). Queer Things About Egypt. London: Hurst and Blackett. Smalls, J. (2003). Homosexuality in Art. New York: Parkstone Press. Smith, W. (1880). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (Vols. 1-3). London: J. Murray. Sophocles, E. A. (1870). Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1100). Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Stanford, W. B. & McDowell, R. B. (1971). Mahaffy: A Biography of an Anglo-­ Irishman. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Strack, M. L. (1897). Die Dynastie der Ptolemäer. Berlin: W. Hertz.

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Sullivan, V.  P. [“Lucyl”] (1911). The Siren and the Roman (Cleopatra and Anthonius) or Luxury, Love and The Lost. A New Tragedy in Five Acts. Brooklyn, NY. Swinburne, A. C. (1880a). A Study of Shakespeare. London: Chatto and Windus. Swinburne, A. C. (1880b). Studies in Song. London: Chatto and Windus. Tryphonopoulos, D. P. & Adams, S. J. (Eds.) (2005), The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Tobin, R. D. (2015). Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tsirkas, S. (1982). Ο πολιτικός Καβάφης (4th ed). Athens: Kedros. Walker, S. (2008). Cleopatra in Pompeii?, Papers of the British School at Rome, 76, 35–46 & 345–8. Weigall, A. (1914). The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Wiggins, M., and Richardson, C. (2013), British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue: Volume III: 1590–1597. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wyke, M. (1997). Projecting the Past. Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History. New York and London: Routledge. Wyke, M. (2002). The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wyke, M. & Montserrat, D. (2011). Glamour Girls: Cleomania in Mass Culture. In M. M. Miles (Ed.), Cleopatra: A Sphinx Revisited (pp. 172–194). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Youngkin, M. (2016). British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910. Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 6

Reading As Writing: “Athyr”

1   Reading and Writing Material Antiquity “In the month of Athyr” first appeared in Alexandria, in the literary magazine Grammata, in the spring of 1917. Rumor has it that, as soon as Cavafy finished it, he sent word to the editor, Stefanos Pargas, to drop by his house to collect it for publication. Pargas found the poet “restless and jittery, pacing up and down in the small living room and the corridor, with the manuscript projecting from his pocket and his hands locked behind his back.” “Take it, dear man, this masterpiece,” Cavafy reportedly exclaimed as he handed him the manuscript, “take it, for it is burning my hands” (Pieridis, 1965, p. 73; my translation).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Kayalis, Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7_6

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IN THE MONTH OF ATHYR With difficulty I read     upon the ancient stone: “lo[r]d jesus christ.”   I discern a “so[u]l” “in the mon[th] of athyr”   “leukios was laid to sl[ee]p.” Where age is mentioned     “he li[ve]d to the age of” the Kappa Zeta shows     he was laid to sleep so young.       5 In the worn-out part I see     “hi[ m]. .. alexandrian.” There follow three lines     quite mutilated; but I make out some words   like “our t[ea]rs” and “suffering” and then once more “tears”   and “to [u]s his friends bereavement.” It seems to me the love     for Leukios was deep.         10 During the month of Athyr     Leukios was laid to sleep.   (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 177)

The fictitious stone that used to commemorate the death of young Lefkios in late antique Alexandria sets off the most impressive reading of material antiquity in Cavafy’s work. In Nora Goldschmidt’s eloquent description, Typographically, the poem is deliberately set in two different columns to mimic the materiality of a text inscribed on stone. Cavafy, however, does not simply mimic an inscription but an ancient inscription transcribed using the tools of the epigraphist. […] Cavafy borrows the tools of classical scholars transcribing the damaged traces of the textual monuments of the past, in what Anne Carson, writing almost a century later, would call “an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it.” Ellipses and square brackets enclose imagined places where words have been lost through physical damage and filled in by editorial conjecture. (Goldschmidt, 2019, p. 58)

Clearly, this is a poem about reading, interpreting and making sense of material antiquity. But Cavafy’s staging of a quasi-archaeological routine has puzzled critics and inspired contradictory arguments on the efficacy of what is presented in the poem as “reading.” According to some commentators, the speaker’s “attempts to resurrect the dead letter, to transcend the corruption of the epigraph, and of time, end in failure” (Jusdanis, 1987, p. 130) and so, “the poem itself highlights the un-readability of the past. […] The gap between the fragmentary ancient past and the present researching the other’s memory appears unbridgeable” (Kocziszky, 2015, pp. 350–51). Other critics suggest, conversely, that the speaker’s reading of the inscription “triumphantly reconstitutes something, something meaningful, in a climactic act that manages to be both one of interpretation and

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one of creation” (Mendelsohn, 2003, p. 15) or that Cavafy’s text manages, in the end, “to illustrate poetry’s ability to preserve, to articulate and to capture what would otherwise be obliterated by time and decay” (Roilos, 2003, p. 623). The difference between these diametrically opposed perceptions does not imply different interpretations of Cavafy’s text as much as the critics’ diverse theoretical and maybe philosophical presumptions. But this poem is remarkable in its ability to allow commentators to use it as proof of whatever they may have in mind on the aims and challenges of reading antiquity. Several of the motifs that intermingle in this poem recur frequently in Cavafy’s work. Lefkios’ young age (he only lived for twenty-seven years), his coded Alexandrian identity, his cultural hybridity (as a Coptic Christian who bears a Roman name and lives in a world that continues to honor local pagan deities, such as Hathor), the mourning of his friends and possibly lovers over his loss—such features secure Lefkios’ place in the sanctuary of Cavafy’s idealized young men. Furthermore, the natural decay of the funerary inscription has been correlated with the decay of lovers’ bodies through aging and death (Mendelsohn, 2003, p. 15) and may also be taken more generally as a metaphor for historical obscurity, which of course is a theme Cavafy often explores. In this case, however, the partial reconstruction of the scratched inscription does not invoke the memory of a young lover from the past or the spirit of a forgotten historical figure. Rather, it seems to reclaim an obliterated emotional reservoir: the love of Lefkios’ grieving friends which, once deciphered, rounds off the speaker’s epigraphic task, investing it with meaning and empathy and possibly triggering a historical reverie. Cavafy’s poem also stands out for its figurative handling of time, as its speaker is presented to read, reconstruct and interpret an ancient inscription just as he simultaneously writes a poem about it (Beaton, 1983, p. 36). As one commentator has put it, this is “a text in which the words on a tombstone are absorbed into an epigraphical transliteration that is then absorbed into the words of the poem” (Zerba, 2015, p.  257). By means of this perfect conflation of two usually distinct modes of writing, scholarly practice and aesthetic production, the speaker’s in situ reading of the ancient markings appears to be transformed into written text, noted with the appropriate epigraphic signs and formed into verse just as it is formulated in his consciousness (Maronitis, 2010, p.  180). In this way, casual orality is fused with an emphatically writerly idiom, making loud reading of the poem nearly impossible. But the poem’s most impressive feature may well be Cavafy’s perplexing handling of form. Αs Nehamas suggests, “in form, except for its iambic meter (and the final couplet), it

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seems closer to a scholarly paper than to a poem” (2018, p. 14); for Nagy, “even the formatting of this poem is part of its meaning” (2010, p. 265). This puzzling blend of discourses, temporalities, tropes, and signs steers the reader’s attention toward the speaker of the poem and the complex task he is performing and away from the improbable textual content of the inscription that he gradually unveils. The poem thus  masterfully substitutes the inscription-as-text by the inscription-as-reading-process. Cavafy highlights “the material condition of transmission from antiquity to the modern world” (Goldschmidt, 2019, p. 58) and so he validates the fabricated content that is being transmitted in the poem. Enchanted by their involvement in a seemingly authentic attempt to discover the meaning of an ancient text, readers tend to forget that no ancient monument could ever disclose what Lefkios’ stone appears to reveal. Cavafy’s clever staging of a scholarly process and the reader’s impression that he participates in an actual discovery engages at a level that cannot be attained by Cavafy’s other funerary poems, many of which bear the impact of J. W. Mackail’s influential translation of Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (see Caires, 1980; Ricks, 2010, p. 183), a book the poet had in his library (Karampini-Iatrou, 2012, pp.  285, 287). The poem “Tomb of Iases” (1917), for example, which was originally published together with “In the month of Athyr,” conveys the voice of a handsome Alexandrian ephebe who also died young, “after experiencing the greatest amount of pleasurable sensations as per Pater’s aesthetic dictum” (Jeffreys, 2015, p. 96). But the motif used here—that of an ancient man who speaks his mind from the grave, albeit “with considerable aplomb” and “almost aggressive candor” (Mendelsohn, 2003, p. 13)—is instantly recognizable as a literary trope. The words carved on Lefkios’ tombstone are no more real than those on Iases’, yet they appear plausible, because of how their deciphering is framed in the poem and the sense of excitement this quasi-­ scholarly routine imparts on the reader as she tries to follow it. The most important feature of the illusion Cavafy skillfully builds in this poem is the incorporation of epigraphic symbols to signify the partial restoration of the inscription’s lost letters. As George Savidis observed, the epigraphic typography used in this text amounts to its “formal essence” and makes it “unique, perhaps in world literature. […] Without the brackets, the poem would be yet another elegant neo-Alexandrian rendition of the funerary topos” (Savidis, 1985, p. 73). Despite his failure to recognize the far-ranging complexity of modernist typographies, Savidis makes here a valid point. As fixtures of modern scholarly practice, the square brackets and other signs used in the poem seem to guarantee “that the work we see

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on the page has absorbed another text in need of exegesis” (Zerba, 2015, p. 255). But these symbols, together with the text’s vertical break, also work at an aesthetic level, calling to mind the typographic experiments of other modernist poets, like Ezra Pound and e. e. cummings. Aside from its scholarly connotations, Cavafy’s typography defamiliarizes the poem’s content and disrupts its natural flow, glazing the text with an almost hieroglyphic texture which seems to support its authenticity at a more transcendental level.

2  Another Debate Over Cavafy’s Sources As the archaeologist Haralambos Bakirtzis demonstrated fifty years ago, the fabricated inscription that is being read and restored in Cavafy’s poem is marked, much like Lefkios’ figure, by hybridity and syncretism. Some of the phrases Cavafy uses, such as those in line 2, may be found in Egyptian inscriptions, albeit in a slightly different form. Other phrases (l. 3) are in reverse order from those found in actual inscriptions, while in some other cases (l. 4) Cavafy combines elements from diverse epigraphic types (Bakirtzis, 1993, pp. 55, 58, 62). Moreover, Bakirtzis observes that in line 6 “the pagan epithet ‘Alexandrian’ is compatible with pre-Christian funerary inscriptions” but not with the Christian tradition, in which we encounter an entirely different set of designations, such as μακάριος, εύμοιρος, γλυκύτατος, ελάχιστος, πιστός, πάντων φίλος, φιλόθεος, παις, θεράπων (blessed, fortunate, sweetest, the least, faithful, everyone’s friend, god loving, son, servant) and others (pp. 65–66). More important, Bakirtzis comments on lines 8 and 9, which reveal the lament of Lefkios’ friends, that words like “suffering” and “bereavement” occur in Christian inscriptions engulfed in Old Testament formulas, as for example in “απέδρα οδύνη και λύπη και στεναγμός” (from where pain, sorrow and sighing have fled) and so are alien “to the emotional passion of the dedicators of Lefkios’ stele,” as depicted in the poem. Furthermore, in the context of late antique funerary inscriptions, terms like tears, suffering and bereavement would surely be associated with the parents of the deceased, rather than with the historically improbable entity of his “friends,” and they could never imply “that ‘the love for Leucius was deep’ in an amorous sense” (p. 67). As Bakirtzis’ account shows, the text inferred from Lefkios’ inscription sets out loosely associated with relevant Christian typology (l. 2–3), then it is syncretized, with the introduction of pagan elements (‘Lefkios,” “Alexandrian”) and climaxes with a motif that is neither Christian nor pagan, as far as epigraphic traditions go. Cavafy’s inscription merges

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elements from both traditions to highlight the fictional motif of Lefkios’ grieving “friends” that is central to the poem’s meaning. The coded homosexual love bestowed on Lefkios is shown to be engraved on stone, rather than imagined by the poem’s speaker, and so it is confirmed and valued by the very process of its transcription. Many of the critics who have speculated on Cavafy’s sources for this poem focus on the prominent presence of Athyr, which “was the third month of the Egyptian calendar, corresponding to the period between October 28th and November 27th” (Bakirtzis, 1993, p. 59) and is in fact “the Greek rendition of the name of the Egyptian/Coptic month Hathor, the ancient Egyptian calendar being in use in Hellenistic Egypt” (Halim, 2013, p. 77). In Cavafy criticism, Hathor is usually identified as the “goddess of tombs and sensual love” (Cavafy, 2007, p. 220). Tracing ancient references to the term Athyr, which has often been perceived as a key to the poem’s interpretation, several commentators have offered Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, 13.39.69) and/or The Greek Anthology (9, 383) as Cavafy’s main sources for the poem (Pontani, 1991, p.  60; Maronitis, 2010, p. 181). G. Fatouros, on the other hand, has indicated that the poem’s source is to be found in “a letter of the rhetor Synesius of Cyrene which Cavafy had read in Hercher’s edition of the Greek Epistolographi,” a book he believes Cavafy used as a source “when writing other poems as well.” According to this argument, the poem originated from the phrase “Εκκαιδεκάτη μηνός Αθύρ ο μακαρίτης Καστρίκιος αυτό τούτο εγένετο (‘on the 16th of the month Athyr the blessed Kastrikios indeed received the attribute of the blessed’ [i.e. he died]).” Fatouros also thinks that line 10 of the poem derives from the phrase “ηγαπήθη διαφερόντως” (was greatly loved), which he locates in a different letter by Synesius (but is also to be found in Plutarch’s Life of Solon) (2000, pp. 214–15). These propositions mostly reflect the great impression the exoticized term “Athyr” has made on some late twentieth-century readers of the poem. 1 We may safely assume, however, that anyone living in Egypt in Cavafy’s time would be familiar with Hathor before reading his poem, if only from its famous temple at Dendera (which, as mentioned earlier, in Chap. 5, also features the pharaonic sunk relief carving of Cleopatra with Caesarion). For these readers, Hathor may also have carried meanings other than those usually attributed to her in Cavafy criticism. In their Short History of Egypt, for example, a booklet printed in Alexandria in 1926 also by Grammata, Stefanos Pargas and Georgios Arvanitakis glossed Hathor as “the sun in its supreme beauty, goddess of the arts” (p. 20). Furthermore, through her common perception as “goddess of sexual allure” (Hart,

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2005, p.  3), Hathor may also have been loosely associated with homosexuality. Sigmund Freud placed her among Egyptian deities that feature “an androgynous structure, a combination of male and female sex characters” (1960, p. 94; also see Bruhm, 2001, p. 85). The connection of such contemporaneous associations of Hathor to Cavafy’s poem is of course purely conjectural, yet it seems to promise a richer interpretative potential for its presence in the poem. A stronger case for Cavafy’s textual source for this poem was recently made by Stephanie Ann Frampton, who drew attention to the epigram “On the name of a certain Lucius inscribed in marble” by Decimius Magnus Ausonius, a Latin poet who lived in modern-day Bordeaux, in France, during the fourth century BCE. Here is the original text, followed by Frampton’s prose translation in English: De nomine cuiusdam Lucii sculpto in marmore Una quidem geminis fulget set dissita punctis littera; praenomen sic nota sola facit. post ‘M’ incisum est, puto sic; non tota videtur. dissiluit saxi fragmine laesus apex; nec quisquam Marius seu Marcius anne Metellus hic iaceat certis noverit indiciis. truncatis convulsa iacent elementa figuris; omnia confusis interiere notis. miremur periisse homines? monumenta fatiscunt; mors etiam saxis nominibusque venit. On the name of a certain Lucius inscribed in marble: Only one letter shines forth, set-off by double points. This mark alone gives the praenomen [‘L’ for Lucius]. After it, ‘M’ is carved: yes I think so. It cannot be seen completely. The top part, which is cracked, is broken-off on a fragment of stone, and no one could know by certain signs whether a Marius or Marcius or Metellus lies here. Letters, overturned, lie among broken shapes. Everything has been destroyed among disordered letters. Should we marvel that men perish? Monuments wear out, and death comes even to stone and names. (Frampton, 2016, p. 67)

As in Cavafy’s poem, the speaker of Ausonius’ epigram appears to be reading a fragment of an ancient inscription but can decipher only two letters: the implied “L,” from which he presumably recognizes the praenomen Lucius, written in the poem’s title, and an “M,” which he seems to read with difficulty and uncertainty, because of the marble’s corruption.

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So, the speaker realizes that no one will ever be able to know the nomen of the man buried in the grave, which leads him to discern an elegiac parallel between the corruption of letters carved on stone and the inevitable extinction of persons, monuments and names. The two poems share the theme of a speaker reading an ancient inscription and contemplating on it, as well as the name of their central figure (Lucius/Lefkios). Although they differ in many other respects, these common elements may indeed make an impression of “a striking resemblance,” as Frampton maintains (p.  171). But the two texts’ similarity is significantly enhanced by the author’s choice to quote Cavafy’s poem from G. Valassopoulo’s early translation (1919), in which the square brackets that dominate the surface of Cavafy’s original are obliterated. In the event that Cavafy actually knew of Ausonius’ epigram, he may indeed have derived from it the motif of a viewer who tries to decipher a damaged inscription. Other critics have suggested similar parallels for other elements of the poem, as for example the use of square brackets in Robert Browning’s “A Death in the Desert” (1864) or the ellipses featured in Ezra Pound’s “Papyrus” (1915) (Ricks, 2010, p. 183). But this does not support Frampton’s claims that “Cavafy read the Ausonian poem, using it to structure his own rumination on death and survival” (p. 171), that this Latin text was his “model” and his “source” (p.  172), or that “In the month of Athyr” is “Cavafy’s version of the Lucius poem” (p. 172). There is in fact no evidence for such claims, other than a general impression of similarity between the two texts. We simply do not know whether Cavafy knew of Ausonius or had read his epigram, and there is no indication that he could even read Latin (his library contains only one work of Latin literature, an edition of Sallustius from 1725; see Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, p.  54). In this light, the correspondences Peter Jeffreys has indicated between Cavafy’s poem and various texts by Walter Pater, including the short story “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), seem to offer a far more apposite and valuable context for the poem’s interpretation than its rather frail connection to Ausonius (2015, pp. 97–99, 112, 221). The text we can identify with authority as Cavafy’s main source for “In the month of Athyr” is not a literary text, but a work of scholarship: Gustave Lefebvre’s collection of Christian inscriptions from late Antique Egypt (1907). Bakirtzis often referred to this book, back in 1972, and was convinced that “Cavafy had studied it” (1993, p. 73). Still, he found no evidence to support his assumption and was clearly disheartened when G. P. Savidis, the Cavafy archive’s custodian at the time, informed him that

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Lefebvre’s collection “is not in the poet’s library” (1993, p. 73). But of course, Cavafy did not consult only books that he owned; he also studied in libraries and is known to have borrowed books, including collections of inscriptions from the Municipal library of Alexandria (M. Peridis, quoted in Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, p. 152.). A set of handwritten notes by the poet that have survived in the Cavafy Archive provide conclusive evidence that “In the month of Athyr” is indeed based on Lefebvre’s collection, as Bakirtzis conjectured fifty years ago (although, sadly, he was never informed of their existence). This book was Cavafy’s major scholarly source for this poem, supplemented by Félix Robiou’s Recherches sur le calendrier macédonien en Égypte et sur la chronologie des Lagides (1878), which the poet also evidently consulted. Folder GR-OF CA CA-SF01-S01-F01-SF001-0151 (793) in the Cavafy Archive’s Digital Collection (Cavafy, 2019) contains a handwritten manuscript of the poem (with two variations noted at the bottom of the page) (Fig. 6.1) along with several pages of handwritten notes in Greek and in French. Two of these pages contain lists with the phrase “εβίωσεν ετών” (lived to the age of), followed by different numbers, all copied from inscriptions in Lefebvre’s edition, which is also cited fully in the notes, in Cavafy’s handwriting (Fig. 6.2). On another page of these notes, the poet copies other phrases from inscriptions in Lefebvre’s collection, under the handwritten title “Texts”: “Χριστέ Κύριε,” “Ιησούς Χριστός,” “των ψυχών,” “εν μηνί Αθύρ,” “εκοιμήθη ο Μίκρος,” “Στέφανος ιατρός εκοιμήθη” (Lord Christ, Jesus Christ, of the souls, in month Athyr, Mikros was laid to sleep, Stefanos doctor was laid to sleep). Yet another page of Cavafy’s notes contains a handwritten list of the twelve months of the Egyptian calendar in French, copied from Robiou’s publication (1878, p. 22), which is also duly cited in handwriting by the poet (Fig. 6.3). In the verso of the same piece of paper Cavafy writes clearly, in Greek, the word Athyr and underneath it: Hathor. As this evidence demonstrates, the first part of Lefkios’ inscription, as deciphered in the poem, is essentially a compilation of phrases copied from various actual inscriptions the poet found in Lefebvre’s collection. The quoted phrases and inferences in the first five lines of the poem are thus generally accurate although aesthetically and culturally modified, along the lines suggested by Bakirtzis; these phrases are also well documented in the poet’s handwritten notes, in contrast to those in the ensuing four lines, which were fabricated by him. We notice, then, that in the first part of the poem Cavafy worked meticulously to build a plausible collage which lends

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Fig. 6.1  Manuscript of “In the month of Athyr” © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation

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Fig. 6.2  Cavafy’s handwritten notes for “In the month of Athyr” © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation

credibility to the second part, that focuses on the emotions of Lefkios’ friends. We also notice that Cavafy carefully copied and examined all months of the Egyptian calendar before deciding on Athyr. Therefore, this word does not connect the poem to a specific ancient text, nor can it be considered as a key to its interpretation, as many critics have suggested. Cavafy may have picked Athyr from the list of months as an allusion to the attributes of Hathor or, more likely, for its aesthetic quality and even “because of the alliteration of theta (πένθος, ἀγαπήθη, Ἀθύρ, ἐκοιμήθη)” it affords (Chaniotis, 2018, p. 20). Using Lefebvre’s collection of inscriptions, Cavafy also taught himself in the use of the epigraphic symbols that he boldly incorporated in his poem. Furthermore,  Lefebvre’s volume contains several indices, which Cavafy may have found handy while composing other poems, as a source for titles

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Fig. 6.3  Cavafy’s handwritten notes for “In the month of Athyr” © 2016–2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation

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and professions, as for example, “Αναγνώστης”/Reader and “Γραμματικός”/ Grammarian (Lefebvre, 1907, p. 164), which he used respectively in the poems “The Tomb of Ignatius” and “Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias.” The same indices may have suggested to the poet the names of some of his fictional characters, including Ammones (“Αμμόνης”), Iases (“Ιωσήας”), Eurion (“Ευρ[.]ω[“) and others (Lefebvre, 1907, pp. 159–60). Turning to the poem’s formal properties, we notice that the manuscript in the archive features the square brackets and the vertical division of the text, but not the ellipses in line 6 that we find in the poem’s final printed version, from 1917 onwards. On the other hand, the poem’s first English translation, by G. Valassopoulo, which initially accompanied E. M. Forster’s 1919 essay on Cavafy at The Athenaeum, omits the square brackets and opts for an abundance of ellipses, which even replace the caesura of empty spaces that break vertically the original text, thus effecting a significant alteration to the poem’s meaning: It is hard to read . . . . on the ancient stone. “Lord Jesus Christ” . . . . I make out the word “Soul”. “In the month of Athyr . . . . Lucius fell asleep.” His age is mentioned . . . . “He lived years . . . .”--     5 The letters KZ show . . . . that he fell asleep young. In the damaged part I see the words . . . . “Him . . Alexandrian.” Then come three lines . . . . much mutilated. But I can read a few words . . . . perhaps “our tears” and “sorrows.” And again: “Tears” . . . . and: “for us his friend mourning.” I think Lucius . . . . was much beloved.      11 In the month of Athyr . . . . Lucius fell asleep . . . . (Translated by George Valassopoulo; Forster, 1923, p. 96)

As a result of the absence of square brackets, the poem’s speaker is here presented to read full words on Lefkios’ inscription, rather than striving to infer their missing letters. Also, the profusion of ellipses that somehow seems to trivialize the poem’s main premise probably reveals the early translator’s eagerness to amplify and naturalize the formal boldness of Cavafy’s original. As earlier noted, the original’s surface is dominated by the presence of epigraphic symbols, suggesting the full absorption of a scholarly mode of writing in the poetic text. But Valassopoulo may not have comprehended the significance of Cavafy’s typographical audacity or Forster may have thought it too bold to accompany his introduction of Cavafy to the English-speaking world.

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3   Making Sense of the Poem Predictably, “In the month of Athyr” has inspired a broad array of interpretative ventures, many of which focus on the poem’s staged occasion (a modern reader trying to decipher what is left of a damaged ancient inscription) rather than on its actual text. Some critics have read Cavafy’s poem as an expression of typically antiquarian ruminations. Fatouros, for example, suggests that “Like anyone deciphering an inscription on a tombstone, the poet is lost in thoughts about death and so concludes his poem” (2000, p. 214), while Phillipson reads it as “an ancient and touching love song” (2013, p. 542). Many other critics, also centering on the poem’s staging, think of it as particularly “difficult” reading and even as a text which exemplifies theoretical notions of difficulty and indeterminacy, and claim that its speaker’s efforts to locate meaning through his reading ultimately come to “nothing” (Lambropoulos, 1983, pp. 662, 665; also see Alexiou, 1983, p.  63; Jusdanis, 1987, p.  130; Nagy, 2010, p.  266). Contrary to this oft-repeated view, we may observe that the only kind of difficulty that is actually evident in Cavafy’s poem is caused by the typographical disruption of the natural flow of speech; this aesthetic complication mimics and enhances the speaker’s specific circumstances, i.e., his “inability to clearly discern the text inscribed on the tombstone” (Polychronakis, 2010, p. 437). Considering the reading challenges posed by actual late antique inscriptions, as amply manifest in Lefebvre’s collection, we must observe that “In the month of Athyr” demonstrates remarkable efficacy and ease, as its speaker manages to decipher and present, adroitly and hierarchically ranked, all meaningful bits of information that appear to have survived on the ancient stone. The content of the inscription is thus offered to the reader of Cavafy’s poem effortlessly and with impressive coherence, despite its typographically constructed image of fragmentation and formal perplexity. What then may be the meaning of this poem, if we move beyond sentimental antiquarianism and difficulty itself as possible answers? Some critics have responded to this question centering on the two names featured in the text, Lefkios and Athyr. Nagy, for example, draws an elaborate analogy between Cavafy’s text and “the ancient Egyptian myth about the fragmentation of Osiris and about his subsequent restoration by his consort Isis in the month of Athyr,” as retold by Plutarch in his essay On Isis and Osiris (Nagy, 2010, pp.  269–70; also see Polychronakis, 2010, pp.  450–51). Building on Mendelsohn’s earlier reading of Cavafy’s poem as a manifestation of fragmentation, decomposition and loss, which parallels that of

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Lefkios’ body and is ultimately overturned by the poet’s act of reconstitution (2003, p. 15), Nagy concludes that The dismemberment of the body of Osiris is matched by the dismemberment of the poem of Cavafy, which is pictured as the reading of a dismembered inscription. The fragmented members of the poem need to be reassembled by the reader poet just as the fragmented members of the body of Osiris need to be reassembled by Isis. […] [The poem’s] composer becomes the first reader of this poem by virtue of being the last reader of the fragmentary inscription that he sees being framed within his poem. And just as the ultimate reintegration of Osiris after his disintegration is driven by the love of Isis in the ancient Egyptian myth, now the ultimate reintegration of the poem after its own disintegration is being driven by love—a love restored in the act of reading a fragmented inscription. (Nagy, 2010, p. 270)

Similarly focusing on the names featured in Cavafy’s poem, other commentators have embarked on more fanciful quests for coded meanings. One such proposition seeks to connect Cavafy’s Lefkios with the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which features two brothers, named Leucius and Carinus, and also with the three-volume Synaxaristis (1868), which is in the poet’s library and contains an account of the life of the Christian martyr Leucius (Karampini-Iatrou, 2013, p. 67). According to another commentator, Cavafy’s reference to Lefkios “camouflages at least two illustrious historical characters, one pagan and one proto-Christian,” in order to protect his connection to them “from the potential prejudice and/or calumnies of the ‘un-initiated’” (Mahaira-Odoni, 2012, pp. 1, 6). The first of these figures is the beautiful Antinous, Roman Emperor Hadrian’s famous young lover, who drowned in the Nile in 130 CE and is supposed to be connected to Cavafy’s poem on the grounds of two coincidences: first, the similar name (Lucius) of Hadrian’s adoptive son and probably lover, whom he took up after Antinous’ tragic death, and second, that according to ancient sources cited by Marguerite Yourcenar in her historical novel, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), Antinous appears to have died on “the first of the month of Athyr” (Mahaira-Odoni, 2012, p. 9). 2 The second figure coded in this composite Lefkios, according to Mahaira-Odoni, is Saint Leucius, a mid-third-century Gnostic whose memory is celebrated by the orthodox Christian calendar together with that of his fellow martyrs Saint Tyrsus and Saint Callinicus, on December 14 (2012, p. 12). This rather obscure figure of ecclesiastical history is thought to “have appealed to

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Cavafy’s sensibilities” presumably because he “had lived reportedly in great self-contradiction, falsehood, dissolution and impiety and had authored unspeakable apocryphal ‘apostolic romances’” (2012, p. 12). Unlike this rather baffling hunt for concealed meanings and correspondences bearing little or nil interpretative value, Eva Kocziszky reads the name of Lefkios literally, observing that in Greek it stands for the color white and, more specifically, “a type of white that often appears in ancient texts to signify the whiteness of marble or of skin” (2015, p. 351). This observation could be further enriched with other connotations of the word “leukos” in Greek (such as: untainted, pure, virgin, sinless) and perhaps connected to broader questions, as for example “Winckelmann’s association of the whiteness of marble with the ideal beauty of bodies” (Hodne, 2020, p. 193). But Kocziszky goes on to suggest that the color white was seen “rather as a feminine color in antiquity” (2015, p. 351), from which she infers that in Cavafy’s poem “the youth Leukios is deliberately associated with his white beauty, and thereby put on a pedestal as the ideal object of desire and unsatisfiable yearning” (p. 352). By a further leap of the imagination, this formulation is combined with the word “εκοιμήθη” (was laid to sleep), which as earlier discussed Cavafy copied from Lefebvre’s collection of inscriptions, to lead to the conclusion that “The beautiful, white bodied Leukios is sleeping because he is the timeless object of desire” (p. 352). A more balanced approach to this poem’s interpretation may begin with the observation that Lefkios’ inscription verifies one of Cavafy’s central themes: the picturing of Hellenistic Alexandria as a vortex of cosmopolitan hybridity and sexual permissiveness, an ideal city “synonymous with cultural and racial fusion, homoeroticism, and indulgence” (Antonopoulou, 2014, p.  54; see also Dellamora, 2010, p.  128). We notice that the “conflation of religious and cultural traditions blending Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Christian elements” in the inscription’s text, portrays late antiquity in terms strongly reminiscent of modern Decadence (Polychronakis, 2010, pp. 452, 454). Also, the term “Alexandrian,” that sums up most of what we learn about Lefkios’ identity from the poem, is a “coded” word (Ricks, 2004, p. 347), standardly employed in Cavafy’s poetry “to denote ‘homosexual’ in a wholly positive way” (Ekdawi, 1996, p. 36; also see Caires, 1980, p. 136). Placed on a young man’s Christian tombstone, this term seems to validate the historical existence of a utopian moment, in which same-sex desire could be proudly signified and could also co-exist harmoniously with Christianity, which is in itself thus

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portrayed as a tolerant institution, unrelated to exclusions, constraints and guilt. In this way, Lefkios’ inscription manifests the “interplay and precarious amalgamation of pagan hedonism and Christian asceticism” that, as Peter Jeffreys has suggested, Cavafy found in Walter Pater (Jeffreys, 2015, p. 108). And yet, the most important finding on Lefkios’ stone is the invented collective subject, the “[U]S HIS FRIENDS” of line 9, who appears to have boldly replaced the young man’s family as dedicators of the stele and as mourners over his death. As Mendelsohn comments, There is in fact an elaborate displacement going on here. For it is the mourning friends who are given voice here; in a way, we are merely overhearing them, through a complex series of rhetorical frames: as we read the poem we are reading the words, reported to the narrator as he himself reads the stone, that were uttered by Lefkios’ friends and subsequently reported to an anonymous stonemason who then engraved them. (2003, p. 14)

The poem’s speaker does not comment on this improbable finding (a group of mourning friends posing as dedicators of a young man’s stele), but his tone in lines 8 and 9 shows him emotionally moved, as he realizes its significance, to the point of breaking off his effort to find any more meaning on the stone. As the next line demonstrates, the narrator is satisfied with the meaning he has already discovered, and so he sums it up in his single interpretative remark (“It seems to me the love for Leukios was deep”), before registering his own symbolic merging with the group of Lefkios’ loving friends, by repeating their script in his own voice, free from epigraphic symbols, in line 11. Clearly, the speaker’s perception transforms a conventional expression of male homosociality (the word “friends”) into a heavily coded term that signifies a group of men “joined by the shared sensations and effects of male intimacy” (Dellamora, 2010, p. 126). “So that was it: he was loved,” the speaker seems to exclaim at the end of the poem, clearly finding an answer to his own unvoiced questions (Mendelsohn, 2003, p.  16). As Ricks comments, “it is Alexandrianism that binds the young men, the stone’s decipherer, and perhaps the poem’s reader” (2004, p. 347). Considering that this celebration of the love of friends takes place in a poem that liberally mixes Christian and pagan traces, one may be tempted to infer that Cavafy implicitly seeks to reunite the two facets of male friendship that were dissociated in medieval times, sodomia and amicitia (see Saslow, 1999, pp. 56–57; Smalls, 2003, p. 47). Moreover, by allocating the traditional responsibilities of a man’s family to

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the collectivity of Lefkios’ friends, the poet hints toward a new historical entity, what might today be called Lefkios’ “queer family” (Watson, 2022, p. 195). Cavafy’s outlook here seems to correspond to Winckelman’s, in whose work, as has been commented, “there is a point at which imaginative reconstruction gives way to fantasy – the projection of desire onto the canvas of the past. The material remains of the lost epoch give rise to a utopian realm with which the writer imagines himself to be much more compatible than the present” (Colby, 2009, p. 23). References to male friendship as a powerful metaphor for male-to-male desire recur often in Cavafy’s work. In some of his poems, including “Kimon, son of Learchos, 22  years old, student of Greek letters (in Cyrene),” “Lovely white flowers” and “According to the recipes of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians,” male lovers identify each other simply as friends. In other texts, male friends appear to constitute a communal collectivity, as for example in “Young men of Sidon (A.D. 400)” or in the incomplete poem “Company of four,” in which two male couples are shown to live together, sharing everything among them and with their friends. This coterie is also implied in the plural voice that speaks in other Cavafy poems, such as “Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias,” “Tomb of Eurion,” and of course “In a town of Osroene”: Yesterday about midnight, they brought to us our friend Rhemon, wounded in a tavern brawl. Through the windows that we left wide open, his handsome body upon the bed was illumined by the moon. We’re a mixture of races here: Syrians, Greek, Armenians, Medes. Such is Rhemon, too. Last night, though, when His erotic face was illumined by the moon, Our minds turned to Plato’s Charmides. (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 161)

In this case, as Timothy Duff suggests, Cavafy reworks the classical ideal of a philosophical Platonic gathering into a belated, hybridized and earthy communal ideal with far-reaching implications for the representation of Cavafy’s homoerotic present; such an ideal may also be traced in the collective subject of friends who love and mourn young Lefkios in the “Athyr” poem:

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Indeed, might we see in Remon and his friends not a pale imitation of a Platonic coterie, but a more real incarnation of it  – in this defiantly non-­ classical, ethnically mixed group of young men who frequented tavernas and got into fights, and who loved each other, who loved their comrade’s body – more real than might be found in the classicizing fantasies common in the art and literature of the time? Might not their appreciation of beauty, and temperance, and virtue, be as philosophical, as wise as in Plato? In posing these questions, Cavafy’s invocation of Plato’s Charmides elevates this group, whose sexuality would have placed them outside the bounds of contemporary society, into an ideal. (Duff, 2021, p. 179; see also Papanikolaou, 2014, pp. 288–89, 104–05)

Cavafy’s persistent use of male friendship as code for an all-­encompassing perception of homosexual desire, which would include but not be limited to sexual practices, is part of a broader cultural project that was widely spread in turn of the century Europe. The sublimation of homoerotic desire as male friendship and its encoding in mythological episodes and various other cultural manifestations has a long history in Western literature and art (see Saslow, 1999, 163 and passim; Aldrich, 1993, p.  7; Boone, 2014, p. 230). But it was also a highly topical issue at the turn of the twentieth century and central to the emerging collective effort to justify and defend male love. As Jeffreys argues, a central motif of Cavafy’s poem, “the paired components of male comradeship and the subsequent mourning for the inevitable death inherent to the Victorian male romance are central to Pater” (2015, p. 111). In 1893, John Addington Symonds, would present Walt Whitman’s “doctrine of comradeship” and the poet’s praise of “a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown,” which “waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men,” as a valuable discovery and possibly the way “whereby abnormal instincts may be moralized and raised to higher value” in society (1893, pp. 75, 76). A few years later, as discussed in the previous chapter, the anthologies of male friendship edited by Elisar von Kupffer (1900) and Edward Carpenter (1902) brought to light and commented on a broad variety of historical and contemporary literary manifestations of love between men. At around the same time, Vernon Lee, in her dialogic essay “On Friendship” (1910), used Plato’s concept of male friendship “to encode a lesbian message,” drawing up “an alternative (lesbian) subjectivity in a subtext that employs and simultaneously recasts the erotic and aesthetic forms of masculinity in Plato” (Zorn, 2003, pp. 96, 99).

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In this cultural context, Cavafy stages in the distant past communal clusters of male friends, which often transcend the boundaries of religions and national origins and perhaps offer symbolically a sense of belonging to the modern homosexual reader. In “In the month of Athyr,” this coterie is not presented in the form of a utopian fantasy, but as a fact, encrypted in the text of a damaged ancient tombstone and deciphered by the authoritative voice of an expert antiquarian reader. Also, Lefkios’ friends appear in Cavafy’s poem as his principal mourners; they practice and express a form of same-sex love in which desire is accompanied by strong emotions, which presumably allow them to build spiritual bonds with each other and a shared sense of communal belonging. This at any rate is what the poem’s speaker infers from the words he makes out on Lefkios’ inscription and what engages him emotionally, at the poem’s conclusion (“It seems to me the love for Leukios was deep”). With its distinct religious references and its solemn overtones, Cavafy’s poem frames the love among Lefkios and his friends in “the Victorian tradition of passionate friendship, spiritual and manly love,” which drew elements “from evangelical Christianity, a purified Hellenism and a reverence for an imagined medieval chivalry” and constituted “a venerable tradition in nineteenth-century Britain” (Cocks, 2003, pp. 177–178; also see Richards, 1987). Communal gatherings of half-dressed boys and young men, disguised as belated ancients and always expressing a sense of sadness and loss, are also portrayed in terms vaguely reminiscent of Cavafy’s poems in some of Wilhelm von Gloeden’s photographs, shot in southern Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, as for example the one presented here (Fig. 6.4). As we will discuss more analytically in the following chapter, von Gloeden’s pictures are grounded on an antinomy: at a symbolic level, they seek to bridge the vast expanse between early twentieth-century same-sex desire and its ancient models (see Evangelista, 2010, p.  99), but at the same time they also painfully recognize that this distance can never be meaningfully traversed. This typically antiquarian discrepancy is in fact common among most modern revivalist attempts. For the mournful settings of von Gloeden’s homoerotic portrayals, just like the funerary motifs through which Cavafy’s eroticism is often filtered, suggest that the modern longing for a sensual connection with antiquity through art will always be incomplete and precarious: a distant echo of past pleasures, inscribed on countless static and muted representations which manifest “an aesthetic of compulsive repetition” (Evangelista, 2010, p. 102).

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Fig. 6.4  Wilhelm von Gloeden, Terra di Fuoco (c. 1890-1900)

4  Cavafy’s Speaker: A Janus-Faced Reader of Antiquity Like “Caesarion” and “Orophernes,” “In the month of Athyr” focuses on the process by which an experienced reader of antiquity retrieves data from an ancient material source and proceeds to tell the story of a young man from the distant past, or at least as much of it as he can put together. Only two of these poems feature actual historical figures; but all their protagonists are connected as cultural hybrids, who died young (literally or metaphorically, as Orophernes’ life seems to stop at the point where history abandons him) and who have clearly been selected as figures from the periphery of the historical archive or, in the case of Lefkios, out of its bounds altogether. These three figures also elicit the narrator’s excited and emotionally charged response. His interest in them is clearly personal and he seems to discern on their portrait or in surviving fragments of ancient texts far more than he actually states in his poem. Moreover, all three poems rise from the inspection of modest remnants of material antiquity,

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a coin portrait and two inscriptions, in all of which a practical purpose is complemented by an aesthetic dimension. These are clearly unassuming antiquities, items that may be exhibited, studied, or used as evidence for historical research but which are rarely perceived as works of art or as objects that afford aesthetic pleasure on their own right. But the most important common feature of these three poems is the figure of their speaker and the impressive skills he performs. This figure’s complexity has shunned critical attention, as he has often been underrated as the poet’s autobiographical reflection. However, the narrator is by far the most complex and interesting character we encounter in this set of poems. He is, in part, the persona of an expert antiquarian who reads antiquity with a voice of learned authority. In “Orophernes,” the speaker instantly recognizes both the value type of the coin (a tetradrachm) and the obscure historical figure depicted on it. His refined physiognomic culture allows him to read, just as casually, qualities like “allure,” “radiance” and “aesthetic memory” on the ancient coin portrait. Moreover, he is able to recite effortlessly, in detail and on a large scale his protagonist’s biography, which to this day remains “abstruse even to the classically educated” (Frier, 2010, p. 34) and to comment, with convincing authority, on the historiographic void concerning his ending. He seems to know everything there is to know about Orophernes and his world, and his savvy handling of this complex material entices the reader to rely on everything he narrates, including the poem’s fictitious section on the Ionian boy (lines 9–17). In “Caesarion,” the speaker is introduced as an experienced antiquarian even more plainly. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the beginning of the poem Cavafy uses Mahaffy as a narrative persona, imitating his language and his procedures, including the checking of a date in the first line. The speaker also appears to have at home and readily available specialized scholarly editions, such as that “collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions,” with which he is so accustomed that he may peruse them to pass his time. The voice of expertise continues to be heard throughout the poem, imparting an air of credibility and homosocial naiveté to the ensuing homoerotic fantasy featuring Caesarion’s apparition. As Cat Lambert comments, “What is queered in this poem is not so much the reader’s object of desire but rather the readerly persona itself, at first an old curmudgeon leafing through a tome in a historicizing manner, to ascertain dates and facts about a period in the past, who then casts ‘rigor’ to the wind, bending and blurring time to resurrect a ghost” (Lambert, 2022, p. 111).

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Finally, the narrator of “In the month of Athyr” performs an impromptu reading and restoration of the textual remnants on a damaged ancient stele, expertly documenting his rendition with the appropriate epigraphic symbols. In all these cases, the poems’ speaker seeks to be trusted as a knowledgeable and expert handler and appraiser of antiquities, who confidently guides his reader in his métier, in a way that may recall the staging of the Elder Philostratus’ Imagines (an expert providing “instructions to the young, from which they will interpret and pay attention to what is worthy,” quoted in Newby, 2009, p. 323) or Winkelmann’s posture of an antiquarian connoisseur devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of antiquity (Harloe, 2013, p. 68). Cavafy’s “poet-scholar” persona has often been noted in criticism, yet it is only one facet of a far more complex narrative voice. For, despite his stylistically crafted pose as an expert reader of antiquity, Cavafy’s antiquarian speaker is also prone to misjudge basic aspects of the texts and artifacts he is discussing. In fact, he consistently approaches ancient coins and inscriptions as something other than what he should know they are, looking for qualities they could not possibly possess. In “Orophernes,” the speaker treats the coin portrait as a subliminal imprint of the young usurper’s facial features, seemingly ignoring that, as in all ancient coins, this image was carved by an artist to serve the portrait’s projected function as a public monument and with little concern for what many centuries later would be perceived as “photographic” accuracy. This fact would be obvious to any commentator on ancient coins in Cavafy’s time, and it was certainly known to the poet himself, as his “Philehellene” clearly demonstrates. In “Caesarion,” as discussed in the previous chapter, Cavafy’s expert reader grumbles about the blandly flattering content of Ptolemaic inscriptions, mimicking J.  P. Mahaffy’s conversational style. But unlike Mahaffy, whose complaints at the inscriptions’ uniformity are based on practical concerns, Cavafy’s narrator scorns Ptolemaic inscriptions as bad poetry. He skims through these formulaic texts looking for literary qualities that could only be found in a very different collection of texts, as for example in the Greek Anthology. Similarly, in “In the month of Athyr” Cavafy’s trained reader is emotionally overwhelmed by references to the mourning of Lefkios’ friends. In this case, the speaker reads phrases suggesting the friends’ sorrow as if they were confessions of true feelings, carved on Lefkios’ tombstone by his friends and free from all constraints, including those of formulaic patterns and typologies. This outrageous set of assumptions supports the narrator’s assumption about the manly love

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that Lefkios enjoyed during his short life. Just as in “Orophernes,” in which an ancient coin is read contrary to knowledge disclosed in other samples of Cavafy’s work, the reading of Lefkios’ inscription contradicts the depiction of commissioned funerary inscriptions in other poems of his, including “For Ammonis, who died at age twenty-nine in 610,” “Epitaph of Antiochos, King of Commagene,” and “Kimon, son of Learchos, 22 years old, student of Greek Letters (in Cyrene).” Evidently, Cavafy’s appraisals of ancient fragments or artifacts feature a subtly constructed Janus-faced narrative persona, which joins and interchanges two clearly incongruous perceptions of material antiquity. The narrator’s antiquarian expertise is established every time from the outset with aplomb; but his assumptions on the nature and function of the material he is reading, as they unfold in the course of each poem, contradict basic tenets of relevant knowledge and lead to surprising and historically improbable conclusions. This masterfully executed device allows what is essentially a queer reading of ancient texts and artifacts to be articulated by a voice of cultural authority and to be masked as a by-product of, or a valid alternative for, mainstream antiquarian expertise. It is the main technique that empowers Cavafy’s own “erotic archaeology” (Colby, 2009, p. 52), as it enables the poet’s eccentric readings to connect the meaning of ancient texts and artifacts with the yearnings and contingencies of same-­ sex desire. Cavafy’s queer readings of material antiquity were probably inspired by Walter Pater’s aesthetic impressionism, as put forth in The Renaissance and other texts. The poems we have been discussing seem to transfer to the reading of ancient texts and artifacts the self-indulgent gaze which Pater postulated as crucial for the appreciation of art and literature: “what is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book to me? What effect does it really produce on me?. .. How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?” (Pater, 1986, p. xxix). As Wolfgang Iser observed, Pater’s aesthetic prose “describes not the work but the impression the work makes on him”; it “blots out what can be seen and so gives free rein to the triumphant observer’s imagination” (1987, pp. 43, 45). Furthermore, in the context of Pater’s aesthetic historicism, “artistic education and scholarly research are turned into fields for the potential deployment of autoerotic and homoerotic pleasures” (Evangelista, 2004, p. 3). Transferring this approach to the interpretation of ancient texts and artifacts, Cavafy develops a double narrative voice, which allows him to subvert the desexualized normativity of antiquarian

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and scholarly discourse while at the same time employing it to canonize the queer meaning he “discovers” in the ancient material. This double posture is more clearly visible in “Caesarion,” as in this poem the voice of learning and that of sensual fantasy alternate in the same night and in the same room, which is thus presented as a coterminous space “for emotion and for erudition” (Dallas, 1987, p. 97). Cavafy’s persistent fusion of the reading of material antiquity with the longings of same-sex desire is part of a broader intellectual quest, which projected shrewd perception and evaluation of texts and cultural artifacts as a specifically homoerotic quality. This figuration is akin to Walter Pater, who according to R. Dellamora “represents his subjects of desire as interpreters who use erotic self-awareness to divine the sexual-aesthetic motives of cultural production. … Pater’s ‘expert’ registers the distance that exists between a cultural critique that is ignorant of male-male desire and one whose expertise is in part erotic” (Dellamora, 1990, pp.  220, 222). Perception was for Pater “the ultimate creative act” (Paglia, 1992, p. 481) and a crucial factor in “his association of aesthetics with a homoerotic temperament as the underlying force in Western culture” (Zorn, 2003, p.  97). John Addington Symonds, also, in A Problem in Modern Ethics (1883) “configures the homosexual as a reader, one able to locate the value of texts and of bodies […] and invokes a proximity between the homosexual and interpretation itself” (Sulcer, 1999, p. 237). For Edward Carpenter, too, “it is the homosexual’s critical, artistic ability that positions him as the very figure of interpretation” (p. 240). By “placing the pathologized homosexual at the very center of culture as a uniquely sensitive, subtle, and interpretive being,” these writers sought to legitimate “the homosexual by demonstrating his centrality in all Western cultural projects, as well as his superiority to heterosexuals in all things artistic” (pp. 240, 237). Consequently, “words connoting acute perception” were “key terms of homosexual self-description until well into the twentieth century” (Cocks, 2003, p. 195). Moreover, this figuration was supported by engagement with far-ranging and intensive reading practices, since “having no access to a formal body of scholarship, gay men needed to invent – and constantly reinvent – a tradition on the basis of innumerable individual and idiosyncratic readings of texts” (Chauncey, 1994, p. 283). Along with cultural critics like Symonds, Carpenter and Pater, Cavafy represents a heightened perception of material antiquity as a privileged site, in which same-sex desire converges with antiquarian expertise investing the queer self with new cultural value. This imperative is embedded in

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his poetry, particularly in its depictions of a  utopian antiquity, in which painters, sculptors and craftsmen were prone to express their own or others mens’ homosexual feelings in their art (as in “The tomb of Lanes,” “For Ammonis, who died at age twenty-nine in 610,” “Craftsman of Craters,” “Young men of Sidon (A.D. 400)” and “Temethos, Antiochian, A.D. 400”), while theaters and libraries were spaces in which learning and the appreciation of the arts were cultivated alongside, and sometimes concurrently, with homosexual pleasures (as for example in “Julian and the Antiochians,” “Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias,” “Tomb of Eurion,” “He came to read” and “Return from Greece”). In other poems, same-sex desire is depicted as innate to the artistic personality or as a condition for artistic creation (“And I lay down and rested on their beds,” “Half an hour”), while artists tend to think of it as intrinsically related to inspiration (“Very seldom,” “Perception,” “So long I gazed-,” “Their origin,” “December of 1903,” “Hidden,” “Picture of a twenty-three year old man, painted by a friend of the same age, an amateur artist”). Cavafy’s queer readings of material antiquity are also mirrored in his physiognomic portrayals of present-time men (“At the coffeehouse entrance,” “The next table,” “He came to read,” “On the stairs,” “At the theatre”), as well as in readings of photographs and other pictorial representations (“Pictured,” “Of the ship,” “In an old book,” “That is how”). As these examples demonstrate, Cavafy treats same-sex desire as an exceptional quality, congenital to artistic creativity and to critical acumen, which may assimilate the virtues of normative antiquarian learning and then proceed further than that could ever go, to mold alternative, vivid and potent forms of connection to the historical past by its own privileged insights.

Notes 1. Kocziszky, for example, claims that Athyr is to the modern reader “only an exotic, even mythic concept of time to our calendar, even in its name” (2015, p. 351). 2. For a discussion of Yourcenar’s reference to the month of Athyr see Parkinson (2019, pp. 5–6).

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References Aldrich, R. (1993). The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy. London: Routledge. Alexiou, M. (1983). Eroticism and Poetry. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 10(1–2), 45–65. Antonopoulou, A. (2014). Late Antiquity as an Expression of Decadence in the Poetry of Constantine P.  Cavafy and Stefan George. In M.  Härmänmaa & C. Nissen (Eds.), Decadence, Degeneration, and the End. Studies in the European Fin de Siècle (pp. 49–65). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bakirtzis, H. (1993). Εν τω μηνί Αθύρ: Σχόλια στο ποίημα του Καβάφη. In Πεζά κείμενα με τίτλο Αρχαιολογικαί Μελέται (2nd ed., pp. 53–78). Athens: Agra. Beaton, R. (1983). The History Man. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 10(1–2), 23–44. Boone, J.  A. (2014). The Homoerotics of Orientalism. New  York: Columbia University Press. Bruhm, S. (2001). Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Caires, V.  A. (1980). Originality and Eroticism: Constantine Cavafy and the Alexandrian Epigram. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 6, 131–155. Carpenter, E., (Ed.). (1902). Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Cavafy, C. P. (2003). 154 Poems. Trans. E. Sachperoglou. Athens. Cavafy, C. P. (2007). The Collected Poems. Trans. E. Sachperoglou. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavafy, C. P. (2019). In the Month of Hathor. Onassis Foundation Cavafy Archive. https://doi.org/10.26256/CA-­SF01-­S01-­F01-­SF001-­0151. Chaniotis, A. (2018). Who Wants to Study Inscriptions? Greek Inscriptions in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy, Journal of Epigraphic Studies, 1, 11–25. Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books. Cocks, H.  G. (2003). Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Colby, S. (2009). Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson. Bern: Peter Lang. Dallas, Y. (1987). Σπουδές στον Καβάφη. Athens: Ermis. Dellamora, R. (1990). Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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PART III

Cavafy’s Contexts: Antiquity, Desire, Empire

CHAPTER 7

Antique Desires

Cavafy’s sexual sensibility and the homoerotic aspects of his poetry, in both their historical and contemporary manifestations, embarrassed many of the earlier critics of his work and were often shunned from critical consideration or met with fierce satire. But even in recent years, after Cavafy’s international acclaim as a gay poet and his broad recognition as a participant in World Literature, critical discussion of his erotic poetry tends to be sharply separated from its other facets, producing a theoretical and methodological partition that may impede a broader understanding of his work. This is particularly unsettling in the case of a poetic corpus where, as has aptly been suggested, “even though it remains unspoken, homosexual desire finally manages to mold and color all words and phrases, to permeate every theme and thought” (Papanikolaou, 2005, p. 242). This chapter seeks to contextualize Cavafy’s historicized poetic representations of homoerotic desire by correlating them to a set of intellectual, artistic and ideological figurations that were active in the early twentieth century and in the context of the British Empire. These range from manifestations of the alarming triadic scheme of “luxury, indolence, and effeminacy,” to the joint venture of deferring homoerotic desire to a set of martial, chivalric and middle-class norms as part of the quest to legitimize it. Read in the context of these intellectual pursuits, Cavafy’s poetry gains topical relevance and yields fresh interpretive perspectives. The chapter concludes with a correlation of Cavafy’s historical depictions of

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homoeroticism to his contemporary erotic poems and to concurrent artistic explorations in other media, such as Wilhelm von Gloeden’s recently rediscovered and celebrated photographic project.

1   Effeminacy, Luxury, Corruption Same-sex desire, as implicated in Cavafy’s renderings of Hellenistic antiquity, may be contextualized with reference to a cluster of aesthetic and ideological figurations, some of which were established long before the turn of the twentieth century. We may start tracing these correspondences by taking a closer look at the Ionian episode in “Orophernes,” as presented in ll. 9–17 of the poem: Oh! Exquisite Ionian nights, when in a fearless and entirely Greek way              10 he came to know utter sensual bliss. Deep in his heart, always an Asiatic; but in his manners and his speech a Hellene, adorned with turquoise gems, clad in Greek style, his body scented with the perfume of jasmine oil,          15 of all the lovely Ionian youths, he was the loveliest, the most ideal.       (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 145)

This imaginary portrait emerges after the presentation of the young man “whose face upon the tetradrachm/ appears to affect a smile” and of the cue that, as a child, this man had been sent “away to grow up in Ionia/ and be forgotten among strangers” (ll. 1–2, 7–8). These suggestions seem to inspire the speaker’s Ionian reverie, in which he presents the young Orophernes’ sensual training and focuses on his body’s embellishment with gems, scents and garments that heighten its exquisite allure. Clearly, this passage expresses and illustrates yearnings akin to “Greek Love”: the imaginary rendering of Ancient Greece as a homosexual utopia, which used the revival of interest in the Classics and particularly the significance attributed to Plato in the British imperial ideological context (Blanshard, 2010, p. 143) to articulate “a homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms” (Dowling, 1994, p. xiii). By virtue of this grand initiative, “looking back to classical Greece” became “characteristic of the construction of homosexual identity in the

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nineteenth century” (Buchbinder, 2003, p. 625), while “Greek studies” in themselves came to operate as homosexual code (Dowling, 1994, xiii). Projects of various kinds, including revisionist readings of classical texts, translations, adaptations and other reworkings of ancient myths and historical episodes, often focused on asymmetrical-age relationships between men, gave currency to several keywords, including friendship, paganism, “pedagogical eros” and “spiritual procreancy,” as idealistic encodings of homoerotic desire. Through these imaginative renditions, Greece became widely known as “the originary and native country of the non-heteronormative” (Buchbinder, 2003, p.  623), offering “the historical memory of a treasured past” that could provide homosexual men with “a rudimentary history of their kind” (p.  624). Greece also furnished the hope that, if the past has seen “a time and a culture that love between men was not only tolerated but actually encouraged” (p. 624), this condition could perhaps be re-­invented in the present or in the future. As Winckelmann suggested, in a passage that Pater decided not to include in his Renaissance, “the Hellenic manner is the blossom of the Hellenic spirit and culture, that spirit and culture depend on certain conditions, and those conditions are peculiar to a certain age. Reproduce those conditions, attain the actual root, and blossoms may again be produced of a triumphant colour” (Pater, 1980, p. 269). It should also be noted that the imaginary topos of “Greek love” did not wither with the demise of its nineteenth-century formulations; on the contrary, all sorts of classical material have been consistently used “for reflexive and political improvisation over the last two centuries, elevating the very theme of ‘Greek love’ to an imaginary ideal, often an exportable good in its own right, repeatedly (re)presented for the satisfaction of various audiences” (Apostolidou, 2017, p. 69). Reading Cavafy’s Ionian fantasy in this context, we note that the speaker’s excitement over his hero’s “exquisite Ionian nights” (l. 9) may allude to William Johnson’s (later Cory’s) Ionica (1st ed. 1858). This emblematic collection of poems has been described as “a classic paean to romantic paiderastia” (Dowling, 1994, p.  114) and “was being passed between tutors and students at Oxford” (Orrells, 2011, p. 159), while its various editions “became cult-books carried lovingly around the Empire by Old Etonians and other pederastically inclined subalterns” (Cunningham, 2011, p. 254).1 In Edmund Gosse’s presentation, Johnson’s clandestine but famous collection evokes Cavafy’s antiquarian self-fashioning: “The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy. But where the author

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is at his best, he is not only, as it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and intended for scholars” (Gosse, 1891, p. 310). Projections of “Greek love” as a form of privileged knowledge practically synonymize classical expertise to same-sex desire and are common in much of the time’s homosexual writing, including Cavafy’s own antiquarian personae and his poetry’s idealized young men, whose sensual moments are often captured in places of study. Moving on to ll. 10–11, we observe that the ostracized young man experienced sensual bliss in Ionia “in a fearless and entirely Greek way.” In the halcyon times of sexualized antiquity that is represented here, homoerotic fulfillment is free from fear, guilt or shame. The poet Meleager, for example, “represented for Cavafy an ideal moment when the eroticized gaze could still be directed, openly, and even publicly, to beautiful male bodies, both in flesh and in image” (Gutzwiller, 2003, p.  86). “Greek sensuousness,” as Pater wrote more broadly in 1873, “does not fever the conscience: it is shameless and childlike” (Pater, 1986, p.  142). In this context, homosexual desire tends to be identified with the immaculate eroticism of Winckelmann’s white statues; “serenity” (p. 142), by which Pater’s Winckelmann used “to deal with the sensuous side of art” (p. 143), is defined as “absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame” (p. 142) and is certainly not limited to the range of experiences afforded by ancient statues. Pater made it clear that Winckelmann “had perfected his study of ancient sculpture through his erotic friendships with young men in Rome, which functioned as a practical education in the aesthetics of masculine form” (Evangelista, 2010, p. 92). This allowed him to touch both these men and “those pagan marbles” fearlessly “with unsinged hands, with no sense of shame or loss” (Pater, 1986, p. 143). Turning to ll. 14–15, we notice that the beautiful Ionian youth is presented strictly by means of his body’s embellishment, without the slightest hint at spiritual, artistic or emotional refinement and in terms that convey precisely Pater’s famous formulation: “stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours” (1986, p. 152). The young man’s body is “adorned with turquoise gems,” “scented with the perfume of jasmine oil” and dressed like a Greek statue. As poet and critic Tellos Agras suggested back in 1922, Orophernes in Cavafy’s Ionian depiction is not only “debauched” but also “effeminate” (Agras, 1980, p. 60). The young Orophernes’ presentation clearly intimates effeminacy and decadent luxury and maybe hints at the “Ottomanization of antiquity” (Roessel, 2002,

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p. 169), which was a popular trend in late nineteenth-century discourses, following the orientalist “feminization of Asian men and infantilization of African ‘boys’” which “sealed their inferiority and neutralized their sexual potency in ‘quiescent’ colonies” (Bush, 2007, p. 96). Moreover, Cavafy’s depiction of young Orophernes in the image of a modern effeminatus is entirely of his own making; ancient sources testify to the man’s hedonism and debauchery but do not suggest effeminacy. Commentators tend to evade  Cavafy’s feminization of the Ionian young man  to present  Orophernes’ early portrait simply  as  “a vision of pleasure-seeking youth” that was later betrayed by the grown man’s “thirst for power and its seizing” (Dallas, 1987, pp. 57, 62) or claim that “the utter uselessness of Orophernes’ life in moral and political terms contrasts sharply with the aesthetic value provided by his delicate beauty” (Gutzwiller, 2003, p.  79). But once we take into account the sociopolitical bearings of effeminacy in the course of a long-standing intellectual tradition, which continued to be popular in Cavafy’s time, we realize that the young man’s effeminate depiction is intricately connected to his future traits. In fact, Orophernes’ sharply contrasted modes of existence seem to allegorize two distinct phases in the history of homosexual men: As aristocratic bisexuality succumbed to the urban middle class and its family-centered heterosexual morality, men who desired men found it increasingly difficult to straddle the rising wall between personal fulfillment and social demands. Male clothing grew more sober in color and decoration to suit the role of bourgeois paterfamilias, starkly visualizing the alternatives for the homosexually inclined: to live an unhappy lie in marriage, or escape altogether into the mushrooming demimonde where men like themselves, often marked by effeminate dress and behavior, found congenial company. (Saslow, 1999, pp. 123–124)

During the eighteenth century effeminacy assumed specifically homosexual connotations (Bray, 1982, p.  88) and was connected to degeneracy and failed masculinity; at the same time, it became widely perceived as a social and political threat, as a symbol “at once of civic enfeeblement and of the monstrous self-absorption,” the “aimless and self-regarding egoism” that threatened civic stability (Dowling, 1994, pp. 8–9). Along with “luxury” and “corruption,” notions with which it was usually triplicated, effeminacy was proof that “like Athens and Sparta and Rome before her, England has entered the last stage of an all but irreversible historical

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decline” (p.  5). In this line of thinking, “vain, luxurious, and selfish EFFEMINACY” (p. 6) was perceived as a threat to the strength of the English nation and to the future of the British Empire (see Barker-Benfield, 1992, esp. 104–153). In the same ideological context, effeminacy was often connected to fiscal concerns and particularly to the social ailments that spring from the accumulation of wealth. As J. G. A. Pocock clarifies, Economic man as masculine conquering hero is a fantasy of nineteenthcentury industrialisation (the Communist Manifesto is of course one classical example). His eighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminised, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolized by such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most recently Credit herself. (Pocock, 1985, p. 114)

Effeminacy was also a major concern in the context of the Empire. As has been observed, “the entire structure of colonial homosociality … rests on the ideologeme of effeminacy. Effeminacy represents a critical and contentious idiom through which the racial and sexual ideologies of empire are mediated” (Krishnaswamy, 1998, p. 18). In colonial India, it was perceived “as the final negation of a man’s political identity, a pathology more dangerous than femininity itself” (p.  19). Along with male-male sexual relations, colonial effeminacy, coupled with luxury and indolence, was thought to be widespread in the colonies and therefore a danger to British manliness. “Cartoons of the returning ‘nabobs’ in the late eighteenth century often showed them bedecked with jewels more suitable for women, a clear sign of a corruption that was at once economic, moral, physical and cultural” (Levine, 2013, p. 162). These deep prejudices and their stereotypical reflections in various cultural and social manifestations were surely within the grasp of Cavafy, a man of British upbringing who lived and worked in a distinctly colonial environment. Effeminacy continued to be readily associated to social, political and economic decay in the late nineteenth century and was employed accordingly in a broad array of contexts and discourses. In 1872, for example, the literary critic Robert Buchanan would berate “the Fleshly School” of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Morris, claiming that “their poetry threatens the very foundations of ‘true English life’” because of its “sickliness and effeminacy” (Morgan, 1999, p. 109).

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A few years later, “the prosecutor’s dark warning that Wilde’s sodomitical practices threaten the corruption of English society” invoked the deep-set fear that “effeminacy and civic incapacity have once again minced forward within the polity and now threaten it with utter ruin” (Dowling, 1994, pp. 4, 152). Taking into consideration the significance attributed to effeminacy in the “traditional politico-­moral ideology of civic masculinity” (Morgan, 1999, p.  109), we realize that the presentation of the idealized Ionian youth in Cavafy’s poem through suggestions of effeminacy, vanity, and luxury anticipates the feebleness, greed and corruption he would display when he came into power. Cavafy’s emphasis on his hero’s Asiatic strain (l. 12) recalls the similar “dichotomy between omnipotent power and socalled Asiatic effeminacy” which informs orientalist stereotypes of the Eastern ruler: the image of a “polymorphously perverse yet powerful man,” in whom “voluptuous indolence” is combined with “unlimited power and sadistic cruelty” (Boone, 2014, p. 96). Orientalist clichés which visualize Effeminacy, Luxury and Corruption as markers of the East often spring up in the imperialist discourse that permeates many of Cavafy’s readings. Gibbon’s Elagabalus, for example, who “corrupted by his youth, his country, and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments” (Gibbon, 1932, vol. 1, p.  167) strikes notes similar to Cavafy’s Orophernes. So does Bevan’s description of “the hybrid population of Syria, pleasure-loving and fickle, in whom Greek lightness and Oriental indolence were combined” (1902, v. 1, pp. 205–06). Cavafy’s ambivalent projection of  young Orophernes  as a seductive impersonation of effeminacy, which promises fearless and full Greek pleasure but at the same time forecasts impending doom, may be further contextualized by Walter Pater’s contrast of the Ionian and Asiatic tendency in Greek culture to an ideal of Dorian masculinity, in his last and most successful book, Plato and Platonism (1893). Drawing on the similar distinction Karl Otfried Müller proposed in his influential Die Dorier (1824), Pater used this contrast to designate two tendencies that correspond to distinct modes of modern male homoeroticism. The first tendency is the centrifugal, the irresponsible, the Ionian or Asiatic, tendency; flying from the centre, working with little forethought straight before it in the development of every thought and fancy; throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination; delighting in colour and brightness, moral

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or physical; in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in music, in architecture and its subordinate crafts, in philosophy itself. In the social and political order it rejoices in the freest action of local and personal influences: its restless versatility drives it towards the assertion of the principles of individualism, of separatism— the separation of state from state, the maintenance of local religions, the development of the individual in that which is most peculiar and individual in him. (Pater, 2002, pp. 67–8)

But Plato, Pater says, desired to cure “the exaggerated assertion of the fluxional, flamboyant, centrifugal Ionian element in the Hellenic character” and he did so “by maintaining over against it the Dorian influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in society, in culture, in the very physical nature of man” (pp. 154, 68). Apart from its adherence to “discipline and order,” to “that severe composition everywhere” and “its constant aspiration after what is dignified and earnest,” Pater also saw the Dorian element as the source of true male beauty, in which there is no trace of Ionian effeminacy and luxury: “The beauty of these most beautiful of all people was a male beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness; had the expression of a certain ascesis in it; was like unsweetened wine” (pp. 13, 69, 144). Commenting on Plato, Pater seeks to reorient current perceptions of “Greek Love” away from Oscar Wilde’s dandyism and toward an ideal of social and political responsibility; at a more personal level, he also wants to leave behind him the hedonist mark that had followed him since the Renaissance (1873). As David Orrells observes, Just as Pater sought to clear his aestheticism of any detrimental charges of hedonism and effeminacy in the 1890s, so Pater’s Plato sought to redefine male-male love, away from an “Ionian or Asiatic tendency” towards a more “effectual desire towards the Dorian order and ascesis.” In his defense of Platonic homoeroticism Pater sought to correlate it with Western, manly, virile love and to distance it from effeminate, orientalizing connotations. (Orrells, 2011, p. 159; see also Woods, 1998, pp. 168–69; Jenkyns, 1980, pp. 256–57)

Clearly, in the early 1890s, the most prominent representative of the “Ionian tendency” in England was Oscar Wilde, whom Pater may in fact allude to in the same text, when he refers to “the winning brilliancy of the lost spirit of Alcibiades” and to the latter’s resolution to be “if not the saviour, the destroyer of a society which cannot remain unaffected by his

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showy presence” (Dowling, 1994, pp.  140–41). Interestingly, by 1915 Pater would be favorably contrasted to Wilde as a reserved “Dorian” thinker, in terms that recall his own Platonic bifurcation (see Chislett, 1915). But as we will discuss below, Pater’s endorsement of Dorian virility was also part of a larger project that was broadly supported at the turn of the twentieth century: a quest to justify homosexuality by the reconciliation of “manly love” with prevalent social values and norms, which sought to overturn its threatening perception and even claimed that “the Socratic eros was essential to the survival of liberal England” (Dowling, 1994, p. 80). Reading Cavafy’s “Orophernes” in the light of the homoerotic ethos of masculinity and civic responsibility proposed by Pater’s Plato, we may discern the affinity of the hero (who was “Deep in his heart, always an Asiatic”) to the Ionian/Asiatic tendency in Hellenic culture. According to James Faubion, Orophernes may occupy “the negative extreme” of Cavafy’s poetic populace, whereas “the positive extreme might be occupied by the guards of Thermopylae or the soldiers of the Achaian League, by Kratisiklia sailing off to her death in Ptolemaic Egypt or Dimitrios Sotir, who could retain his courage though ‘everything he’d hoped for turned out wrong’” (Faubion, 2003, p. 57). As we will go on to discuss, however, in some of these “Dorian” poems (as also in many others) Cavafy reaches toward prevalent heteronormative values, themes and standards, registering his own attempt to vindicate homoerotic desire by associating it to the moral and ideological backbone of middle-class sensibilities. This perspective aligns Cavafy’s work with a broader revisionist project, through which homosexual artists and theoreticians of his time sought to correlate homoerotic desire with a set of traditional manly virtues, including martial, Christian and patriotic values at the heart of imperial discourse.

2   Soldiers, Merchants and Male Love In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, following the sharp increase of persecutions and revelations of scandals involving male-to-male love, many homosexual intellectuals reached toward middle-class values and norms, seeking to present homoerotic desire as a masculine, ascetic and socially beneficial force. The Dorian ideal projected in Walter Pater’s re-reading of Plato is one of several manifestations of this broader revisionist program, whose aspiration was to disentangle male love from the discourses of effeminacy and decadence and to reorient it toward an “assertive, productive, ‘manly,’ and culturally indispensable” ideal (Arata,

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1996, p. 86). Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as K. O. Müller’s The Dorians (1824), which claimed that “Greek paederastia was martial in origin” (Arata, 1996, p.  86), and Walt Whitman’s projection of “the homosexual as the very embodiment of the state and civic rhetoric, rather than its private, elitist challenge” (Sulcer, 1999, p. 244), this multi-faceted endeavor sought to prove that “the language of male love could be triumphantly proclaimed the very fountain of civic health” (Dowling, 1994, p. xv). A powerful example of this line of argument may be traced in the late nineteenth-century writings of poet and critic John Addington Symonds, in which he attempted “to reconcile his conception of homoerotic passion with traditional middle-class notions of love and masculinity” and to achieve “a reintegration of homoerotic desire into everyday culture” (Arata, 1996, p.  84). Like Pater, but using a far more open and direct sexual idiom, Symonds counterposed “the healthfully masculine homoeroticism of Doric camaraderie to the ‘effeminacies, brutalities and gross sensualities which can be noticed alike in imperfectly civilised and in luxuriously corrupt communities’ that also practiced male same-sex sexual activities” (Clarke, 2000, p. 144). He thus made a sharp distinction between “vulgar” and “heroic” forms of homoerotic love. The former, which he associates with public school buggery and male prostitution, is labelled decadent, corrupt, unmanly: a wallowing in physicality marked by “effeminacies, brutalities, and gross sensualities.” Heroic love, by contrast, originates in a kind of chaste hypermasculinity. It is not sensual but spiritual, not effeminate but virile, “tolerating no sort of softness.” In his autobiography Symonds insists that he is no “vulgar and depraved sensualist” but one who is by nature robust and manly. He rejected “the belief that all subjects of inverted instinct ... are pale, languid, scented, effeminate, painted, timid.” (Arata, 1996, p. 86)

Symonds “deployed late-Victorian codes of race, national identity, and middle-class manliness in an attempt to integrate male homoeroticism into a Western cultural economy of value” (Clarke, 2000, p.  135). For him, manly love as practiced by the ancient Greeks was “a powerful and masculine emotion, in which effeminacy had no part, and which by no means excluded the ordinary sexual feelings” (Brady, 2012, p.  45). He linked his ideal of heroic love “to a long catalog of Victorian virtues and practices” (Arata, 1996, p. 86), tried “to assimilate pederasty and homosexual bonding to Christian ideals” and presented same-sex desire as what

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prepared Dorians “for exactly the sorts of deeds which Victorians admired … ‘for deeds of prowess, for the overthrow of tyrants, and the liberation of their fatherland’” (Aldrich, 1993, p. 80). Portraying Greece as “a displaced and idealized vision of nineteenth-century Britain,” Symonds linked heroic homoeroticism “to ‘gentlemanliness,’ that supremely middle-class construct.” Therefore, “where the effete Wildean dandy mockingly parodies the gentlemanly code, Symonds’ noble youth becomes its very paragon” (Arata, 1996, pp. 86–87). Believing that “modern British society had become alarmingly sensual, morbid, weak, effeminate,” he “saw in Wilde the epitome of an age in which the ideals of heroic friendship had been degraded into a luxurious hedonism” and looked for ways “to inculcate the virtues associated with heroic masculinity into an effeminized and decadent world” (p. 88). Symonds at times “situates himself ideologically alongside late-Victorian male romancers like Haggard, Conan Doyle, and Kipling,” as he strives “to make same-sex desire palatable to middle-­class sensibilities” and to project “the ‘healthy’ homosexual man as the very embodiment of an ideal masculinity seen in bourgeois terms” (Arata, pp. 88, 85). At around the same time, Elisár von Kupffer, a Baltic poet and painter, published his own polemic in support of the “ethical-political significance” of homoeroticism, in which he argued for the “emancipation of man from the subjection to female taste and female beauty” (Oosterhuis, 2011, p. 142). This essay was first printed in 1899 in Adolf Brand’s journal Der Eigene, known as “the first magazine for homosexuals in the world” (Lukas, 2016, p.  112) and reprinted the following year as the introduction to von Kupffer’s anthology of male friendship, which made it “one of the most widely read [texts] of the German masculinist movement at the start of the twentieth century” (Ivory, 2009, p.  73). Invoking a list of men-loving men from ancient and modern times as examples of martial, civic and intellectual power, von Kupffer’s manifesto advocates male love as the epitome of “moral responsibility” and “national consciousness” and presents it as equivalent to the social usefulness of family bonding: The close relationship of men has the further effect that one instinctively and not without reason joins with the other; therefore if the one is respectable and honorable, then it is up to him not to let the other bring shame to him. Thus there arises a band of moral responsibility regarding excellence. And what can better promote public life than that the individual members feel themselves responsible for one another? It is just this which makes up

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the national consciousness, the strength of a people: that it is a whole in itself, where one feels in himself an attack on another. Such connections can be of the highest social value, as the family is. Precisely in the hour of danger is the effect of this togetherness proved, for where the one stands or falls with the other, where self-sacrifice, schooled in small things, has become at the same time a warm-hearted instinct, then there is a force of incalculable importance, a force that only madness could little respect. (von Kupffer, 1992, p. 42)

Symonds and von Kupffer were not the only turn-of-the-century intellectuals who strove to dissociate homoerotic desire from sickness and effeminacy and to present it as a traditional and socially beneficial expression of virility, by fusing it with prevalent heteronormative social values. Other examples of early twentieth-century writers who championed this cause include Edward Carpenter, who was influenced by von Kupffer’s anthology and argued that “homogenic love was essential for ‘the State’” (Crawley Quinn & Brooke, 2011, p. 693); André Gide, who sought “to show the compatibility of tolerance for homosexuality and martial values” (Nye, 1993, p.  121); E.  M. Forster, who searched “for an alternative model of imperial masculinity, one that would be more open, fluid, flexible, almost androgynous in sensibility” (Krishnaswamy, 1998, p.  143); and the German scholar Benedict Friedlaender, who “argued that homosexuality was necessary in any well-functioning army” (Mosse, 2020, p. 36). Although he may have had little direct knowledge of some of these writers’ formulations and propositions, Cavafy was certainly aligned to their collective effort to distance homoeroticism from connotations of decadence and effeminacy and to promote love between men as compatible with martial and chivalrous ideals as well as gentlemanly manners.2 Some of Cavafy’s poems, especially among his earlier writings, seem to directly promote conventional norms and to handle martial, Christian or folklore themes without offering any discernible twists that might complicate their meaning. These poems have been consistently acclaimed by Greek critics as presenting values and examples of high national and ethical importance and, especially in previous years, were very popular as selections from Cavafy’s poetry in Greek schoolbooks. They have also been heavily promoted as a counterbalance to his poetry’s riskier themes. This direction was memorably formulated in 1963, a seminal year that in some respects marked Cavafy’s entry in the Greek literary canon, as G. P. Savidis

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raised the question of whether Cavafy “may actually be considered a national poet”: I haste to answer with an unequivocal YES: Cavafy is – as he intended to be  – a national poet, in the same way that Solomos, Kalvos, Valaoritis, Palamas, Sikelianos, and in our days Seferis and Elytis are, and intended to be, national poets. Twenty years ago one could not be so categorical. At that time we looked at Cavafy as an exquisite aesthete, an unorthodox erotic poet, a student of Wilde and Anatole France, a neo-alexandrine who transferred to the Hellenistic era the spirit of European decadence which prevailed around 1890. That perception was illusive; it was not untrue, but it was one-sided and excessively highlighted, although it surely originated in Cavafy’s own verses. (Savidis, 1963, p. 9; my translation)

Savidis went on to juxtapose Cavafy’s decadent image, which was mainly elaborated by Timos Malanos and dominant before World War II, to George Seferis’ 1946 lecture on Cavafy and Eliot. This text, Savidis wrote, made “us suddenly see Cavafy with different eyes. We saw him as a major contemporary European poet and at the same time as a national poet. He was no longer the aesthete who scours old writings looking for an elegant anecdote or a ‘lyrical alibi,’ but the poet who brings back to life an entire world, a stashed and forgotten part of our national heritage, to enlighten the present and the future with the past’s experience.” Savidis elaborated on the two strains in Cavafy’s poetry by evoking two of his poems as examples of aesthetic decadence (“I brought to Art” and “According to the recipes of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians”) and presenting “In the year 200 B.C.” as illustrating Cavafy as national poet (Savidis, ibid.). Twenty years later, Savidis confirmed that Cavafy “has been established in the national conscience as a national poet.” In this occasion, which was a speech addressed to an audience of military cadets, Savidis moved one step further, branding Cavafy as “the poet of crucial battles of Hellenism, beginning with the Persian wars and concluding with the Fall of Constantinople” (Savidis, 1985, p. 337; my translation). Contrary to the critically established severance of Cavafy’s erotic poetry from poems that explore themes of national, historical or moral interest, we may observe that some of his poems that do not manifest any sensual or homoerotic implications are often queered by association, as they are interspersed with his erotic poems and so are inevitably combined and

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juxtaposed to them in the mind of his reader. As Robinson has suggested, Cavafy “develops a mode of poetic composition where the ‘group meaning’ of his poems derives from reading them in different sequences, arriving at different connections” (2005, p.  276). Poems that focus on a historical character’s courage in adversity or that present themes of loneliness, treason or the consequences of a man’s weakness may be (and have been) read as allegories of the homoerotic sensibility. An implied negotiation of heteronormative values with homoerotic insinuations is more noticeably manifest in some of Cavafy’s earlier poems, including “Thermopylae” (1901, 1903), “The Trojans” (1900, 1905), “Che fece ... il gran rifiuto” (1899, 1901), “The Windows” (1897, 1903), “Walls” (1896, 1897) and others. Although these texts are often perceived as universal allegories of the human condition and therefore alien to Cavafy’s homoerotic work, the poet’s language seems to open a queer potential in each one of them, often by correlating same-sex desire to ethical dilemmas or emotional conflicts of heroic proportion. These poems, as many others, may easily be queered, depending on the meaning attributed, for example, to the plural in “Thermopylae,” the “great No” in “Che fece ... il gran rifiuto” or to the identity of the plural speaker and the nature of the inescapable fall, as related in “Trojans.” In poems of this type, grammatic and semantic ambiguities may be (and have been) read as cues revealing “a homoerotic subtext” (Cavafy, 2007, p. 214). “Walls” has been read as a closet-metaphor: “employed so often in Greek criticism on Cavafy to imply homosexuality without using the word, [this poem] had the potential to turn from a hidden site of identity into its active exposure” (Papanikolaou, 2005, p.  239). Another example of this mechanism is offered by Cavafy’s early Homeric poem “The horses of Achilles” (1896, 1897) in which, as D. N. Maronitis’ 1983 reading indicated, the horses’ violent lament over the death of Patroclus discloses indirectly Achilles’ emotional state. Maronitis discerned in this poem “some measure of erotic temperature” as opposed to sentiments of “philanthropic sympathy,” concluding that “as the two partners’ legendary friendship is destroyed, the craving gets sharper, lament cannot and will not stop” (Maronitis, 2007, p.  104). It is actually quite difficult to seriously invest this poem with meaning unless one accepts that Cavafy used a martial episode from the Iliad in a manner that tacitly discloses homoerotic suggestions (in this case, by presenting the fury of a man’s lament over his lover’s heroic death in battle).

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But Cavafy’s poetry also features instances in which the interweaving of queer desire with martial imagery or conventional middle-class values is directly presented in a way that clearly evokes the Dorian revision of male love which, as we saw earlier, was pursued by several writers and critics at the turn of the twentieth century. A prime example of this type is presented by “Craftsman of Craters,” a poem in which an artist’s failed attempt to secretly encode his past male lover’s face in the form of Narcissus suddenly blends into the theme of heroic sacrifice, as the lover is revealed to have given his life as a soldier in the battle of Magnesia, in 190–189 BCE. This poem’s main proposition, that in the Hellenistic years a soldier could be involved in a homosexual love affair with an artist and that the latter’s emotions might be strong enough to compel him to memorialize his lover fifteen years after his heroic death (in the crucial battle which ended Seleucid rule in Asia Minor) aptly illustrates Cavafy’s aim to invest the poem’s homoerotic subtext with a martial and heroic ethos. Interestingly, in the case of “Craftsman of Craters” Cavafy appears to transpose to Hellenistic antiquity a situation that was part of social reality for some homosexual men in early twentieth-­century Europe. Drawing from Magnus Hirschfeld’s seminal work, The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1913), Kerwin Kaye comments on sexual relationships between soldiers who acted as male prostitutes and their male clients: Generally speaking, the availability of soldiers was far greater than the number of clients, and soldiers therefore attempted to maintain long-term regulars in order to better guarantee some degree of financial stability. Soldiers also might desire more from their clients than a straightforward cash for sex transaction, finding in the company of middle-class and aristocratic men an opportunity to be taught manners and tastes which would enable them more opportunity at upward mobility within bourgeois-dominated society. Relations between soldiers and clients could therefore involve a good deal more emotional intimacy than was typical between female prostitutes and their clientele, and at least a few of these ­relationships developed into a domestic arrangement in which the gay-identified “fairy” would cook, clean, and sew for his soldier-partner during periods of leave. (Kaye, 2004, p. 10)

Another instance in which Cavafy invests sensual hedonism with chivalrous overtones is in the poem “I went” (1905, 1913), whose speaker celebrates his own unrestrained flight into the night, in search of pleasure,

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and his resolve to drink from the metaphorical “strong wines,” which are the privilege of the “valorous champions of pleasure.” In this case, Cavafy’s rhetoric borrows conventional attributes of masculine strength and martial gallantry to defy the prohibition of unrestrained homosexual joy. An equally bold attempt to assimilate same-sex desire to imperial and middleclass imagery may be traced in his Baudelairean early prose poems “The Regiment of Pleasure” (1894–1897?) and “The Ships” (1895–1896?). The first of these texts has been described as “a tribute to sensual pleasure, of a confessional and unabashedly admonishing type” (Katsigianni, 1998, p. 94) and also as a poem that “expresses Cavafy’s ideological connection to the decadent movement of the 1890s” and mirrors Baudelaire’s “amoral hedonistic ethos” (Jeffreys in Cavafy, 2010, p. 156; Jeffreys, 2015, p. 45). Throughout this text, Cavafy invokes some of the shibboleths of imperial discourse to make a case for the uninhibited pursuit of pleasure and against adherence to “shadowy virtue” and the “ill-considered” moral laws. Examples of the rhetorical transmutations taking place in this poem include the phrases “to join the good crusade, to the conquest of pleasures and of passions,” “Your duty is to fall in, a faithful soldier, with simplicity of heart,” “Service to Pleasure is a constant joy” (Cavafy, 2012, pp. 339–40; my emphasis). The values Cavafy chose to assimilate to the pursuit of homoerotic pleasure are particularly significant in the imperial context; as Barbara Bush clarifies, “duty and ‘service’ had always characterized the public school ethos which defined superior imperial masculinities” (2007, p. 80). As has recently been proposed (Anagnostou-Laoutides, 2021), “The Regiment of Pleasure” may have been inspired by the militia amoris exhibited by Propertius and other poets of the Greek Anthology. But the poem’s specific imagery clearly suggests the march of a regiment of the Imperial Army, as envisioned through the eyes of a homophile observer. The poem’s central image, “the Regiment of Pleasure” that “passes by accompanied by music and by flags” (a phrase that is repeated in the text four times) has unmistakable gender-specific and colonial connotations, so much so that Cavafy’s editor found it necessary to clarify, in a note to the text, that “the main military impressions that Cavafy could have gathered were from English occupation troops in Alexandria” (Cavafy, 1993, p. 190). Contrary to this example, in which hedonism is fused with the triumphant march of a British military brigade, the prose poem entitled “The Ships” presents the risks and challenges of hedonistic writing through an

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elaborate and relentlessly detailed commercial metaphor (see Roilos, 2009, pp. 133–137; Jeffreys, 2015, pp. 52–53). Cavafy here resorts to the factual and uninspiring language of the marketplace to draw an exhaustive analogy between the contingencies of hedonistic art and the mercantile core of middle-class imagery. The poem’s speaker may be pictured as a hedonist disguised as a broker, or vice versa: Upon reaching the white papery harbour, more sacrifices are required. The customs officials arrive and examine a portion of the wares, and they decide whether or not the cargo should be unloaded; they refuse to allow a certain portion in; and from that which they do allow, they only admit a small amount. The land has its laws. Not all wares are duty-free and contraband is strictly forbidden. The importing of wines is prohibited because the continents from which the boats arrive produce wines and spirits made from grapes that grow and ripen in warm climates. The custom agents do not want these beverages at all. They are highly intoxicating. They are not suitable for all consumers. (Cavafy, 2010, p. 84)

As Peter Mackridge has commented, “homoerotic code-words are frequently used in Cavafy’s poetry. They are not intended to conceal, but rather to be understood by sensitive and sympathetic readers” (2007, xxiii). On the basis of our previous discussion, we may conclude that this function is not limited to words denoting sensuality, emotion, intoxication or aesthetic pleasure. Cavafy’s homoerotic code-words may also include a set of far more unexpected terms, like duty, service, honor, faithfulness, generosity and sacrifice, through which the poet, in alignment with other homosexual writers and thinkers of his time, sought to associate male-tomale desire to heteronormative virtues of high ethical and patriotic esteem.

3   Stylized Bodies, Old and New Let us go back now, for a moment, to Cavafy’s depiction of Orophernes as an alluring effeminate ephebe in Ionia and compare it with the presentation of Caesarion as a child, in the following extract from “Alexandrian Kings” (1912): Caesarion was standing more to the front, dressed in rose-colored silk, a posy of hyacinths on his chest, his belt a double row of amethysts and sapphires,

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his shoes fastened with white ribbons embroidered with pinkish pearls. Him they named above his younger brothers, him they named King of Kings.       (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 107)

Although this poem is loosely based on Plutarch’s Life of Antony, Caesarion’s extravagantly embellished attire is entirely drawn from Cavafy’s imagination. In a passage that was quoted by Bevan (1902, vol. 2, p. 274), Plutarch describes the dress of Antony’s own sons, Alexander and Ptolemy Philadelphus, during the ceremony: “At the same time he also produced his sons, Alexander arrayed in Median garb, which included a tiara and upright head-dress, Ptolemy in boots, short cloak, and broadbrimmed hat surmounted by a diadem. For the latter was the dress of the kings who followed Alexander, the former that of Medes and Armenians.”3 Clearly, this description has little in common with the superfluous effeminate luxury Cavafy bestows on the young Caesarion which, as has been noted, amounts to “an almost fetishistic display” (Jeffreys, 2015, p. 116). As C. M. Bowra commented, “Plutarch describes the clothing of the children to emphasise the preposterous claims made by Antony for oriental kingdoms: Cavafy changes the details and makes them an element in the glittering pathetic show” (Bowra, 1967, pp.  40–41). But Cavafy also dresses the young Caesarion, much like the Ionian Orophernes, in a manner that appears to be directly derived from Gibbon’s diatribe on the demoralizing effects of Eastern habits on the Roman Empire. Consider Gibbon’s comments on Elagabalus and Emperor Constantine: Two hundred years after the age of Pliny the use of pure or even of mixed silks was confined to the female sex, till the opulent citizens and the provinces were insensibly familiarised with the example of Elagabalus, the first who, by this effeminate habit, had sullied the dignity of an emperor and a man. (Gibbon, 1932, vol. 2, p. 149) The dress and manners which, towards the decline of life, he chose to affect, served only to degrade him in the eyes of mankind. The Asiatic pomp which had been adopted by the pride of Diocletian assumed an air of softness and effeminacy in the person of Constantine. He is represented with false hair of various colors, laboriously arranged by the skilful artists to the times; a diadem of a new and more expensive fashion; a profusion of gems and pearls, of collars and bracelets; and a variegated flowing robe of silk, most curiously embroidered with flowers of gold. (Gibbon, 1932, vol. 1, pp. 562–563)

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As Brian Young comments, “While Elagabalus was derided by Gibbon for what amounted to cross-dressing, the great Constantine himself, a supreme example of a warrior-emperor, stood condemned for the vice of over-dressing in eloquently contemporary terms” (1997, p. 526). There can be little doubt that Gibbon’s appalled commentary on ancient men wearing silk and jewelry informs Cavafy’s exorbitant elaboration on Caesarion’s attire. The poet is said to have explained his choice of Caesarion’s garments through a distinctly antiquarian reasoning that was clearly part of his famous evasive tactics: “I dressed him in pink silk because at that time an ell of that sort of silk cost the equivalent of so-and-so many thousand drachmas” ( Liddell, 1974, p. 124). Caesarion’s costume takes up this static historical “scene” in order to convey “the absolute extravagance of Hellenism in Egypt” (Jeffreys, 2015, p. 116). Yet, as Gibbon’s commentary shows, the young Prince’s excessive over-dressing also connects to other frames of reference. On the one hand, Cavafy’s presentation invites an analogy with the extreme ornamentalism displayed in similar scenes that were frequently staged in the British Empire, culminating in Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. These “national and imperial spectaculars” aimed at creating an impression of “theatrical splendour” (Cannadine, 2002, p.  109) and reminded imperial subjects (including Cavafy himself) that “the British monarch was King of Kings in the empire” (p.  111), just as Caesarion was proclaimed, on Cassius Dio’s authority (Fatouros, 2000, p. 213), in “Alexandrian Kings.” But placed in Cavafy’s contemporary setting and read with an eye on sexual politics, Caesarion’s and Orophernes’ effeminate depictions may also assume other connotations, quite different from those of colonial parades. Consider, for example, the “physiognomy” of a male prostitute, as famously presented in Ambroise Tardieu’s 1857 volume, Les attentats aux moeurs, a milestone of nineteenth-century legal medicine: “Hair curled, face made up, neck bared, waist cinched to accentuate his curves, the fingers, ears, and chest covered with jewels, the most penetrating perfume wafting from the whole person, and in his hand a handkerchief, flowers or some needlework: such is the strange, repulsive, and by all rights suspect physiognomy that betrays pederasts”(Wilson, 2006, p. 193). As Michael Wilson explains, Tardieu’s book was considered authoritative on matters of criminality and sexuality and was routinely cited as such well into the twentieth century. This particular passage had an especially vigorous afterlife, appearing as a

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direct quotation or in paraphrase in almost every printed discussion of pederasty – as male-male sexuality was most commonly termed – through the end of the Belle Époque. Although Tardieu’s description purports to be of the pederast as a general type, he embeds it within and makes it exemplary of his broader discussion of male prostitution as an outrage against morals. The figure Tardieu outlines is not merely a pederast, but a pederast who sells his tightly-clad, bejeweled, and over-scented body. (pp. 193–194)

Placed in the context of Cavafy’s conceptual and experiential horizon, suggestions of luxurious effeminacy in the portrayal of a historical character may imply the decay of an orientalized empire as much as stereotypical features of an effeminate  male prostitute. In either case, however, the poet’s gaze is ambivalent; a measure of purely aesthetic pleasure, emanating from a brightly depicted and alluring theatrical scene, is usually combined with an awareness of the suffering and degradation that is imminent or lies just off its surface. If young Orophernes and Caesarion in “Alexandrian Kings” strike the reader as Cavafy’s most prominent historical configurations of effeminacy, the working-­class boys who engage in part-time prostitution in a different set of his poems clearly point toward the poet’s contemporary social awareness. These boys also tend to have a penchant for fine and extravagant clothes; consider for example the young man in the following extract from “In the Street” (1913, 1916), who was “walking aimlessly down the street,/ still as if in a trance, from the deviant pleasure”: twenty-five years old, but could pass for twenty; with an artistic flair in his mode of dress, —tint of the tie, shape of the collar—          (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 157)

or the one who worked for a blacksmith, in this extract from “Days of 1909, 10 and 11” (1928): In the evenings, when they closed shop, if there was something he fancied a lot – a somewhat expensive tie, a tie to be worn on Sundays – or if he had seen in a shop window and yearned for some nice lavender shirt, he’d sell his body for a shilling or two.          (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 343)

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Cavafy’s presentation of these men’s longings and ways appears to agree with Magnus Hirschfeld’s description of the preferences of “young men who solicited straight clients while working on their own distinct strolls” in the streets, in early twentieth-century Europe: [G]reat value is placed on so-called “charming clothing”: finely woven, colorful shirts; long, expensive socks with openwork and colorful patterns; whenever possible the same color as the tie. . . . colorful vests; suits and hats in the latest fashion, as extravagant as possible; and especially truly eyecatching footwear, such as patent leather shoes with wide ribbons and bows or laced shoes in rich yellow with deerskin or spats, as the very latest fashion demands. Rings and bracelets are also frequent. (Kaye, 2004, pp. 7–8)

In the case of the blacksmith’s apprentice, we note that the poem’s speaker focuses exclusively on the young man’s exquisite beauty, which “went to waste” precisely because (unlike Orophernes or Lanes) “no statue or painting of him was ever made!” Other young men in Cavafy’s oeuvre appear to have been more fortunate in this respect. The poem “In an old book-” (1922), for example, presents a painting of a young man whose “exquisite … beauty of deviant appeal” was “not intended/ for the likes of those who engage in healthful love” (trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 265). Similarly, in the unpublished poem “That is How” (1913), yet another young man is memorialized in a photograph, which this time is specified as pornographic: That is How In this indecent photograph, sold secretly in the street (so the policeman won’t see), in this lewd photograph, how did such a dreamlike face end up; how did you end up here!      5 Who knows what a disgraced, sordid life you must live; how repellent the surroundings must have been when you posed for this photograph; what a despicable soul yours must be. Yet, in spite of this, and more so for it, you remain   10 for me the dreamlike face, the countenance made for and given to Hellenic sensual bliss — that is how you remain for me and my verses speak of you.         (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou, © 2023 Onassis Foundation)

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This poem is structurally akin to “Orophernes” on a number of levels (see Mackridge, 2008, p.  223). The emphatically repeated phrase “you remain for me,” to use an eloquent remark by Eleni Papargyriou, “implies the permanent imprinting of the image on the personal plate of memory and, subsequently, on the collective plate of poetry” (2011, p. 80). This phrase may reflect the way in which Orophernes “left the allure of his lovely youth” on the coin portrait. Similarly, the unpublished poem’s final line (“that is how you remain for me and my verses speak of you”) seems to correspond to the emphatic stress in the historical poem’s conclusion. Also, the sharp contrast between the photographically captured “dreamlike face” and the boy’s “disgraced, sordid life” and “despicable soul” recalls the discord between Orophernes’ affective image and his own degraded life. Furthermore, just as in “Orophernes,” the reasoning presented in “That is How” seems to emerge from the careful observation of a face. In both of these instances, the poem’s speaker is attracted by a portrait; paradoxically, one might think, a facial picture, whether on an ancient coin or on a contemporary pornographic photograph, appears to suffice for the imaginative recuperation of “Greek pleasure.” But, as is often the case in Cavafy’s poetry, in both these instances the life of true pleasure is not lived by the poem’s characters; in fact, their sordid lifeexperiences appear to function as a dim background, which enhances the clarity and brightness of their portraits in the speaker’s eyes. In these cases, “Greek pleasure” is imagined, recalled or experienced by the picture’s keen observer, who is also the poem’s speaker, and by others in his circle: a networked community of caring and refined gentlemen artists, who on occasion share pictures, poems, stories and fantasies among them. This specific circle emerges in the poem “Passage” (1914, 1917): PASSAGE Those things he timidly imagined as a schoolboy are out in the open, exposed right before him. And he wanders around and stays up nights, and yields to temptation. And as it is proper – for our Art – sensuality relishes his blood, fresh and hot. His body is overwhelmed by deviant erotic rapture; and his youthful limbs succumb to it.

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       And thus a simple boy becomes worthy of our attention, and for an instant, he, too, passes into the Exalted Realm of Poetry— the sensuous boy, with his blood fresh and hot.          (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 163)

This poem is addressed by the speaker to his peers, who are envisioned as a community of artists: they are arbiters of sensual pleasure, keepers of “the Exalted Realm of Poetry.”4 The needs of Art, specifically those of “our Art,” appear to justify the young man’s “abandonment to his sexual desires” and make him worthy of the artists’ interest (Mackridge, 2007, p. xxi). Cavafy’s text does not clarify whether the artists watch the “simple” and “sensuous boy” in the flesh or, more likely, through a photograph that has captured precisely the “instant” that makes him worthy of their attention. Yet this poem’s scope is not limited to the portrayal of a circle of homosexual poets, who are inspired by photographs depicting simple boys abandoned in lust. Note the poet-speaker’s highfalutin way of addressing his peers (“our Art,” “our attention”), the boy’s emphatically proclaimed passivity (“timidly,” “yields,” “overwhelmed,” “succumb”), the rather pompously articulated “Exalted Realm of Poetry” that alone may give worth to a young man’s otherwise dull life. These features fold this particular narrative in a code that transcends the themes of class hierarchy or eros as artistic inspiration: the code of Empire. Art is portrayed here in imperial solemnity, more or less as an Empress whose momentary gaze gives purpose and worth to her common subjects’ existence. This supreme power entitles an elite of male artists to act as arbiters, collectors and transmuters of precious hedonistic beauty. In the course of this process, the young man’s twiceevoked “blood fresh and hot” may suggest some form of ritualistic sacrifice, or perhaps a rite of passage from a life consumed “by deviant erotic rapture” to the “Exalted Realm of Poetry.” In another instance, in the poem “Their origin,” Cavafy presents two young men in a moment of anxiety and guilt, as they walk on the street after completing “the fulfillment of their deviant pleasure,” and concludes: But how the artist’s life has profited. Tomorrow, the day after or years later, the fervent Lines will be written that had right here their origin.           (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 243)

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Commenting on this poem, W. H. Auden asked: “But what, one cannot help wondering, will be the future of the artist’s companion?” (Auden, 1961, x). Cavafy, he suggested, “does not, perhaps, fully appreciate his exceptional good fortune in being someone who can transmute into valuable poetry experiences which, for those who lack this power, may be trivial or even harmful” (ix). These simple boys who fortuitously pass through the empire of sensual art functioning as transient muses for its custodian poets suggest the practice of collecting as an important facet of the artist’s work. Cavafy’s poetic personae are often shown to collect aesthetic images, sensuous impressions, ecstatic moments from the lives of alluring young men and to rework these into their art, which thus may be likened to a collector’s cabinet. This configuration suggests a radical reworking of the collector’s passion, which transposes it from its famously dull and unrefined antiquarian origins to the highly selective and particular modern realm of aesthetic fantasy and homoerotic art. These two seemingly disparate worlds, antiquarianism and homoerotic fantasy, are fused in the artistic project of the Prussian baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a popular photographer and “the most important gay visual artist of the pre–World War I era” (Waugh, 1996, p. 72). As previously discussed examples  show, and as Cavafy criticism has long recognized, the poet’s “historicizing reveries” (Jeffreys, 2015, p. 104) are often reciprocally connected to his depictions of contemporary homoerotic desire. “He sees, in the ancient Greek world, analogues for the sort of desire he experiences in twentieth-century Alexandria and recognizes ephebic, often Alexandrian, youths from antiquity as interchangeable with the objects of his own desire” (Watson, 2022, p. 199); “Just as his erotic poems in a contemporary setting are every bit as much poems about past time as his historical poems … so the reflections on desire and emotion in the erotic poems with historical settings can be no different in essence from those in poems with modern settings” (Robinson, 2005, pp. 275–276). As has also been observed, Cavafy often connects these distinct timeframes by the motif of visual stimulation, as for example by means of a coin or a photograph: “The visual serves … both as a link to antiquity and as a stimulus to memory of the poet’s own sexual experience and so to its transformation into literary art” (Gutzwiller, 2003, p. 81). But criticism has failed to recognize that, aside from his muchdiscussed textual sources, Cavafy’s “pictorial poetics” (Jeffreys, 1915, p. 115) is also akin to a form of visual culture that was being developed in his time, which embellished contemporary icons of homoerotic desire

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with lavish suggestions of post-classical antiquity, producing photographs which acted as visual proof of these two realms’ reciprocity and interchangeability. We will probably never know for sure whether Cavafy ever saw samples of von Gloeden’s art or what he may have thought of them. As manifest by the “indecent photograph” in “That is How,” he was aware of the existence of similar pictures and of the clandestine networks by which they circulated. We also know that artists in Cavafy’s wider circle used to exchange erotic photos of young men. Napoleon Lapathiotis, for example, a younger homosexual poet who first met Cavafy in Alexandria in 1917 and was an ardent supporter of his work, kept postcards with photographs of half-naked young North-African boys sent to him in 1921 from Smyrna by the poet and critic Mitsos Papanikolaou (one of these, depicting “Le petite Ali,” bears the handwritten inscription: “could this one be your Alexandrian guy?”).5 Surely, Cavafy was also aware of the manner in which von Gloeden and other artists promoted their riskier work, by mailing visual catalogues “of his erotica to his discreet homosexual clientele all over Europe” for purchases (Boone, 2014, p. 271) and of how they diversified their work and the means of its circulation. Von Gloeden is known to have “differentiated his production, maintaining a public line of photographs for general purchase while reserving the more risqué pictures for special clients. Whereas the general offerings avoided frontal nudity, the under-the-counter photographs did away with the loincloths and tunics” (Goldman, 2006, p. 242). Cavafy’s poem “Of the store” (1912, 1913) appears to sublimate and aestheticize precisely this practice: OF THE STORE He wrapped them up carefully, neatly in precious cloth of green silk. Roses made of rubies, lilies made of pearls, violets of amethysts. As he himself decides, wants them, deems them as beautiful; not as he saw or studied them in nature. He′ll leave them in the safe; samples of his more audacious and skillful work. Yet, when a customer enters the store,

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he takes out of the cases and sells some other things— fine jewels—bracelets, chains, necklaces and rings.           (Trans. by E. Sachperoglou; Cavafy, 2003, p. 119)

In tracing analogies between certain aspects of Cavafy’s poetry and von Gloeden’s aesthetic vision, as I will do more analytically in the following section, I do not mean to suggest more than an incidental affinity between the substantially different artistic idioms of two homosexual artists who, at around the same time, explored manifestations of manly love in comparable pseudo-historical settings. But I do propose that Cavafy’s homoerotic poetry, with its constant transit between historical and contemporary settings, may be illuminated by being set against a popular concurrent visual project which, at the very least, showed how these distinct timespans may be plausibly integrated in a fluid and dream-like present.

4  Antiquarian Porn Alongside its textual formulations, “Greek love” was also elaborated at the turn of the twentieth century by means of visual culture, most prominently by the baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and his rivals  and imitators, including Wilhelm von Plüschow and Vincenzo Galdi.6 Inspired by Winckelmann, von Gloeden photographed working-class boys and young men in southern Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean, dressing them up as “living relics of antiquity” (Evangelista, 2010, p.  98): in ancientlooking outfits and settings, naked or half-dressed, by themselves or in small groups and suggestively gazing at or touching each other. In these pictures “Italy, and Sicily in particular, become Arcadian pleasure landscapes that implicitly denounce the restrictions of modern sexual morality in the North” (Evangelista, 2010, p.  99). These contemporary images make “classically inspired homosexual decadence” (Blanshard, 2010, p.  148) appear at once tangible and nostalgic, embedding homoerotic desire in a radically new antiquarian vision. Some photographs were shot, by von Gloeden and others, in Tunisia, Turkey and Egypt, and so bore abundant orientalist and colonial features. But von Gloeden also visibly orientalized his Sicilian subjects in many ways, which included the “use of a socially subaltern population that was almost completely invisible and manipulating it into an historical context that is foreign to it” (Verdicchio, 2011, p. 150). His version of antiquity was a romanticized homosexual Arcadia inhabited by young peasants clad in “exotic” garments and

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Fig. 7.1  Wilhelm von Gloeden, Flute Concert (1905)

surrounded by folkish props, who therefore epitomized “the docile and feminized eastern male of nineteenth century colonial imagination” (Hannavy, 2008, p. 498) (Figs. 7.1, 7.2). Von Gloeden’s nudes were published in art magazines, some of which had a homosexual following, exhibited in international events and collected prestigious awards. But they also found great commercial success circulating as postcards and sold through privately distributed catalogues, thus “creating a complex encroachment of scholarly, artistic, and erotic discourses” (Evangelista, 2009, p. 15) and serving a clandestine market “that extended from Sicily to continental Europe, Britain, and the United States” (Goldman, 2006, p.  243). In this way, von Gloeden’s pictures were instrumental in forging “an imaginary international community of like-minded spectators” (Herring, 2010, p. 111), similar to the collectivity pictured by Cavafy in “Passage” and other poems (“And thus a simple boy/ becomes worthy of our attention”). But von Gloeden’s photographs

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Fig. 7.2  Wilhelm von Gloeden, Dancing Boys (1895–1900)

were also circulated via real and trusted homosexual networks: “Symonds was an avid collector of these photographs, which he sometimes used as material for his studies on aesthetics, and Wilde, like many of his contemporaries, travelled to the small Sicilian town of Taormina in order to visit von Gloeden’s studio” (Evangelista, 2009, p. 15). In a letter from 1889, the poet and critic Edmund Gosse thanked Symonds for sending him a specimen, noting that while he attended Robert Browning’s funeral at Westminster Abbey “with George Meredith at my side, I peeped at it again and again” (Thwaite, 1984, p. 323). Aside from its more straightforward uses as erotica, von Gloeden’s art also served as a practical guide for homoerotic readings of material antiquity, thus helping to shape “an international constituency of gay cultural practitioners” (Waugh, 1996, p. 71). Much like Cavafy’s art, von Gloeden’s rendering of antiquity may be conceptualized as a creative and decidedly modern restaging of some of the cultural principles which allowed antiquarianism to function as “a personalized expression of historical consciousness” (Crane, 2018, p. 187). But these artists’ use of an antiquarian

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code has eluded their critics, probably because of the general discredit and effacement of the antiquarian legacy by the relentless satire thrown at it by its nineteenth-century successors. The revision of antiquarianism that started with Arnaldo Momigliano’s seminal work from the early 1950s onwards (and is still very much in progress) allows us to trace its ironic and creative uses in both von Gloeden’s and Cavafy’s projects. Although at the turn of the twentieth century antiquarianism had been displaced as a method of historical and archaeological research, its memory as an archaic and conventional set of cultural practices which sought to revitalize the past in ways that differed drastically from academic scholarship was still potent and was evoked by both these artists to legitimate their more risqué production. Both Cavafy’s poetry and van Gloeden’s photography were cloaked and could readily be “justified as classical studies” (Verdicchio, 2011, p. 140) to those who did not partake in their art’s sensual longings, while its true meaning was “evident only to a select few who know how to read the signs” (Gutzwiller, 2003, p.  84). The antiquarian code thus allowed both of these artists to conceal and, at the same time, enhance the homoerotic import of their work. Von Gloeden and his supporters regularly summoned antiquarian arguments in their attempt to present his cultural project as a revival of antiquity. As discussed in this book’s Introduction, antiquarians sought “an empathetic relationship with the historical past” (Sweet, 2004, p. 32) and “a dynamic, recuperative, resurrective response” to it (Vine, 2010, p. 3). Recognizing that “no attempt to reconstruct the past. .. was possible without the capacity to envision the broken and fragmentary made whole again” they envisioned their “reconstructive ambition” as an “act of the imagination” (Miller, 2000, p. 31). In one of his few surviving writings, from 1899, von Gloeden described his own  visual project in similar terms: as an imaginative attempt to resurrect ancient Greek life, fashioned after antiquarian goals and void of erotic intentions: My wish was to do artwork through photography…. Readings from Homer and Theocritus’ Sicilian poetry stimulated my fantasy. Rocks and the sea, hills and forests recalled arcadian shepherds and Polyphemus. Greek shapes excited me, just like the bronze colour of the descendants of the ancient Hellenes, and I tried to resurrect ancient Greek life in these images. But how the desire surpasses the means! Fortunately, I did not choose professional models, so I did not have to fight against academic poses and practiced positions. My models were peasants, shepherds, fishermen. I had to be intimate

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with them for a long time in order to be able to observe them later in scanty garments, to select among them, and to stimulate them spiritually with stories from Homer’s sagas. (Quoted in Aldrich, 1993, pp. 150–51)

Von Gloeden’s nudes were also reviewed by sympathetic critics much in the same terms, as a fresh, artistic and instantaneous mode of antiquarianism that bore no sexual implications. As the art critic Fritz Loescher would argue in 1899, von Gloeden’s photographs breathe life into the classical Sicilian landscape, while naked men simply add to this effect a memory of classical beauty. Furthermore, the Baron’s antiquarian goals were proven by the support extended to him by the local population, which Loescher attributed to the Sicilians’ “cultural sensitivity” rather than to their need for von Gloeden’s financial patronage: The treasures of that fortunate isle tell us much about that epoch of cultural brilliance to which we look back with admiration and yearning today. Its most magnificent natural beauty and the richness of its soil at each harvesttime have survived the storms of history from the time when it was the granary of Rome until the present day. …W.v. [sic] Gloeden has set himself the goal of animating the landscape of this magnificent memory-laden country with these naked figures which have forever felt the imprint of the Hellenic ideal of beauty. The cultural sensitivity of the Sicilian people, in whose blood appreciation for classical beauty flows, has totally supported him. Thus he could take these pictures which seem to carry us back from the present to a far-off time. (Quoted in Aldrich, 1993, p. 151)

Like Cavafy’s, von Gloeden’s erotic archaeology offers a post-classical and Decadent version of antiquity. His photographs are brimming in Hellenistic and Late Antique hybridity, from the dark complexion and orientalist dresses of his models to their ritualistic postures on old and worn-down terraces. Some of the poses they struck were imitations of ancient statues at the Naples Museum of Anthropology or of paintings by Caravaggio, Dubufe, Eakins, Fortuny, Alma-Tadema and others (Aldrich, 1993, p.  149; Verdicchio, 2011, p.  148). Furthermore, von Gloeden’s images carry a puzzling semantic overload, an overabundance of discordant signs that sets them in an anachronistic timeframe. This effect is also noticeable in several of Cavafy’s poems, including “Alexandrian Kings,” in which the poet’s theatrical staging and his profuse recitation of titles, colors, gemstones and other ornaments clearly overwhelm the text’s

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historical grounding, ultimately transfiguring “the historic event … into a purely aesthetic object” (Jeffreys, 2015, p. 116). Cavafy’s over-the-top handling of detail was probably the reason why C. M. Bowra chose this particular poem to refer to the poet’s “antiquarian sense of an historic situation” (Bowra, 1967, p. 40). In the case of von Gloeden, the excessive mixture of codes and “languages” in his photographs was famously observed by Roland Barthes, who spoke of the frictions that allow them to “interest, engage, amuse, amaze.” As Barthes noted, von Gloeden “takes the code of Antiquity, overloads it, clumsily parades it (ephebes, shepherds, ivy and vine leaves, palms and olive trees, tunics, columns, steles)” and ultimately produces “a collection of details without hierarchy, without ‘order’ (that great Classical principle)” (Barthes, 1985, pp. 195, 196). Barthes may be implicitly recognizing here von Gloeden’s artistic use of an antiquarian code, as a common criticism of antiquarians targeted their inability to carve the plethora of details about antiquity that they amassed into some sort of orderly synthesis. But he may also be making an early gesture toward what is today known as “queer unhistoricism,” that is to a mode in which “queer connections are frequently brought about by acts of bending time, productive mobilisations of anachronism, and momentary or sustained transitions from temporal normativities into osmotic temporalities” (Matzner, 2016, p. 192). Apart from their broad use of antiquarianism as a filter used to legitimize homoerotic art and confuse unsympathetic viewers, von Gloeden and Cavafy may also be connected to more specific antiquarian tenets. Sentimental expressions of nostalgia and lament over the inability to reunite and to re-possess fragmented and distant antiquity were popular among antiquarians, as famously manifest in Francis Bacon’s “metaphor of a shipwreck for the fall of the ancient world, with spars and flotsam standing for the fragments of antiquity that had survived into the present” (Miller, 2017, p. 9). Antiquaries were also known as avid collectors, heavily “concerned with fragments and specialized collections based on objects of personal interest” (Crane, 2018, p. 187), and were prone to use collecting principles and practices as guidelines for reconstructing the past. This became an important aspect of their legacy: “As soon as the antiquarian leaves his shabby palace which preserves something of the eighteenth century and enters modern life, he becomes the great collector” (Momigliano, 1990, p. 54). Both of these themes, nostalgic grief over the past’s unavailability and a collector’s sensibility, were reworked, in diverse ways, by

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Cavafy and von Gloeden into aesthetic principles which are central to their homoerotic art. In Cavafy’s poetic readings of ancient objects and fragments, just as in von Gloeden’s photographic re-enactments, a contemporary gaze often seeks to traverse the historical distance by virtue of its erotic attraction to imagined or real figures from antiquity. This approach seems to offer an aesthetic response to Symonds’ anxiety over the untraversable distance that separates modern homoerotic desire from its ancient origins: “How shall we, whose souls are aged and wrinkled with the long years of humanity, shake hands across the centuries with those young-eyed, young-limbed immortal children?” (Symonds, 1873, p.  398; see Evangelista, 2010, p. 99). And yet, the mournful and nostalgic aura permeating von Gloeden’s photographs, just like the excess of memorials, funerary motifs and lamentation in Cavafy’s homoerotic emplotments, shows that the promise of connection and fulfillment is bound to remain uncertain, illusory and transient. As Stefano Evangelista comments, In Symonds’s and Von Gloeden’s aesthetic encounters with Italian young men the progressive discourse of homosexual emancipation is aligned to fundamentally conservative desires of objectification and orientalist collecting. Von Gloeden’s aesthetic vision is itself based on a collecting impulse …. There is an aesthetic of compulsive repetition in the photographer’s use of the same settings, in which countless male bodies alternate and ultimately come to be almost interchangeable, as the photographer and the viewer search for an impossible ideal. (2010, p. 102)

An aesthetic of “compulsive repetition” which manifests “the psychological condition of the homosexual author as collector” (Evangelista, ibid.) may also be traced in Cavafy’s erotic poetry. As Robinson has argued, “most of Cavafy’s young men are losers: they lose their place in society, they lose their lovers, they lose their lives. The only winner is always the artist who recuperates them from time” (Robinson, 1988, p. 84). Cavafy’s autobiographical persona “like a reverse Pygmalion, turns his beloveds into sculptures, he aestheticizes and eternalizes vulnerable bodies” (Watson, 2022, p. 192). Yet in doing so he also objectifies these men as figures “fashioned for and dedicated to Greek pleasure” (“That is How”), treating them more or less as collectible snapshots: a long procession of “simple boys,” each of whom “becomes worthy of our attention, and for an instant, / he, too, passes into the Exalted Realm of Poetry” (“Passage”).

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This limitation, which brings a facet of Cavafy’s poetry close to von Gloeden’s photographic project, seems to queer the condition of the antiquarian collector into a sexual sensibility that is inescapably restrained by the impediments of its time and place. This shared exigency may not be irrelevant to the fact that both artists have been related to kitsch (Cavafy by W. H. Auden, von Gloeden by Roland Barthes) (see Jeffreys, 2015, xix; Barthes, 1985, p. 195) or to their ongoing cultural “kitschification” as gay icons (see Jeffreys, 2015, esp. pp. 165–172; Goldman, 2006). However, it must also be noted that in Cavafy’s case this outlook is traceable in a small part of his erotic poetry, which also features several different formulations, modes and procedures, whereas it appears to occupy the full extent of von Gloeden’s aesthetic production.

Notes 1. Rosemary Barrow (2001, p.  140) suggests that Cavafy’s poem “Ionic” (publ. 1911) was inspired by William Johnson’s Ionica. 2. There is no evidence suggesting that Cavafy was familiar with Symonds’ work, as some commentators have claimed (Mendelsohn in Cavafy 2012, p. 565; Watson, 2022, p. 196, n. 21). Papanikolaou observes textual affinities, but stops short of  claiming that Cavafy had actually read Symonds (2014, pp. 106–107, 129–130). 3. Fatouros (2000, p.  212) misreads Plutarch’s description of Ptolemy Philadelphus,  son of Antony and Cleopatra, as referring to Caesarion’s attire: “he [Cavafy] took over the description of Caesarion’s clothing (called by Plutarch ‘Ptolemaios’), but, in order to enhance his ‘glittering pathetic show’ he enriches it with more details.” 4. For a significantly different reading of this poem see Papanikolaou (2014, pp. 247–250). 5. Postcard in Napoleon Lapathiotis’ archive at the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA/MIET). 6. Other early  twentieth-century artists producing similar photographs included F. Holland Day and Frederick William Rolfe (Baron Corvo).

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Papanikolaou, D. (2014). ‘Σαν κ’ εμένα καμωμένοι’: Ο ομοφυλόφιλος Καβάφης και η ποιητική της σεξουαλικότητας. Athens: Patakis. Papargyriou, E. (2011). Cavafy, Photography and Fetish. Κάμπος: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek, 18, 73–91. Pater, W. (1980). The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, D. L. Hill (Ed.), University of California Press. Pater, W. (1986). The Renaissance. A. Phillips (Ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pater, W. (2002). Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1985). Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, C. (1988). C.P. Cavafy. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Robinson, C. (2005). Cavafy, Sexual Sensibility, and Poetic Practice: Reading Cavafy through Mark Doty and Cathal O Searcaigh. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 23(2), 261–279. Roessel, D. (2002). In Byron’s Shadow. Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Roilos, P. (2009). C. P. Cavafy. The Economics of Metonymy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Saslow, J.  M. (1999). Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. New York: Penguin Books. Savidis, G.  P. (1963). Ο Καβάφης είναι Εθνικός Ποιητής! Μια ραδιοφωνική συνέντευξη του Γ. Π. Σαββίδη από τον Ν. Γ. Κάρτερ. O Tachidromos, 496 (12.10.63), 9. Savidis, G. P. (1985). Μικρά καβαφικά, A’. Athens: Ermis. Sulcer, R. Jr. (1999). Ten Percent: Poetry and Pathology. In R. Dellamora (Ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissidence (pp. 235–52). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sweet, R. (2004). Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Symonds, J. A. (1873). Studies of the Greek Poets. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. Thwaite, A. (1984). Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849–1928. London: Secker & Warburg. Verdicchio, P. (2011). Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison & Teaneck: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Vine, A. (2010). In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Watson, J. L. (2022). Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy. International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 29(2), 190–213.

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CHAPTER 8

At a Slight Angle to the British Empire

Cavafy’s association with the British Empire has mainly been discussed with reference to the poet’s biographical situation and social standing or as reflected in a few of his poems that focus on explicitly imperial themes, as for example in “Waiting for the Barbarians.” This chapter investigates the deployment of aspects of Hellenistic history in British imperialist discourse, seeking to contextualize Cavafy’s poetic handling of the same historical material in a way that may enable subtler and more balanced readings of the poet’s work. Continuing from the previous chapter, which sought to locate contemporaneous sources, contexts and correspondences for Cavafy’s historical representations of homoerotic desire, the present discussion probes into Edward Said’s largely unhindered observation that Cavafy’s “poetic and psycho-sexual consciousness operated within imperial circles; consequently, he identified with the Europeans of the East” (in Gourgouris, 1992, p. 394; my emphasis). My inquiry begins with the examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiographical and cultural formulations of the Hellenistic East as code for the British Empire. This was chiefly the work of the first academic histories of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Dynasties, books that as earlier discussed Cavafy possessed in his library and used extensively in his work. Imperialist conceptualizations of Hellenistic hybridity, assimilation, amalgamation and cosmopolitanism in Cavafy’s time are also shown to form an important, though neglected, facet of his

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poetry’s historical context. This inquiry is supplemented by a discussion of the poet’s personal and cultural interactions with a set of important colonial figures and classicists, including T. E. Lawrence, Ronald Storrs, Edgar John Forsdyke, Robert (Robin) Allason Furness and George Antonius. Cavafy thus emerges as a poet who reads and writes of Eastern Hellenism through facilities, resources, and viewpoints made available by the British Empire, while also keeping his distinct identity and seeking to increase his cultural capital as a diaspora Greek within the imperial framework, among other ways by addressing his poems to a set of highly cultured and classically trained British intellectuals who often also occupied high-ranking positions in colonial administration. This discussion leads to a close reading of Cavafy’s “Coins,” a poem that was written in 1920 and remained unpublished until 1968, which illustrates some of the deeper interpretative complexities that arise once we acknowledge and critically investigate the colonial substratum of his historical poetry. This reading rounds up my attempt to respond to the urgent question of “what it might mean to take seriously the possibility of thinking of Cavafy as a writer in or of the British Empire” (Mufti, 2021, p. 179).

1   Colonial Hellenism Sometime in the early 1960s, Stelios Papadimitriou, a young lawyer in Alexandria who would later become Chair of the Onassis Foundation, chanced on an elderly and highly cultivated Egyptian man, Ibrahim El Kayar, who had an interesting story to tell. El Kayar had worked under Cavafy for eight years, at the Third Circle of Irrigation of the Ministry of Public Works, in Alexandria, and succeeded him after the poet retired in 1922, having spent thirty years as a “permanently temporary minor colonial civil servant” (George Savidis, quoted in McKinsey, 2010, p. 76). El Kayar was promptly interviewed, and his published testimony presents Cavafy as a man utterly indifferent to the Egyptian people, their culture and their political causes (Halvatzakis, 1964).1 This text has sometimes been used by critics who depicted Cavafy “as at best indifferent and at worst sympathetic to colonialism” (Kazamias, 2021, p. 110) to contradict Stratis Tsirkas’ portrayal of the poet as a pro-Arab intellectual, who secretly harbored and covertly expressed anti-imperialist sentiments (on which see Papatheodorou and Pechlivanos, 2013; Hadziiossif, 2013). But this is not at all the ontext in which I will engage El Kayar’s testimony in this discussion.

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In a rather neglected passage from his interview, which focuses on Cavafy’s rapport at the office with his British superiors, El Kayar remarked that the poet was as talkative and agreeable with the English, of whom he was very fond and they were fond of him, as he was laconic with us [Egyptian clerks] about anything outside our work. They [the English] made a difference between him and the rest of us and treated him with great respect. He must have fascinated them, for they often called him into their offices, and got him to talk about historical matters. They listened to him going on and on about the Ancients… The English were delighted with him. (Liddell, 1974, p. 131)

Cavafy is famous for his historicist conversational routines, so it is not hard to imagine him “going on and on about the Ancients” whenever the opportunity presented itself. But El Kayar’s testimony seems to raise a question about the poet’s British superiors at the office and their own interests. Why were these men so fascinated with the Levantine clerk’s elaborate ruminations on Hellenistic history? And what was it that made this particular and rather obscure slice of antiquity relevant and urgent to a set of middle-ranking British colonial bureaucrats? I think these questions may help us locate Cavafy’s antiquarian yearnings and poetic historicism in a more specific intellectual and ideological framework than hitherto acknowledged. Cavafy’s focus on historical and archaeological topics from the Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity has been mostly addressed through the lens of Greek national historiography. From this viewpoint, the poet’s historical preferences are usually perceived as metaphorical comments on the decline of Greece and the Greeks in the first decades of the twentieth century. Following this line of thought, critics have discovered various encodings of the Greek social and political present in Cavafy’s historical settings. But in doing so, they have neglected the fact that in the poet’s time and in the context of his immediate personal and cultural experience, which was that of colonial Egypt, the Hellenistic East carried a set of totally different connotations. The pervasive growth of colonial discourse, which employed the Classics to support, explain, and glorify the Empire, made ancient Hellenism relevant and urgent to large numbers of colonial subjects, including Cavafy’s superiors at the Third Circle of Irrigation, who clearly had no worries about the Greek nation and its questionable continuities (see Goff, 2005; Bradley, 2010; Hagerman, 2013; Vasunia,

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2013). I think we may safely assume that the Levantine clerk’s historical musings at the office were not perceived by “the English” as tales about the current state of Greece and the Greeks, but as profound allegories that pertained to the deep history and to the very essence of the British Empire. Translatio imperii, the perception of empire as a process of eternal succession in which historical paradigms transferred imperial authority to newer ones through comparison, identification and even mimicry, flourished in Cavafy’s times and provided the chief rationale for historical research in the British imperial context (Vasunia, 2013, pp. 152–153). As Martin McKinsey has suggested, “Hellenism is best thought of as one of the modes of Western discourse” or as “one of the vocabularies the West uses to think about itself.” Its meaning may vary, but it was always underpinned by “a sense of cultural proximity, a felt kinship that was understood to grant the English privileged access to the mind and genius of Ancient Greece” (McKinsey, 2010, p. 27). This general sense of kinship with antiquity was intensified and put to political uses during the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, when Alexander’s conquests of the East and the Roman Imperium were employed as ruling metaphors for the expansion, legitimation and ultimately the management of the British Empire. In this context, selected colonial themes from the past assumed new meaning and relevance, as foundations for modern imperialism’s sense of purpose and destiny. Alexander’s campaign was mainly used to sublimate the earlier stages of the British colonial venture, until the consolidation of colonial rule in India with the establishment of the British Raj, in 1858: “Comparisons between the military exploits of Alexander and of the East India Company were typically positive, with both the Greeks and the British as bringers of order and civilization” (Mairs, 2018, p. 583). In 1849, for example, after the conquest of the Punjab that extended the borders of British India to the Indus River, British Commander-in-Chief Hugh Gough addressed his soldiers with a direct reference to their status as Alexander’s heirs: “The tide of conquest which heretofore rolled on the Punjab from the west, has at length reached and overcome it from the east; and that which Alexander attempted, the British Indian Army has accomplished” (Vasunia, 2013, p. 77). Identification with Alexander was a long-standing colonial project, and in fact a joint venture, promoted by academics as well as military and political operators. As Phiroze Vasunia comments,

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On the one hand, scholars drew on the books of British political agents and geographers in order to analyse Alexander’s expedition into eastern Persia, Afghanistan and India; on the other, the political agents and geographers were themselves guided by their reading of scholarly accounts of Alexander. Each group influenced the other, and each was operating within the capacious frame of the British Empire. (Vasunia, 2013, p. 76)

As R.  Mairs observes, British imperial obsession with the campaigns of Alexander the Great in India and Afghanistan “is manifest in the scholarly and semi-scholarly literature of British India, in works of fiction, and in the discourse of British imperialism” (2018, p. 576). Apart from its uses by academics, soldiers and politicians, the function of Macedon expansion as code for the Empire was also manifest in countless cultural representations. The  enormous eighteenth-century tapestry hanging  behind the majestic bar of the Grand Bretagne Hotel in Athens shows Alexander entering Gaugamela; the hotel’s bar itself is tellingly called “Alexander’s.” On the other hand, and in contrast to Alexander’s campaign, which was mainly invoked to legitimize British imperialism at the time of its expansion, the ubiquitous comparison of the Empire to Rome “enabled people to identify with a concept of the benign spread of civilization over benighted barbarian tribes” (Young, 2001, p. 33) while colonial administrators sought examples that might help them rule them. As Vasunia comments, “invariably, the comparisons between Rome and Britain point to contemporary concerns about empire, race, decay, and decline; invariably, these concerns are obfuscated or contained in ways that reveal the ideological motivation of this precise historical comparison” (2013, pp. 119–20). Lord Lugard further clarified this approach in 1922: As Roman imperialism laid the foundations of modern civilisation, and led the wild barbarians of these islands along the path of progress, so in Africa today we are repaying the debt, and bringing to the dark places of the earth, the abode of barbarism and cruelty, the torch of culture and progress, while ministering to the material needs of our own civilisation…. We hold these countries because it is the genius of our race to colonise, to trade, and to govern. (Lugard,1922, pp. 618–19)

As has been suggested, the urge to parallel Greater Rome to Greater Britain was attuned to the Victorian epistemological commitment to the “Comparative Method,” by which “the very method of comparative

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enquiry was deeply and inextricably entangled in British Imperialist practices and discourses” (Vasunia, 2013, p.  154). But this comparison was also specifically connected to, and authorized by, classical scholarship; its exponents were “immersed in Victorian imperial culture” and, at the same time, “derived their materials and their legitimacy from the institutionalized study of the ancient world” (p. 39). It is worth recalling here that the special connection of “comparative Empire” to Oxford classics (pp.  39, 49) was parallel and in some respects concomitant to the elaboration of what we might call “comparative Desire,” the project to legitimate modern homoerotic desire through classical scholarship, which, as previously discussed, was also primarily elaborated at Oxford. Moreover, aside from its employment as an instrument for the comprehension and support of the British Empire, the Roman exemplum also served as a reminder of its precarious state and produced anxiety about its eventual decline and collapse. Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was very influential in this way. Originally published between 1776 and 1788, Gibbon’s work reached iconic status in the late nineteenth century, especially after the celebration of his death’s centennial in 1894, which was followed by a proliferation of parodies and pamphlets that used Gibbon as a warning for Britain’s imperial present (see Rogers and Hingley, 2010, pp. 201–202; Reisz, 2010, pp. 219–220). Gibbon’s History clearly came to Cavafy’s hands as a major imperial text, and as such it was read and copiously annotated by the poet between 1896 and 1899 (see Haas, 1982; on Gibbon’s significance in the turn of the twentieth-­century British imperial setting see Quinault and McKitterick, 1997; Rogers and Hingley, 2010). But Rome was also more directly identified to the British Empire, in popular works and in the context of a “linear national mythical history,” which sometimes gave the impression “that the purpose of Rome in conquering and civilising Britain [in the 1st c. BCE] was to create the historical context for Britain’s own imperial mission” (Hingley, 2000, p.  11). From the busts and paintings of British statesmen dressed in togas to the presentation of Roman gifts to Indian dignitaries (Vasunia, 2013, p. 153), Rome was invoked at all possible levels as a ubiquitous metonymy for Great Britain and provided the larger framework for the exercise of imperial rule. As the self-taught classicist Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer since 1892, would put it, “the history of Imperial Rome can never cease to be of more than academic interest to the statesmen and politicians of Imperial England. Rome bequeathed to us much that is of inestimable

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value, both in the way of precept and example” (1913, p. 340). Cromer himself, a major figure of British imperialism and a protagonist in Said’s Orientalism, was also a great promoter of ancient history and the classics as a means by which to articulate and refine modern imperial policy (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1  Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer (1841–1917)

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Cromer, whose posture “seemed to radiate the essential spirit of imperial rule” (Owen, 2004, vii), adopted the Roman title of Proconsul, by which he ruled Egypt from behind the scenes for a period of twentyfour years, from 1883 to 1907. In this case, the title became indistinguishable from the man. Shortly after his death, he was eulogized as “a great public servant, a Roman proconsul, of whom it could be said that, unlike the proconsuls of old, he had ruled for the glory of his country and the good of those under his rule, never for his own enrichment or his personal advantage” (Courtney, 1919, p.  258). Interestingly, this Roman title, which was particularly conspicuous in colonial Egypt, makes some notable appearances in Cavafy’s poetry, as in the poems “Philhellene,” “Tomb of Lanes” and “The Rest Shall I Tell to Those in Hades Below.” Between the two major historical paradigms of British translatio imperii discussed above,  the Macedonian conquering of the East and the Roman imperium, lies the period of the Hellenistic dynasties, which gave Cavafy most of his historical themes. This period seems to have entered the British colonial imagination in the late nineteenth century, as it was earlier frowned upon as a time of decline and debauchery. The new role attributed to the Hellenistic world in the context of colonial discourse was made clear by the first academic historians who dealt with it, in the very books which Cavafy studied and used as primary sources for many of his poems. As we saw in previous chapters, these were mainly two works that Cavafy kept in his personal library: on the one hand, on the Ptolemies and Hellenistic Egypt, The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895) by the Anglo-Irish classicist John Pentland Mahaffy and, on the other, The House of Seleucus by Edwyn Robert Bevan (1902), which was the poet’s principal source on the Seleucids and other kingdoms in Asia. Both authors are commonly perceived in our time as imperialist historians (Moyer, 2011, p.  19 and passim). Their books, from which Cavafy taught himself Hellenistic history, were hailed by Cromer in 1913 as landmark works which signaled the entrance of the Hellenistic period in imperial discourse: Archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics are year by year opening out new fields for inquiry, and affording fresh material for the reconstruction of history. More especially much light has of late been thrown on that chaotic period which lies between the death of the Macedonian conqueror and the final assertion of Roman domination. Professor Mahaffy has dealt with the Ptolemies, and Mr. Bevan with the Seleucids. (Cromer, 1913, p. 382)

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Clearly, the histories Cavafy owned and used as sources  for his poetry, Mahaffy’s Empire of the Ptolemies and Bevan’s House of Seleucus, were also studied and used by Cromer at the same time, as also evidenced by references in his seminal essay Ancient and Modern Imperialism (see Cromer, 1910, p. 135, n.1). Reading from Bevan’s book, Cavafy studied the history of Hellenistic Asia as a distant pre-incarnation of the British colonial venture. Bevan presents Hellenism as a value-system that was inherently very much akin to the Victorian outlook and which was perfected in the British moral, ideological, technological and military present. In this context, the Seleucids, as Alexander before them, were perceived as early European kings who administered empires in Asia, just as the British did in the present. Therefore, as the British historian proposed, his book’s purpose was “to make clear how closely the subject touches us, as students of the world, as Christians and as Englishmen” (Bevan, 1902, v. 1, v). As Bevan also suggested, “what we call the Western spirit in our own day is really Hellenism reincarnate,” whereas the superiority of the European over the oriental in modern days is based on “just those [qualities] which distinguished the ancient Hellene from the Oriental of his day” (pp. 17, 16). In line with its common use in the context of imperialist discourse, Bevan employs the term “European” as a synonym for the British Empire and goes on to propose that today an enormous part of the East is under the direct government of Europeans; all of it is probably destined […] to be so at no distant date. We may say then with perfect truth that the work being done by European nations, and especially by England, in the East is the same work which was begun by Macedonia and Rome, and undone by the barbarian floods of the Middle Ages. The civilization which perished from India with the extinction of the Greek kings has come back again in the British official. What will the effect be? An experiment of enthralling interest is being tried before our eyes. Those who predict its issue by some easy commonplace about the eternal distinction of “East” and “West” have given inadequate consideration to the history of East and West. Hellenism has as yet had very little time to show what it can do. Whatever the issue be, a peculiar interest must be felt by Englishmen in those Western kings who ruled in Asia twenty centuries ago. (p. 19)

Not infrequently, Bevan’s narration leaves the Hellenistic past behind to ruminate freely on the British Empire’s current affairs and future prospects. In the example quoted below, a discussion of the Macedonian

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campaign that was left incomplete after Alexander’s death triggers a detailed exposition of Bevan’s hopes for British control over Western Asia in the near future, by virtue of Britain’s military supremacy: When the day comes for European government to be re-established in Western Asia it will be seen whether its operation, immensely more powerful than that of any Asiatic monarchy, does not bring the old license of mountain and desert to an end. Already weapons of scientific precision are working a transformation in the Nearer East. … Already some of the extreme provinces of Alexander’s Empire are once more under European rule; British and Russian administrators are grappling with the problem of the mountain and desert tribes, with the Afridi of the frontier hills and the Kirghiz of the steppe. But instead of the sarissa and bow with which Alexander had to work, his modern successors have the rifle and the mountain battery, and who knows but progressive science may put into their hands before long means of mastery more certain still? (Bevan, 1902, v. 1, p. 24)

Similarly, Bevan’s discussion of the Maccabean Revolt against Seleucid rule (in 167–160 BCE) inspires him to compare it to the rise of Mahdism in Egypt during the 1880s and to ponder on its military successes: The accounts of the great victories won by the Jewish bands in these early days over superior numbers of the King’s troops one might be inclined to attribute to the self-glorification of the Jews. But indeed men filled with religious enthusiasm are likely to perform prodigies against merely professional soldiers. The story of the rise of Mahdism echoes strangely the Maccabaean story. On the first signs of revolt, the Governor-general of the Sudan sends two companies to capture the Mahdi. The two captains quarrel, and the force is set upon by the bands of the Mahdi and killed with nothing but simple sticks (July 1881). A few months later the Mudir of Fashoda advances against the Dervishes. He is drawn into a forest and his whole force massacred, before they have time to alight from their camels. Then the Egyptian government (March 1882) sends a serious expedition from Khartum to co-operate with another from El Obeid. They effect a junction, but their camp is suddenly surprised in the early morning by the Mahdists, and only a few escape. And so on, till Gordon meets the fate of Nicanor (Ohrwalder, Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp). Nor was it only against the Egyptian soldiery that the Mahdists won their successes. Englishmen will not need to be reminded that, in spite of the disparity of arms, they were able to “break the British square.” (Bevan, 1902, v. 2, p. 298)

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As earlier discussed in Chap. 5, the other historian of the Hellenistic era that Cavafy consulted was J.  P. Mahaffy, an Irish Anglican priest and Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College, Dublin and also a fervent supporter of British imperialism and Unionism. Mahaffy famously brought his student and protégé Oscar Wilde to Greece in 1877; in 1892 he had visited Alexandria and lectured at the “Athenaeum” Club, perhaps in Cavafy’s presence (Tsirkas, 1982, pp. 112–13). Apart from the volume on the Ptolemies, Cavafy’s library also featured Mahaffy’s Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), whose sub-chapter entitled “Romantic affection for boys: discussion of this question” was “one of the first popular English discussions of Greek homosexuality” (Blanshard, 2018, p. 26; Sareyannis, 1964, p. 35). Cavafy also owned Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought, from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest (1887) (Sareyannis, 1964, p.  35), a book that concludes with an argument in defense of imperialism, old and new: With the rise of Alexander’s empire a great blow was stuck in favour of imperialism. Whatever national distinctions remained, the Egyptian, the Syrian, the Phrygian, the Bithynian, felt the glamour of Hellenism, and sought to belong to the great Greek empire of language and of culture. … Whatever losses and hardships may have been inflicted on Syrians and Egyptians by the establishment of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires, no one will contend that it would have been better for those nationalities had they followed an isolated path, and had Greek energy and culture not come to the aid of decaying Semite and Hamite life. … Let, therefore, separate nationalities subordinate themselves, we might say, to great Hellenistic kingdoms, and seek their higher development not in narrow patriotism, not in the cultivation of nationality as an exclusive principle, but in acceptance of cosmopolitan culture. (Mahaffy, 1887, pp. 575–576)

In his book on the Ptolemies which, as earlier discussed, was Cavafy’s chief source for “Caesarion,” Mahaffy presents “Greek rule in Egypt as similar to British rule in Ireland” (Stanford and McDowell, 1971, p. 81) and both of these colonial paradigms as marked by the co-existence of racially and culturally divergent populations. It is not always easy to determine whether Mahaffy inscribes the British Empire’s cosmopolitan present on Hellenistic Egypt or vice versa. But this transposition is quite literal, as in the historian’s text “the Museum in Alexandria is compared at some length to an Oxford or Cambridge college […], the Greek literate culture of Ptolemaic Egypt is compared to the illustrious British literate tradition

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of Ireland” (Mairs, 2010, p. 59); and Greek supremacy over Egyptians in Ptolemaic times is glossed by the present-time sovereignty of language, culture and all things British over their Irish counterparts. Mahaffy’s systematic depiction of Hellenistic Egypt through contemporary imperialist figurations is reflected in his book’s very title, which boldly presents the Ptolemaic dynasty as an Empire. As he explained, “I have called it the Empire of the Ptolemies, to emphasize the fact that this dynasty were not mere kings of Egypt – indeed the very notion of a defined kingdom as the domain of a sovran was a notion foreign to the old world – but that they ruled over a composite Empire, and were suzerain lords over local dynasts and kings” (Mahaffy, 1895, vii). Mahaffy’s perception of antiquity as an exact parallel of British imperial life went well beyond the Irish question. In his book on the Ptolemies, for example, he would appeal to his audience’s racial colonial sentiments to present Cornelia’s alleged refusal to marry Ptolemy VIII Euergetes (Physcon): “the great Roman lady probably held him in such esteem as an English noblewoman now would hold an Indian Rajah proposing marriage” (Mahaffy, 1895, p.  349). In a dismissive anonymous review of Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought, from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest, Oscar Wilde noted Mahaffy’s “passion for imperialism” and blamed the book’s failure on the historian’s use of antiquity as a disguise for current imperial politics: in his attempt to treat the Hellenic world as “Tipperary writ large,” to use Alexander the Great as a means of white-­washing Mr. Smith, and to finish the battle of Chaeronea on the plains of Mitchelstown, Mr. Mahaffy shows an amount of political bias and literary blindness that is quite extraordinary. (Wilde, 1887, p. 3)

Beside the criticism it received (see Stanford and McDowell, 1971, pp.  179–80) Mahaffy’s identification of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman antiquity with the British Empire was also acclaimed by many commentators, popular as well as academic. A brief introduction to his work aimed for the general public presented the Irish historian as a master of Translatio imperii: John Pentland Mahaffy is conspicuous among contemporary Greek scholars and historians for devoting himself less to the study of the golden age of the Greek intellect than to the post-Alexandrian period, when the union of

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Greece with the Orient produced the Hellenistic world. It is in this highly colored, essentially modern world of decadent Greek energy that Professor Mahaffy is most at home, and in which he finds the greatest number of parallels to the civilization of his own day. He is disposed indeed to link England and Ireland, through their political life, to the Athens and Sparta of the third century before Christ, and to find precedents in the Grecian republics for democratic conditions in the United States. … It is this intimate manner of approaching a far-off theme that gives to Professor Mahaffy’s work much of its interest. He is continually translating ancient history into the terms of modern life. (Warner, 1895, p. 9569)

A year later Bernadot Perrin, Professor of Ancient Greek Philology and History at Yale and translator of Plutarch, would make similar points in an academic review, revealing the depth to which late nineteenth-­century scholarship was engulfed in imperial politics: It is eminently fitting that the first special and complete history of the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt should come to us from England, after her entrance into the inheritance of the Ptolemies. The problems which confront her in the administration of Egypt are in many ways like those which confronted Alexander the Great and Ptolemy Lagus. And there seems to be on the part of the English government the same marvellous perception of the best methods of evoking and enjoying the inexhaustible riches of this ever fruitful Nile-land, which Alexander first showed when he took it in willing lapse from the mismanagement of Persia, as England from that of Turkey. (Perrin, 1896, p. 704)

Mahaffy’s work on Ptolemaic Egypt was revised in 1927 by Bevan, who “reintroduced into this history a more direct analogy between the history of Ptolemaic Egypt and the colonial empires of his day” (Moyer, 2011, p. 19). As Bevan put it, the civilization of the ruling race in Ptolemaic Egypt was precisely that same Greek civilization which is the parent of the modern civilization of Europe, and their feeling of superiority to the people of the land was not unlike the feeling which “white men” have to-day towards “natives.” Indeed, a word which means “natives” … was the common one in the mouths of the Greeks when they spoke of Egyptians. (Bevan, 1927, p. 38)

As these examples suggest, the early historians of the Hellenistic era that Cavafy studied and used in his work boldly projected the imperialist

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present on the Hellenistic past and sometimes collapsed the boundaries between the two timeframes. Cavafy’s subtle suggestions of analogies between historical episodes and present-day political situations and individual sentiments have often been recognized and appreciated by critics as an original and innovative poetic treatment of historical material. And yet, despite the unquestionable originality of Cavafy’s dramatic presentation and ironic viewpoint, his urge to connect the past to the longings and exigencies of the present was not innovative or original as a methodology. It was indeed the prime method of “imperial philhellenism” (Mufti, 2021, p. 180), as manifested in the historical accounts of Hellenistic dynasties which the poet regularly mined, looking for material and for ways to make sense of it. Moreover, in the poet’s time, the habit of comparing the past to the colonial present was not limited to historical narratives. It was rather a ubiquitous metonymic function, a standardized formula through which Victorian experts and amateurs alike read, evaluated and explained texts and material objects of the Hellenistic antiquity. Commentators on material antiquity, for example, would examine samples looking for traces they could relate to current colonial figures and themes. In 1861, Reginald Poole, one of the first numismatists of the British Museum, discussed the famous tetradrachm of Mithridates VI Eupator (the king of poet Fernazis, in Cavafy’s “Darius”) by referring to the ruler of Pontus in the first century BCE as a prefiguration of chieftains who currently resisted British rule in India: His career was one of the most daring attempts to withstand the power of Rome, and in some of its particulars is almost an anticipation of our own conflict in India. As inhuman and unscrupulous as our opponents, he was unlike them in his generalship and courage, but his thoroughly Asiatic cruelty makes it impossible for us to feel pity as we read of his disasters. (Poole, 1861, p. 577)

In another instance, Poole would comment that the coin portrait of Artaxerxes Mnemon or Arsakes of Persia “is of much beauty and refinement, very like the most handsome Arab type of our day” (p. 577). A few years later B. V. Head, one of Poole’s successors at the British Museum, would comment on the coin portraits of other Hellenistic rulers, proposing that “this or that uninspired and commonplace face might well be that of a prosperous modern Englishman, were it not for the royal diadem and

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Greek inscription which designate it as a King of Pontus or Bithynia, of Syria or of Egypt” (1885, pp. 31–32). In Cavafy’s time, then, and by virtue of the ubiquitous academic and cultural colonization of antiquity, Hellenistic history was readily recognized as a prefiguration of, and as a metonymy for, the British Empire. The claim for the Empire as successor of Eastern Hellenism was strong and omnipresent and it was certainly familiar to Cavafy, who encountered it in the academic material he studied and used in his work but also in its numerous other manifestations in the colonial world he inhabited. Surprisingly, the span of British imperial interests in the Hellenistic period included an unlikely topic that was also one of Cavafy’s favorite themes: racial and cultural intermingling and fusion. This connection was already pre-figured by Mahaffy who, as Rachel Mairs comments, “in the cultural melting-pot of the Hellenistic world … found a classical precedent for the dominance of what he called ‘these splendid mongrels,’ the Anglo-Irish” in Ireland (2010, p. 51).

2   Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Hybridity Critics have sometimes overestimated the imperialist racial and cultural preference for the sculptural ideal of Greek Whiteness and assumed that the British Empire deployed Hellenism exclusively as a metonymy for classical whiteness (see McKinsey, 2010, p.  28). Posited against this Winckelmannian ideal, Cavafy’s poetic focus on hybridity, amalgamation and crossings surely appears irrelevant to, or subversive of, colonial Hellenism. But the imperialist intelligentsia’s interests in Hellenistic cultural hybridity were far more varied and complex than usually imagined. As evidence we may consider Cromer’s own book on Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1910) and the symposium on Ancient imperialism he subsequently organized at Oxford, in May 1910, as President of the Classical Association, with a number of participant scholars, including Bevan, the “hugely influential Roman historian and archaeologist” Francis Haverfield (Rogers and Hingley, 2010, p. 189), the archaeologist D. G. Hogarth and the classicist Master of Balliol College, James Leigh Strachan-Davidson. This symposium was essentially a follow-­up event with elaborations and responses to Cromer’s own ruminations in Ancient and Modern Imperialism, his presidential lecture to the Classical Association (1909) that was published shortly before the Oxford symposium.

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In his book, Cromer looked at Rome in search of insights that might help strengthen and improve British colonial policies. This concern was clearly fueled by the pressure for decolonization, which Cromer had experienced as a political reality in Egypt. As he noted, “the great Imperial problem of the future is to what an extent some 350 millions of British subjects, who are aliens to us in race, religion, language, manners, and customs, are to govern themselves, or are to be governed by us” (Cromer, 1910, pp. 18–19). The problem of assimilation was for Cromer peculiarly modern and “he believed that one of the main obstacles to its success was that Britain was governing … a ‘vast number of races’ that were not only ‘profoundly diverse’ but also racially unlike Europeans” (Butler, 2012, p.  60) and without the benefit of a lingua franca, as Latin was for the Romans. As Cromer conceded, the Romans had “succeeded far better” in “assimilating the nations which the prowess of their arms had brought under their sway” (1910, p. 72). Cromer drew evidence in support of his opinions from many sources, including archaeological research. In one such case he relied on an ancient funerary inscription from Numidia, published by the French classicist Gaston Boissier in his L’Afrique romaine. Promenades archéologiques en Algérie et en Tunisie (1895) to “show that intermarriage was not uncommon” (Cromer, 1910, p.  96). As Cromer wrote: Thus one Musac, manifestly a Phoenician, had a son who took the Roman name of Saturninus, and married a Roman lady, Flavia Fortunata. In the next generation the Romanization was complete. The son was called Flavius Fortunatus. Such cases are now of extremely rare occurrence in countries where races of different colour and religion are brought in contact with each other. (p. 96)

In his book’s Appendix, Cromer examined the question of interracial marriages in the Hellenistic and Roman times, looking for insights on whether the British Empire should encourage the fusion of Europeans with local populations toward the creation of hybrid racial and cultural identities. Cromer’s interest in these issues was not purely theoretical; in 1901, he had “prepared an elaborate marriage contract for use in mixed marriages … which contains a lengthy exposition of a certain vision of marriage under Islam and its risks for Christian girls” (Hanley, 2017, p. 146). His concern with questions of assimilation, intermarriage and

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hybridity in imperial policy is also evident in his correspondence with many scholars and high-ranking colonial officers at around the same time (see Chamberlain, 1972, esp. pp. 72–82). These questions would be further debated by some of his respondents in the 1910 Oxford symposium. A central task for participants in this debate was the examination of Hellenistic and Roman policies on racial and cultural fusion with a view to the shaping of contemporary imperial policies. Haverfield, for example, commenting on Rome’s failure to Romanize the East, ruminated that most serious of all obstacles to assimilation, races whose thoughts and affections and traditions and civilization had crystallised into definite form. This is the true obstacle to Imperial assimilation and even to peaceful rule. […] It does not so much matter whether the crystallization has been caused by a political religion or a national sentiment or undying memories of the past: the point is the coherence which results. In India, I am told, we might assimilate in some sort the uncivilised hill tribes, if geography let us bring sufficient influences to work. But the civilized Hindoos and Mohammedans have crystallised. They offer to us somewhat the same resistance as the Croats at Agram or the Poles in Posen offer to various European powers. In such cases the civilisation of the dominant race does not act as solvent or assimilator. Its power to do that is limited to the uncivilized or incoherent units. (Haverfield, 1910, pp. 106–107)

As Hogarth noted, Alexander “met at every attempt, whether on the Caspian shore, in Afghanistan, in Bactria, or on his return to Susa, with the strongest opposition possible, based on sheer Macedonian and Greek Pride of Race. Yet within two centuries after his death, the Greek was forming, in Egypt, in Syria, and even farther East, that same sort of amalgam with the non-Greek Oriental which he forms at this day” (Hogarth, 1910, p. 113). Bevan, on the other hand, explored resemblances and differences “between the relation of the Greek to the barbarian, and our own relation to Oriental races” (Bevan, 1910, p.  110). Observing that “to some extent the slowness of Europeans to believe in the real Europeanisation of Asiatics rests upon the true perception of the impossibility of transplanting ideas and institutions which have grown up in one soil straight away into another and alien one,” he offers that “in the later Greek philosophy, especially in Stoicism, the really popular philosophy of the Hellenistic age … distinctions of race and social standing would not come into

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consideration at all” (p. 110). Referring to Plutarch’s De Alexandri fortuna aut virtute, which he presents as “the most emphatic expression of the Greek’s consciousness of a mission to the world, as a civilising power,” Bevan notes Plutarch’s argument against making “the distinction of Hellene and barbarian depend upon race or fashion of dress, but upon virtue and vice” while also suggesting that “in one way, the Greek seems to have been narrower than the modern European. If he had less racial prejudice, he had greater cultural prejudice” (pp. 110–111). Doubtless, this exchange between imperialist scholars who read the classics fantasizing about racial and cultural machinations that might perpetuate British dominance in the East bears little resemblance to Cavafy’s poetic depictions of male-to-male desire flourishing in a Hellenistic setting of ethnic co-­existence and cultural hybridity. In fact, we may easily imagine the poet taking up some of the forementioned imperialist views as material for his own, unmistakably ironic and subversive treatment. And yet, the urgent debate on various aspects of “the general assimilation of subject races” (Anon., 1910, p.  105) that took place in Cavafy’s time among imperialist scholars, thinkers and agents contextualizes some of the central themes in his poetry, including the problematic or incomplete colonial “amalgamation” manifest in poems like “Philhellene” and “The Potentate from Western Libya,” or the pondering on multiple cultural outlooks and identities in “Return from Greece.” Surely, the broader imperial discursive context was far more conspicuous to the poet, as a colonial subject in the so-called cosmopolitan hub of the British Empire, than it has been to his later readers and critics. Imperialist discourse also frames, as broader historical context, the theme of harmonious ethnic co-­ existence and interaction which is an essential feature of Cavafy’s Hellenistic imagery (e.g., “We are a mixture of races here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes,” in “A town in Osroene”) and has been treated by many of his critics as a reflection of real life in the “cosmopolitan” Alexandria he inhabited. As the historian C. Hadziiossif has argued, however, the “neo-Hellenistic” city of Cavafy’s poetry is a turn of the twentieth-century utopian construction, in which England and France were disguised as “Greece,” while both the Hellenistic city and its early twentieth-century counterpart were fantasized as loci in which various ethnic groups lived in harmony among themselves and with the Egyptian population (in the case of the modern city, with British rulers as well) (1990, pp.  147–48). The construction of neo-Hellenistic Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is evident in late nineteenth-century tourist

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books, as for example in the popular two-volume guide by Georg Ebers, originally composed in 1878: That life for the ideal, that struggle for intellectual wealth, that nurture of science and art which ennobled Alexandria of yore, have not accompanied the resurrection of the great metropolis, and yet the circumstances of the new city appeal to us in many particulars as a reflection oi ancient Alexandria. Just as the old town remained a Greek colony in the midst of Egyptians, so the new has received little of that impress of the Mohammedan mind which is visible throughout the rest of the Nile valley. The Alexandria of our day, like its predecessor two thousand years ago, has developed from an unimportant Egyptian town, by the influx of enterprising Europeans — chiefly Greeks and Italians — while the native Egyptian element has been thrust into the background. Now as then the citizens of Alexandria may well be called a turbulent and mixed population of South European stamp. (Ebers, 1880, v.1, p. 50; also see Hadziiossif, 1990, p. 147)

Recent scholarship has probed into the colonial imperatives underlying the eurocentric construction of “cosmopolitan Alexandria” and offered alternative and historically accurate conceptualizations (Fahmy, 2004; Halim, 2013; Kazamias, 2021). According to Khaled Fahmy, Cavafy’s poetry is not “so remote from the discourse of cosmopolitanism, despite numerous references to what one must assume were Arabic-speaking locals … Only minimally does he belong to the Alexandria he lived in or to the real people who inhabited it” (Fahmy, 2004, pp. 273–74). For the most part, Alexandrian cosmopolitanism was a nostalgic fiction constructed and deployed by the city’s European social and economic elites, which had little room for Egyptian natives or the lower classes regardless of their national origin. Recent archival research offers compelling glimpses of the city’s poor, which suggest entirely different versions of fluid cultural intermingling than those encountered in the eurocentric discource of cosmopolitanism. Consider the story of Jessie Brown: Jessie Brown was a British woman who was living with and either married to, or about to be married to, John (Yannis?) Mindler, a Greek national, which would mean that she had either given up or was about to give up her British nationality. The pair lived in the home of Muhammad Hassan, working on the various ships that came through the Alexandria harbor. Brown spent her free time with Lea Cohen, a “local” subject who celebrated Easter, despite her clearly Jewish family heritage, and Lea’s daughter, Fanny, who

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worked at a nearby shop. The daughter of a Scottish man and a woman who may have been Spanish, Greek, or Syrian, Brown spoke broken Arabic, French, Greek, and Italian; she may or may not have spoken English. Far disconnected from the idealized “British” person Lord Cromer wrote of, Brown came under British charge only after she committed suicide in April 1906. The British Consulate, called into duty by the Cohens after Brown’s death, immediately set about to learn about her life, as they had not known of her previously. … Jessie Brown’s death turned her into an imperial body. (Minkin, 2020, pp. 125–26)

Alongside its cultural and literary projections, Alexandrian cosmopolitanism was also deployed by British imperialists as a political legacy inherited from the Hellenistic age by which they hoped to rival the allure of “narrow” nationalism among colonial subjects. It was a concept that glorified present colonial rule and promised a harmoniously amalgamated imperial future. Mahaffy, for example, would admonish the Irish and all other peoples who fought for self-determination: “Let, therefore, separate nationalities subordinate themselves, we might say, to great Hellenistic kingdoms, and seek their higher development not in narrow patriotism, not in the cultivation of nationality as an exclusive principle, but in acceptance of cosmopolitan culture” (Mahaffy, 1887, p.  576). To which Cromer, who saw Egypt as “a fortuitous concourse of international atoms” (as quoted in Reisz, 2010, p. 212), would add, a few years later: Egypt can never become autonomous in the sense in which that word is understood by the Egyptian nationalists. It is, and will always remain, a cosmopolitan country. The real future of Egypt, therefore, lies not in the direction of a narrow nationalism … but rather in that of an enlarged cosmopolitanism, which … will tend to amalgamate all the inhabitants of the Nile Valley and enable them all alike to share in the government of their native or adopted country. (Cromer, 1913, pp. 171–172)

Imperialist conceptualizations of hybridity, assimilation, amalgamation and cosmopolitanism form an important, though much neglected, facet of the historical context of Cavafy’s poetry, whose recognition may enable subtler, more nuanced and historically pertinent readings of his poetic vision. Situated against this backdrop, Cavafy’s emplotments of Hellenistic cultural intermingling and fusion may indeed be found to qualify or challenge colonial certainties and pretenses. But this will require close examination of specific poems, such as may reveal the poet’s alternative or

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subversive treatment of themes concurrently deployed by colonial discourse. It may indeed be true that Cavafy’s “emphasis on the post Alexandrian Hellenistic states in various stages of decline and fragmentation displaces the canonical hierarchies of British high-culture and its veneration of classical antiquity” (Mufti, 2021, p.  188). However, the immediate conceptual framework to which Cavafy’s work needs to be contrasted was not shaped by Victorian high-culture, but more importantly by the new and urgent interest in Hellenistic decline, fragmentation and hybridity shown by high-standing imperialist scholars, thinkers and agents in the poet’s time. In Cavafy’s experience, Hellenistic fusion and hybridity is not axiomatically “an instantly decentering and de-essentializing gesture” (McKinsey, 2010, p. 34); rather, it is a topic that has already been embedded in, and elaborated by, dominant imperialist discourse. Likewise, Cavafy’s idyllic presentation of “transnational affinity groups, affiliated though shared linguistic, aesthetic, and sexual tastes” (Dellamora, 2010, p. 128) needs to be contrasted with other, non-sexual cosmopolitan idealizations that were performed in his time by colonial operators. At the very least, a historical awareness of the parallel deployment of some of Cavafy’s most typical motifs by imperialist thinkers may help critics of his work avoid impressionistic platitudes, as for example the claim that by focusing on “the racial, ethnic, and religious mix of the Eastern Mediterranean … Cavafy prefigured by many decades our contemporary interest in multicultural and hybrid Greece” (Jusdanis, 2004, p. 42). George Savidis once claimed that Cavafy was devoted “to the recovery of the real Magna Grecia (which is to say, of the Greater Eastern Hellenism as a powerful metaphor for the entire Western civilization)” (Cavafy, 1983, p. 17). As evidenced by the foregoing discussion, this trope, which essentially configures Eastern Hellenism as code for the European drive to conquer, civilize and rule the East, was certainly not Cavafy’s invention. Rather, it was a commonplace that the poet found inscribed in the historiography he studied, and which he also encountered in a broad array of other manifestations in the context of imperial culture. Furthermore, in this cultural and discursive framework, the deployment of Hellenism as the principal “metaphor for the entire Western civilization” was not an idealistic figuration, as Savidis seems to have thought, nor was it in any way connected to Modern Greece and its particular contingencies. It was a bold imperialist claim, by which British colonialism sought to exonerate its own conquering of Asia and Africa. But contrary to intellectuals in

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mainland Greece, who have often been prone to read the entire world as a metaphor for their nation, Cavafy was not in a position to ignore or deny the imperialist and colonial world he inhabited. In a comment Tsirkas attributes to the poet and reads as referring to British imperialism, Cavafy acknowledges that “this colossal organism is so perfect and its limbs embrace our planet so tightly … that any effort to avoid it … would be futile” (Tsirkas, 1983, p. 340). The discrepancy between the shortsighted scope of many mainland Greeks and the larger imperial reality, as seen from the viewpoint of a colonial subject, is amply registered in Cavafy’s poetry and informs much of his fascinating political irony.

3   Cavafy’s Colonial Network In addressing Cavafy as a poet who read and wrote of Eastern Hellenism from the position of a colonial subject and using facilities, resources and viewpoints that were made available to him by the British Empire, I certainly do not imply that the poet was ideologically committed to imperialist ideals or that he acted as a collaborator of colonial rulers. In my reading, Cavafy was keenly aware of his complex positionality as a diaspora Greek writer who operated within the British imperial framework and acknowledged both the frictions and the cultural prerogatives that came from this special but also precarious condition. In order to comprehend the complexity of Cavafy’s cultural placement in this specific context, we need to look more closely at the poet’s multi-levelled exchanges with the colonial world that surrounded him, noting that orientalism, in Edward Said’s definition, may be viewed as “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts” (Said, 2003, p. 12). How conversant was Cavafy with colonial matters? Some traces that have survived in his library indicate that he was quite well acquainted with relevant discussions. One piece of such evidence is offered in a book by John Morley, entitled Critical Miscellanies (Morley, 1887) (see KarampiniIatrou, 2003, p. 68). Morley, “whose reputation had been based on hostility to imperialism” (Jackson, 2012, p. 367), would become an important colonial figure. Starting out as a journalist, he was elected MP for the Liberal Party in 1883 and served, among other positions, as Chief Secretary for Ireland and Secretary of State for India. Among Morley’s essays on literary and cultural topics, the book in Cavafy’s library contains a long

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essay entitled “The expansion of England,” which discusses a range of topics of colonial interest from a critical perspective. Morley’s essay was originally a review of mid-Victorian imperial theorist John Robert Seeley’s enthusiastic promotion of Greater England in the model of Greater Rome in his hugely popular book The Expansion of England (1883), which “sold 80,000 copies in its first two years of publication” (Thompson, 2007, p.  13). Morley’s conclusion states that “if our ideal is a great Roman Empire, which shall be capable by means of fleets and armies of imposing its will upon the world, then it is satisfactory to think, for the reasons above given, that the ideal is an unattainable one. Any closer union of the British Empire attempted with this object would absolutely fail. The unwieldy weapon would break in our hands. The ideal is as impracticable as it is puerile and retrograde” (Morley, 1887, p. 335). The presence of such material, along with other relevant books in Cavafy’s library (as for example Cromer’s own books, to be mentioned below) establishes Cavafy’s awareness of important discussions on various aspects of British colonialism. Apart from these publications and from the various inscriptions of orientalism and colonialism in the academic material he used, Cavafy was also aware of the outlook of colonial Hellenism in more direct ways, which included his personal networking with several colonial agents and officials. A major imperial figure with whom the poet came into indirect contact was the famous Lawrence of Arabia, who read and reportedly enjoyed Cavafy’s poems. In a letter of April 1924, E. M. Forster informed the poet “how much Colonel T. E. Lawrence admires your work,” adding that he “is a good judge of literary matters” (Jeffreys, 2009, p.  67; Forster, 2019a). Two months later, he wrote again on this, in more detail: I am stopping with T. E. Lawrence for a few days, and have brought down all your poems with me, that he may read them through. He has done so (all) with enormous enthusiasm. He said “A very great achievement – modern literature of the very highest order in its class.” Since he is well read in French and English – besides being a most remarkable personality and a fine scholar — his praise is worth having, I think: any how it gave immense pleasure to me. … He liked your “flatness” as he called it: your “chroniclemethod” as I call it: and he compares your final retrospective effects with the methods of Heredia. He said “I like the African & Asiatic poems best.” (Jeffreys, 2009, pp. 74–75; Forster, 2019b)

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Cavafy responded to this news with an interesting phrase: “Of course Colonel Lawrence’s approbation is worth having, most worth having” (Jeffreys, 2009, p. 76). The poet’s use of the word “approbation” here is striking, as it would seem to refer more to approval from an authority than to a reader’s positive response to a literary work, and so to carry a tinge of colonial subservience. Cavafy may have associated T. E. Lawrence with a specific kind of cultural capital, in which (as so often in his verse) poetic dexterity was inextricably linked to political privilege. Turning to a second example, we note that in 1924 the poet personally sent his two self-compiled collections (Cavafy, 2019b, 2019c) to Sir Ronald Storrs, another major colonial figure and a close friend of Lawrence who at the time was Military Governor of Jerusalem, “the first ‘since Pontius Pilate’ as he quaintly put it” himself  (Melman, 2020, p.  101) (Fig. 8.2). Storrs had previously served a term as Oriental Secretary in Cairo as Lord Kitchener’s trusted officer and was acknowledged as “an important moulder of British policy” (Reid, 2011, p. 40); he would subsequently be appointed Governor of Cyprus and then of Northern Rhodesia. Storrs had begun his career as a colonial agent in Egypt close to Cromer, whom he admired throughout his life. In his view, Cromer was “the greatest Proconsul in the nineteenth century” and “the greatest foreign benefactor that any Oriental nation has known” (Storrs, 1937, pp. 77, 115). Cromer’s reading was “wide and deep” and his modesty as a colonial Hellenist “bordered upon humility, which, however, stopped short of tolerating literary decadence” (p. 53). As Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Storrs was not an ordinarily cultured colonial officer, but “the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly efficient, despite his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of sculpture, painting, of whatever was beautiful in the world’s fruit. … [Storrs] was always first, and the great man among us” (1940, pp. 56–57). According to Donald M. Reid, Storrs’ combination of scholarly excellence with political acumen was recognized already in his early years in colonial service, in Egypt: “With a classicist of the caliber of Oriental secretary Ronald Storrs holding the fort at the British Residency in 1914, the Graeco-Roman legacy that Westerners from Bonaparte to Cromer had deployed to legitimate their domination of Egypt remained in trusty hands” (Reid, 2002, p. 171). In Orientalism, Edward Said places Storrs, along with Lawrence, among the major “Orientalists-cum-imperial agents” who “took over both the role of expert adventurer-eccentric …

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Fig. 8.2  General Ronald Storrs (1881–1955), photographed in 1918

and the role of colonial authority, whose position is in a central place next to the indigenous ruler” (2003, pp. 196–97, 246). In light of this brief portrait, the fact that Cavafy, much like the poet Phernazes in his “Darius,” would address his own Greek poems to a powerful colonial operator like Storrs seems to ask for a more complex perception of the poet’s imagined audience than the one we have so far worked with. Storrs’ response to the poet, which has also been kept in his archive, is brief but succinct and brimming with colonial Hellenism:

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The Governorate Jerusalem March 18th, 1925

Dear Sir, Mr. George Antonius did not fail to bring me back from Alexandria the precious consignment of your poems, for which I tender to you my heartly thanks.   I have always loved Alexandria, and it gives me a special pleasure to think that the traditions of the Greek anthology are being honoured and maintained by you in a language, which, if Greece would but follow Dante’s example and make the effort, might once more enrich Europe with a lifegiving Hellenism.

Thanking you again, I am,

Yours very sincerely, Ronald Storrs (Storrs, 2019)

Storrs’ carefully phrased acknowledgment of Cavafy’s offering tactfully admits the value of maintaining “the traditions of the Greek Anthology,” while his wish for a renewed spread of Hellenism in Europe after Dante’s example salutes Cavafy’s use of demotic Greek. Storrs had been well schooled in the debate around the Greek Language Question by his friend Alexander Anastasius Pallis, the Eton and Oxford-educated son of the Greek demoticist author and translator Alexandros Pallis; he firmly believed that until “the dream of Pallis comes true, no great work of poetry or prose can be hoped from the Arab or Greek-speaking countries” (Storrs, 1937, p. 91). Surely his letter to Cavafy is a formal gesture that discloses little in the way of a reader’s actual response and appreciation; Storrs may not have spent much time reading the poems. What is more important in this instance is that Cavafy would send his poems to a powerful colonial figure of Storrs’ caliber, thus including the British Governor of Jerusalem in the circle of his trusted invited readers and obviously looking for his “approbation.” Another important figure we need to consider in the context of this brief survey is Sir Edgar John Forsdyke, who was briefly discussed earlier, in Chap. 2. His personal acquaintance with Cavafy is amply documented

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in the poet’s archive, in correspondence with Singopoulo and Pericles Anastasiadis as well as in a distribution list of his poems. In a letter from January 1919, Forsdyke expressed his affection for Cavafy, concluding: “Take care of yourself, I beg you: we have much to do together” (Forsdyke, 2019). Forsdyke was an Oxford-trained archaeologist; he worked at the British Museum since 1907 and from 1912 to 1923 served as editor of the Journal of Hellenic Studies. In subsequent years he would be appointed Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1932–1936) and after that Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum (1936–1950), an institution that maintained a “high profile as an advisory body to British imperial interests” (Melman, 2020, p. 53). During World War I, Forsdyke served as Captain in the Royal Field Artillery and for some time he was stationed at the Imperial School of Military Instruction, in the outskirts of Cairo. It was during this time that he met Cavafy and he is likely to have introduced him to specialized archaeological material, such as B. V. Head’s Historia Numorum which, as discussed in Chap. 2, came to the poet’s attention in 1918 or 1919, when the British archaeologist was stationed in Egypt. This was also the time when Cavafy appears to have corrected his erroneous reference to the tetradrachm of Orophernes, probably at Forsdyke’s suggestion. Cavafy’s circle of colonial acquaintances also included Robert (Robin) Allason Furness and George Antonius, who during World War I were working as press censors at the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, together with the poet’s friend Pericles Anastasiadis. Furness, a Cambridgeeducated classicist of “exquisite literary taste” (Grafftey-Smith, 1970, p. 70), has been described as a “tall, elegant wit who combined a cultivated mind, serious scholarship and immense administrative ability” (Bentley, 2011, p. 92). He shared Cavafy’s historical interests, translated Callimachus into English and introduced the poet to E.  M. Forster. Furness would also have interesting stories to share since, upon entering the Egyptian Civil Service, he had been “posted, not to the secretariattype of job which he would instantly have adorned, but to the Alexandria City Police” (Grafftey-Smith, 1970, p.  70). He would later serve as Oriental Secretary to Egypt’s High Commissioner and as Professor of English at Cairo University. George Habib Antonius, on the other hand, who would later come to be well known as a “renowned author, historian of Arab nationalism, and mandate functionary in Palestine” (Melman, 2020, p. 326), was born in Lebanon and educated at Cambridge; he also frequently attended meetings at Cavafy’s house, shared his historicism and

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is thought to have inspired his poem “He came to read” (Boyle, 2001, p. 60). Antonius would later write The Arab Awakening, a “hugely important book in which he set out a powerful criticism of British policy towards the Arabs,” which has been described as “the most eloquent, able and influential exposition of Arab Nationalist claims that has so far been written” (Reid, 2011, p. 76). Both Furness and Antonius figure prominently in Cavafy’s correspondence and in his poems’ distribution lists, as evidenced from the poet’s archive; as we saw above, in 1925 the latter also took Cavafy’s poems to Ronald Storrs in Jerusalem. These figures formed an important network, whose imprint surely played a crucial role in the shaping of the poet’s thinking and of his historical poetry as well. Forsdyke, Furness and Antonius were all young and well-­educated men, whose interests and experiences combined historicism, aesthetics and a privileged insight in the workings of colonial power; as such, they were surely indispensable to Cavafy as highly cultured interlocutors and as suppliers of political anecdotes as well as scholarly information and material. Aside from their significant impact on the poet as trusted members of his circle, they were also all treated by Cavafy as invited readers of his poetry in the original Greek, as were also T. E. Lawrence and Ronald Storrs. This shows a new and so far unacknowledged facet of the poet’s implied reader: that of an Oxbridge-trained British intellectual, who was often also involved in colonial administration. This angle is surely reflected in Cavafy’s writing and presents the poet engulfed in the vibrant exchange of art, classicism, orientalism and imperial rule that was taking place in his time on a far more personal, complex and vital level than has so far been acknowledged.

4   Hellenism and Cavafy’s Alexandria Hellenism in Cavafy’s poetry has long been recognized to hold several distinct meanings. Sometimes it refers to the nationalist ideals of the Greek state: its aspirations of expansion, its claims to the recovery of classical ancient glory—all these treated by the poet with a grain of salt and sometimes with more than a touch of sarcasm. In other instances, Cavafy’s Hellenism refers to the memories and longings of Greek individuals and communities operating outside the Greek state: the Egyptiote paroikia, other diaspora communities or more generally the Graikoi of the Eastern cultural tradition, going back to the Byzantine years and beyond. Thirdly, as we saw in the previous chapter, in his erotic historical poems Cavafy

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used Hellenism primarily as code for the expression of homosexual desire.2 As I will suggest below, an additional frame of reference comes into play in the context of Cavafy’s work, though in a far less explicit manner: Eastern Hellenism as the claimed political and cultural heritage of the British Empire. The multiplicity of Hellenisms at play in and around Cavafy’s work suggests a more complex, ironic and equivocal posture than the chauvinism and Hellenocentrism that have sometimes been attributed to the poet, usually with regard to opinions he expressed in prose pieces or in conversations rather than with reference to his poetry. In fact, Cavafy seldom deploys in his poetry one of the four versions of Hellenism described above on its own and never as a universal or idealistically pure concept. On the contrary, the interactions, fusions and conflicts of Hellenism’s multiple significations produce kaleidoscopic and richly ironic depictions of the historical past (and sometimes of the present), which often prevent his reader from pinpointing a poem’s precise tone or implication with any degree of certainty. Having said that, I would propose that a number of Cavafy’s more perplexing historical poems yield new and subtler meanings once we recognize the intricate transfers between belated Hellenism and colonial politics that operated in the poet’s time and the way in which Cavafy dislocated and problematized them through his ironic juggling of Hellenisms in their multiple (homosexual, colonial, mainland—and diaspora—Greek) manifestations. To gain a subtler understanding of Cavafy’s positionality with respect to Hellenism and Greekness and to comprehend the diaspora outlook that is so shrewdly woven in his work, we need to acknowledge the tensions, aspirations and anxieties of the Greek Egyptiotes, who formed “the country’s largest and most powerful diaspora community” (Kazamias, 2014, p. 275) and were predominantly based in Alexandria. As Hala Halim clarifies, “denoting a Greek from Egypt, Egyptiote can be described as a subset of mutamassir (pl. mutamassirun), an umbrella term that covered ‘resident Egyptianized foreigners,’ as distinct from British occupiers, such as ‘Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Maltese, Jews, and other Levantines’” (Halim, 2021, p. 127). These local “Egyptianized” minorities “integrated with Egyptian society in a way not true of the occupying British forces and European haute bourgeoisie” (Gorman, 2003, p. 175). As Aamir Mufti observes, from a sociological perspective the Greek community of Egypt “is recognizable as one of the various populations of middle men of the colonial world … who existed at varying degrees of proximity to the

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colonial state and performed various economic functions in colonial capitalism” (Mufti, 2021, pp. 181–82). This community’s precarious position and its dependence upon colonial power often gave rise to claims of special privileges and inflamed inter-­communal antagonisms with other minorities. From the mid-nineteenth century and until at least 1922, public debate in Greece focused mainly on the utopian dream of the Megali Idea, which “envisaged the extension of the borders of the young Greek state to include all the Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire” (Stouraiti and Kazamias, 2010, p. 11). The marching spread of nationalist ideology and irredentism urged Egyptian Greeks (particularly those in Alexandria) to intensify their own claims to the cultural legacy of Hellenistic Egypt by devising fictional continuities and analogies between Ptolemaic Hellenism and the modern diaspora. This vision is expressed in grandiose terms in Alexandrinos Diakosmos, the monumental biographical compendium “of Greeks and Hellenists who flourished in ancient Alexandria” in the span of almost a millennium, from 331 BCE to 645 CE. As we saw in Chap. 5, this work was compiled by the physician Dionysios Oikonomopoulos, who was also known as “the father of Greek journalism in Egypt” (Lahanokardis, 1927, p.  253) and was published in Alexandria, in four volumes (1889). As a Greek Egyptian offshoot of the Megali Idea, the “neo-Hellenistic” vision implied, among other things, “that the Greek community could claim an earlier presence in the country than the local Arab population which gave it an inalienable right to its privileged position” (Kitroeff, 1989, p. 27). Indications of this “common cultural topos” (Kazamias, 2021, p.  101) may also be traced in some of Cavafy’s own texts, as for example  in his drafts for the early version of “Caesarion,” which feature references to the “royal child of my Alexandrian earth,” “our Alexandrian earth” and “the glorious Alexandrian earth” (Cavafy, 2019e). More boldly, Cavafy wrote in an unpublished text of 1928 that he did not consider the work of Egyptiote Greek writers “entirely foreign to Egypt” since it was “written in a language derived from the old language which for so many centuries was spoken in Alexandria” (Cavafy, 2010, p.  69; also see Halim, 2021, p.  134). By virtue of this claim, literature written in Greek could be perceived as akin to Egypt without referring to Egyptian themes or acknowledging the country’s local population; Alexandria, old and new, was literally overwritten in Greek. In claiming a continuous presence on Alexandria’s soil since the city’s founding in 331 BCE and, by this token, a privileged status as inheritors of its glorious past, Egyptiote Greeks were antagonized by the local Italian

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population. In early twentieth-century Egypt, as Ronald Storrs noted, “Cairo was still French-speaking-­thinking-and-living, just as Alexandria was Italian and Greek” (1937, p. 22). Nobody would be able to guess the city’s strong Italian community from Cavafy’s poems, which on the contrary tend to emphasize the colonial Greek origins of much of southern Italy. However, as briefly noted earlier, in Chap. 5, “Italians made a strong second behind the Greeks among Alexandria’s foreign residents (the Italians constituted 25 percent of the European residents in 1897),” whereas “Britain and France were a distant third and fourth behind Greece and Italy among foreigners in Alexandria, and Egypt, around the turn of the century” (Reid, 2002, pp.  151, 152). The city’s Graeco-Roman Museum was founded in 1892, by the Italian archeologist Giuseppe Botti, and was run by Italian directors until 1952. Italians mythologized “the origins of the Italian community” in Alexandria “to have begun during the Middle Ages” (Minkin, 2020, p. 11) and posed their own “claim on the legacy of classical Alexandria. Dreaming of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Augustus, and Hadrian, a number of Italian notables of Alexandria collected Greco-Roman and pharaonic antiquities” (Reid, 2002, pp. 151–152). Antiquarianism was a major site of rivalry, as many Egyptian Greeks also held similar interests and assembled notable collections, including the physician Tassos Demetrios Neroutsos, merchants Count Stephan Zizinia and Sir John Antoniadis and the lawyer Efstathios Glymenopoulos (pp. 150, 151). Aside from their internal antagonisms, diaspora communities in Egypt, often amassed as Levantines, were viewed with suspicion by “both the Egyptian national movement and the British authorities” (Gorman, 2003, p. 181). In the early twentieth century, Cromer’s economic policies and ideological suppositions caused particular anxiety to local European communities, including Egyptian Greeks, concerning their privileged status in colonized Egypt. As Alexander Kazamias clarifies, “British colonialism never saw the foreign residents of Egypt who came from Europe as authentic ‘Europeans’,” but as “Levantine” or “Orientalized Europeans”; it sought “to convert not only the Egyptians, but also the country’s local foreign population into colonial subjects” (Kazamias, 2014, p.  256). Greeks, in particular, were viewed by Cromer as “thoroughly orientalized” Europeans and were memorably depicted as such in his Modern Egypt, the book he published a year after his removal from power (p. 257). 3 In this text, Cromer divides the Greek Egyptian community in two segments: he begins by carefully commending the “great many influential

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and highly respectable Greeks” in Alexandria and elsewhere, whose “presence in Egypt is an unmixed benefit to the country,” noting that the “high-class Greeks established in Egypt … have, as of old, carried high the torch of civilisation in their adopted country.” Apart from the Greek haute-bourgeoisie, Cromer concedes that “many of the small Greek traders are fully deserving of respect.” But then he unleashes a bigoted invective against the rest of the Greek community, which he depicts as a pervasive and ubiquitous debaser of moral and political health that had better be eliminated: Still the fact remains that a portion of the Greek colony in Egypt consists of low-class Greeks exercising the professions of usurer, drink-seller, etc. The Greek of this class has an extraordinary talent for retail trade. He will risk his life in the pursuit of petty gain. It is not only that a Greek usurer or a bakal (general dealer) is established in almost every village in Egypt; the Greek pushes his way into the most remote parts of the Soudan and of Abyssinia. Wherever, in fact, there is the smallest prospect of buying in a cheap and selling in a dear market, there will the petty Greek trader be found. … We may, therefore, give the low-class Greek credit for his enterprising commercial spirit. Nevertheless, his presence in Egypt is often hurtful. Whatever healthy moral and political influences remain untouched after the TurcoEgyptian Pasha, the tyrannical Sheikh, and the fanatical “Alim” have done their worst, these the low-class Greek seeks to destroy. He tempts the Egyptian peasant to borrow at some exorbitant rate of interest, and then, by a sharp turn of the legal screw, reduces him from the position of an allodial proprietor to that of a serf. He undermines that moral quality of which the Moslem, when untainted by European association, has in some degree a speciality. That quality is sobriety. Under Greek action and influence, the Egyptian villagers are taking to drink. … It would be an excellent thing for Turkey and its dependencies if some of the low-class Greeks, who inhabit the Ottoman dominions, could be turned bag and baggage out of Turkey. (Cromer, 1908, vol. 2, pp. 250–252)

Cromer’s orientalist perception of middle- and lower-class Egyptian Greeks was rehashing a racial stereotype that was in use from much earlier. We may find it expressed in guide-books to Egypt for Western European visitors, such as the popular one furnished by Georg Ebers, who also introduced an interesting distinction between upper-class “Hellenes” and plebeian “Greeks”: “Of course there are not wanting most respectable representatives of the merchant class, English and French, German and

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Swiss, Hellenes and Levantines; but the man who ventures into the Greek drinking shops, and their innumerable gaming hells [sic], will meet with the very dregs of society — than whom nothing more worthless, dissolute, and reckless can be found in any great city” (Ebers, 1880, v. 1, p. 50). Cromer’s formulation was essentially commonplace among the European haute bourgeoisie and British colonial administrators. As such it was immediately endorsed by a highly esteemed colonial figure, who surmised his review of Cromer’s book with the rhetorical question: “what could be fairer, more in accord with actuality and opposed to fictitious traditional nonsense, than his general summing up of the character and achievements of the 40,000 Greek settlers in Egypt?” (Johnston, 1908, p.  248). By means of this divisive and corrosive discourse, “British colonialism in Egypt managed to permeate the structures of the country’s largest and most powerful diaspora community and, in so doing, it deepened its insecurity and inner divisions” (Kazamias, 2014, p. 275). As Kazamias postulates, the Greeks of Egypt responded to Cromer’s rhetoric in three distinct ways: by means of collaboration, negotiation and resistance. The second approach functioned as “the mainstream Egyptian— Greek response” to British colonialism, and its tactics “were always enveloped in the nationalist rhetoric of Greek ‘patriotism’” (Kazamias, 2014, p. 276). The negotiatory approach appears to correspond to Cavafy’s way of handling his personal and intellectual position in the Alexandrian colonial setting and it may also account for some of the contradictions that arise in his writings, as they traverse the broad span between Nationalism and Anglophilia. Cromer’s contemptuous perception of a large section of Egyptian Greeks raised great concern in the community and was met by some angry responses, including a polemical satire by Ioannis Gikas (1908). However, the British attitude vis-à-vis Egyptians and resident populations appears to have hardened in subsequent years. As Robert Graves later recalled, British officials in the 1920s would nullify the claims of both Egyptians and mutamassirun, suggesting that “there was no Egyptian nation” and that “the Greeks, Turks, Syrians, and Armenians who called themselves Egyptians had no more right in the country than the British” (Gorman, 2003, p.  241, n. 22). Interestingly, Cromer’s earlier remarks found a positive reception in the late 1920s, in the diplomat Athanasios Politis’ History that was published, in Greek and French, at the end of the 1920s and is still considered a “landmark” in the historiography of the Greek

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community’s presence in Egypt (Gorman, 2003, p.  189). As Anthony Gorman describes, this work’s central theme of the historical development of the Greek presence in Egypt since 1798 and its contribution to modern Egypt was a significant departure both from works that had been drawn to more ancient periods to illustrate the close relations between Greek and Egyptian cultures and those who were concerned with developments on the Greek mainland. In effect, Politis reinforced the significance of Egyptian Hellenism as a subject of historical and contemporary study and produced a work that has proved a valuable resource for any study on the subject ever since. (Gorman, 2003, p. 189)

Although Politis’ History focuses mainly on the Greek community’s contribution to the economic and cultural life of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt, it begins with a long introduction covering the Greek presence in Egypt from the times before Alexander to the Byzantine period and suggesting that, although it had its high and low points, this presence was continuous and uninterrupted (Politis, 1928, pp.  9–70). And yet, in the introduction to the second volume Politis presents an accolade for Cromer’s views on the Greeks. Politis begins by presenting a short passage from Lord Milner’s England in Egypt (1892), in which the author acknowledges that some Egyptian and European subjects did serve the cause of British imperialism during the first decade of Egypt’s occupation. This was in fact the year “when mainstream opinion among Alexandria’s Greek community became explicitly hostile to Lord Cromer, because the British proconsul curtailed the Capitulations, set commercial restrictions under the Greco-Egyptian Treaty of 1884, and imposed strict law and order controls under the so-­called Police Directives of 1891” (Kazamias, 2021, p. 95). In the same book, Milner had addressed “the foreign residents, and especially the Greeks” as “obstreperous and exacting” (quoted in Kazamias, 2021, p. 106). Yet Politis engulfs “the gentle Lord” in his own idealized and largely fictional narrative of early colonial geniality and kind recognition of the Greek community’s good deeds, claiming that subsequent authors and politicians failed to match his “sincerity.” As Politis claims, at the time of his writing and “for reasons of international rivalry or due to racial struggle, the Greeks’ contribution to Egypt has been forgotten, underrated” (Politis, 1930, p. 6). Then Politis sets out to demonstrate how earlier British politicians and other functionaries acknowledged the value and significance of the Greek

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community in Egypt. A large part of this account is taken up by tidbits from Cromer’s writings in Modern Egypt, as well as various reports and letters (pp.  7–44, passim), commenting on which the Greek diplomat seeks to revaluate the Lord’s perception of the Greeks as positive and even laudatory. This task demanded a good measure of creative interpretation on Politis’ part, as well as suppression of other relevant information (see Marangoulis, 2011, pp.  398–401). Two years after Modern Egypt, for example, Cromer pondered once again on the state of Egyptian Greeks with a racial caricature that sneered at their claims as heirs of the Ptolemies: “When I read in Dr. Adolf Holm’s monumental history that the Greeks in Alexandria, under the Ptolemaic rule, had the privilege of being beaten with a stick instead of a whip, I am reminded that their descendants, in common with other foreign subjects, possess privileges of substantially greater importance” (Cromer, 1910, pp. 3–4). Politis’ undertaking demonstrates that twenty-three years after his removal from Egypt and thirteen after his death, Lord Cromer was still remembered among the upper social factions of colonial Egypt, perhaps with some nostalgia at the idealized past he represented. His positive opinion, even when it had to be fabricated or construed as such, could be admonished to lend cultural credit to a community that felt the need to strengthen its position in the British colonial context. Cavafy reviewed the first volume of Politis’ work and recommended it to Egyptian Greeks as a work from which they could learn “the history … of the Hellenism to which they belong,” focusing particularly on the author’s concise presentation of the history of Greeks in Egypt during the Hellenistic, GrecoRoman and early Christian periods (Cavafy, 2003b, p.  151); he is also reported to have dictated to Politis part of his own work’s presentation in the History’s final chapter (see Tsirkas, 1983, pp. 23, 449). In this particularly startling passage, Cavafy’s project is presented as founded on a brand of imperial cosmopolitanism, which rests on a close parallelism of currentday Alexandria to its Hellenistic counterpart and is empowered by the assimilating force of Pax Romana, presumably as reflected in the current Pax Britannica: For this historical period [the Hellenistic] is particularly fitting as a framework for the diverse historical characters whom he [Cavafy] wants to bring to life again. In the Alexandria and the Egypt of that time, as is also the case in those of today, there were, alongside the indigenes, foreigners. Among the latter, many, although not Hellenes, nevertheless spoke Greek; they

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were Hellenophones. They were numerous. Hellenic civilization had melted into one and the same mold men of different nationalities to whom Roman peace (pax romana) had contributed by giving them similar characteristics in such a way that the Graeco-Roman world of back then can be compared to our own nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In brief, what characterizes this epoch is above all the absence of a particular homeland and of a narrow nationalism, the absence of a constraining tradition, the facility of communications and, finally, a freedom of mores and a sexual morality similar to those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Politis, 1930, p.  452; English translation quoted from Halim, 2013, p. 57)

Cavafy’s own interest in Lord Cromer’s political views is testified by the two works he kept in his library: his book on Abbas II (1915), and the two volumes of his Modern Egypt (1908) (Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, p. 138). More important, a handwritten note that has been saved in the poet’s archive shows him copying a page from an article on translation and Paraphrase” that Cromer published in 1913 in The Edinburgh Review. In the passage copied by Cavafy, Cromer compares an aphorism by eighteenth-century French writer Vauvenargues to a verse from Bacchylides, quoted in Greek and translated in a footnote, and this to a verse by the eleventh-century “great Arab poet Abu’l’ Ala, whose verse has been admirably translated by Mr. Baerlein” (Cromer, 1913, p. 65; Cavafy, 2019d). Bacchylides was a Greek lyric poet whose work was virtually unknown until 1896, but who had more recently acquired great imperial significance (see Fearn, 2010, pp. 158–185). The discovery of his verse in 1896, in an Egyptian papyrus roll acquired by the British Museum, and its 1898 British edition, which “contained 200 pages of text and sixty five pages of introduction,” had led to his “immediate literary recanonization” (pp. 162, 169). As this note shows, a few years after the Dinshawai Affair of 1906 and the composition of his much-discussed poem “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.,” in 1908, Cavafy thought of Lord Cromer primarily as a respected classicist from whom he sought to learn (on Cavafy’s poem see Halim, 2013, pp.  99–110; Halim, 2021, pp.  135–157; Kazamias, 2021, pp. 112–113; Papatheodorou, 2021, pp. 170–173). While denouncing Cromer as a “tyrant” and “the ruthless satrap of Egypt” (Tsirkas, 1982, pp. 82, 77) Tsirkas also noted that “he studied the ancients and particularly Homer” (1983, p. 430). In fact, Evelyn Baring had received a military training at the Woolwich Royal Academy and always regretted missing a classical education. He taught himself the classics and frequently used untranslated Greek and Latin quotations in his writings,

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thus asserting “his arrival among the classical cognoscenti” (Reid, 2002, p.  155). From an academic perspective, he was “an autodidact poetry enthusiast and translator” with “few pretensions to scholarship” (Reisz, 2010, p. 2013); yet after his return from Egypt he became President of the Classical Association. Cromer clearly had no interest in or patience for the uses of classical scholarship for the promotion of “Greek love”; but he did have a slight and inadvertent connection to the Oscar Wilde scandal, shortly before it broke out, of which Cavafy and other homosexual men in Egypt may have been aware. In the winter of 1893–94, Alfred “Bosie” Douglas was sent by his mother to Cairo, at Wilde’s suggestion, where the young man would spend three months at the Proconsul’s residence as a guest of the Lord and his wife. Cromer disliked him acutely and probably sent him back to England sooner than planned, after a failed attempt to get him hired at the British Embassy in Istanbul. In fact, Bosie’s departure may have been expedited by Cromer’s discovery of scandalous “illustrated French volumes” in his young guest’s room, which he immediately threw in the fire, while their owner, as Storrs noted in his memoirs, “waved a Byzantine forefinger, wailing reproachfully, ‘Savage! Savage!’” (Owen, 2004, p. 253; Storrs, 1937, p. 51). This episode, in which Oscar Wilde’s young lover is hosted and confronted by a top-rank imperialist official and apologist, who would later launch the “Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage,” illuminates some of the central ironies of British colonial life in a way that seems to correspond to Cavafy’s ironic poetics.

5  The Secret Language of “Coins” “A small boy in another part of Africa, discussing the question of classical education, said to a member of another educational commission, years ago, ‘We desire to learn Latin because it is your secret language, from which you derive your power’” (Goff, 2013, p. 1). This exchange, quoted from the Report of the Elliott Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1945), focuses on the meaning of Latin, and the classics more generally, in the colonial condition; it exposes this condition “as structured around an unequal distribution of power between Africans and Europeans, and fuelled by quasi-­ mystical apparatuses of superiority” (ibid.). This insight provides a suitable starting point for the discussion of Cavafy’s poem “Coins,” which was composed in 1920 but first published in 1968.  It centers on the reading of a set of Indo-Greek coins from ancient Bactria (Fig. 8.3).

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Fig. 8.3  Cavafy’s manuscript of “Coins” © 2016-2018 Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation

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This deceptively simple text has been all but neglected by Cavafy critics, whose brief descriptions often fail to penetrate its surface. But in recent years the poem has attracted quite a large nationalist following on the web, where it is often hailed as Cavafy’s straightforward celebration of the past, and vast, Greek colonial expanse: a text in which the poet is thought to have chosen a rather unusual thematic angle to confess his emotional attachment to the Megali Idea. I will try to develop here a radically different reading of this text, drawing on its strong colonial implications, the tensions and claims of the Greek Egyptiote paroikia, as discussed in the previous section, and the seminal figure of the Graikos, whom Cavafy places at its center. Among its other aims, my reading intends to probe and qualify Edmund Keeley’s perception of Cavafy’s work as embracing “the cultural, rather than political, chauvinism of Hellenes” (1996, p. 110). COINS Coins with Indian inscriptions. They are of the most powerful monarchs, of Evukratidasa, of Stratasa, of Menadrasa, of Heramayasa. In such a way the wise book transcribes for us the Indian writing on the one side of the coins. But the book also shows us the other, the good side of the coins, with the face of the king. And here how he stops at once, how deeply is the Graikos moved when in Hellenic writing he reads Hermaios, Eukratides, Straton, Menandros.                     (My translation)

An early critical note on this poem was furnished by the epigraphist Alkis Oikonomides in 1984, enhanced with a numismatic commentary: One of the best Unpublished Poems of C.  P. Cavafy (1863-1933) in the collection edited by George Savidis, is to this writer’s judgement the Coins with Indian Inscriptions. Unfortunately, this excellent poem is one of the most difficult texts of Cavafy for the traditional type of poetry-reader. To follow the poet’s thoughts one needs to know how the ancient coins look and who were the kings who issued them. But even that is not enough if the reader does not understand that the poet is deeply touched by looking at a book on the coins of the Greek kings of Bactria and India, the men who held

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the easternmost frontiers of the Hellenistic world for almost three centuries after the death of Alexander the Great. Cavafy himself used to say that he was more of a historian than a poet. In no other poem of his is this statement verified better than in the Coins with Indian Inscriptions. He expresses his deep feelings, possibly from a first contact with the remains of a lost and unknown section of Hellenistic history; he is not concerned at all with the educational background of his future readers. This may be the main reason that the poem remained unpublished during the poet’s lifetime. (Oikonomides, 1984, p. 35)

Among recent commentators, Daniel Mendelsohn notes that in this poem “Indian history (rather than that of Asia Minor, as is more typical in the poet’s work) becomes the vehicle for a poetic reverie about the clash of Western and Eastern culture” (Cavafy, 2012, p.  535), adding that it “reveals a fascination with the reaches—or perhaps the limits—of Hellenism, following the conquests of Alexander the Great” (p. 576), as well as “Hellenic pride in the extent of the spread of the Greek language, particularly to India” (p.  627). For Peter Jeffreys, “Coins” is one of Cavafy’s “more mature historical poems where the East is reduced to a tamed province of the Hellenistic kingdoms” (2005, p.  68). In it, “the speaker experiences a linguistic thrill over the Prakrit rendering of Greek names” (p. 88); “the Greek reader here is an opaque mask for Cavafy himself who delighted in these very conflations of the Hellenic and Asiatic” (p. 89). According to P. Roilos, Cavafy’s poem depicts the syncretism of indigenous and Greek elements from a more sympathetic perspective. Composed in 1920, a crucial year for the development of the Greek expedition in Asia Minor, “Coins” celebrates the dissemination of Hellenic culture in the post-classical antiquity, as documented in a series of Graeco-Indian coins that are pictured in a scholarly intertext, a specific “wise book.” … The narrator indirectly identifies himself with the average Greek (“Graikos”) reader. (Roilos, 2009, pp. 184–85)

In Hala Halim’s reading, on the other hand, The text is not merely about two scripts on two faces of the same coins, but about two readerships: an amorphous, non-identity-based “us,” and an inner group, that of the Greek reader who reads the Greek language, whose attention is “instantly” arrested by the script. The difference between the

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Greek legend on one face of a given coin and the legend on the reverse side, beyond the alphabets, is not even a translation, but a transliteration that only modifies the Greek names. However, what the speaker valorizes is the Greek side: the numismatic expression “the good side” … enhances the quasi-talismanic status of the Greek proper name, “properly” inscribed and properly read in Greek. (Halim, 2013, pp. 64–65) 4

Due to the lack of other evidence, the Indo-Greek coins presented in this poem played a vital role in reconstructions of the history of Bactria (see Holt, 2012). The names Cavafy quotes “belong to various members of the dynasty of Indo-Hellenic kings who ruled in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent during the second and first centuries B.C.” (Cavafy, 2012, p. 576). More important, some of “these kings are known only from the numismatic record and do not appear in any ancient historical account” (Mairs, 2016, p. 5); by virtue of this, these coins may also be implicitly connected to Cavafy’s favorite theme of historical obscurity and to figures like Orophernes and Caesarion, whose existence is ostensibly recovered in his poetry from small tokens of material antiquity. Trying to establish the identity of the “wise book” mentioned in the poem (and also of the book in which Cavafy himself saw pictures of these coins), Oikonomides wrote: “I am almost sure that the poet was looking at R. B. Whitehead’s The Indo-Greeks published in 1914” (1984, p. 37). The book in question is the first volume (“Indo-Greek Coins”) of the Catalogue of Coins in the Panjab Museum, Lahore by the collector and scholar Richard Bertram Whitehead, a veteran of the Indian civil service, “published for the Panjab Government” at Oxford, Clarendon Press in 1914 (Whitehead, 1914). This book is an emblematic specimen of colonial scholarship and the picture of Cavafy studying from it is fascinating in the context of the present inquiry. But, from a broader viewpoint, it really makes little difference if Cavafy actually read transcriptions of the IndoGreek coins in Whitehead’s book or in one of the alternative sourcess listed by Oikonomides 5 or, indeed, in B. V. Head’s Historia Numorum, either in the 1887 or in the 1911 edition, in which the same coins are also presented (and which Cavafy probably used to correct his early version of “Orophernes”) (see Head, 1887, p. 709; 1911, pp. 844–45). The coins featured in Cavafy’s poem had attained a high place and broad recognition among colonial artifacts long before they appeared in printed catalogues; they clearly reached the poet heavily invested with colonial meaning, irrespective of the specific source in which he first encountered them.

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By the time they entered Cavafy’s poetry, these particular coins had acquired a highly valued status in the empire as orientalist trophies. They had been systematically collected by colonial operators throughout the nineteenth century and heavily promoted, in academic as well as popular journals (Vasunia, 2013, esp. pp. 71–76). Their study “was made possible by the activities of political agents and administrators in the field, as scholars well knew” (p. 73). Commentators noted how the Indo-Greek coins “had connected the past of India with other ancient civilizations” (p. 72), and argued that thanks to their study “the legacy of Alexander and his successors could be more fully interpreted and Indian history could be associated with the histories of Greece and Persia” (p. 73). Discoveries of Bactrian coins were also often reported in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greek newspapers, whose rhetoric tried to balance a contemporary colonial awareness with the conflicting claims of nationalist rhetoric. An article of 1876, for example, informed Athenians that the excavations launched in Afghanistan after the British conquering of India had unearthed many “Greek coins, of excellent art” which, together with those discovered by Sir Douglas Forsyth in the Eastern Turkestan, “serve to remind the British to which ambit once expanded the majestic Greek nation that is being reborn in our days” (Anon., 1876). Thirty years later, another Athenian newspaper reported on a great hoard of golden coins found in Afghanistan, noting that The value of this treasure will be at least tripled if the Amir decides to disperse it by selling it to European Museums, since – oh wonderful and ageless Hellenism! – these coins come from a time in which Afghanistan was under the power of the Greco-Bactrian dynasty, during which Hellenism ruled even in that remote Asian hub, so they are extremely rare. (Anon., 1907; my translation)

In the colonial context, the Indo-Greek and Bactrian coins provided a much-needed window that could make India relevant to the European and particularly the British public. As James Prinsep, one of their earliest researchers conceded in 1838, As long as the study of Indian antiquities confines itself to the illustration of Indian history it must be confessed that it possesses little attraction for the general student, who is apt to regard the labour expended on the disentan-

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glement of perplexing and contradictory mazes of fiction as leading only to the substitution of vague and dry probabilities for poetical, albeit extravagant, fable. But the moment any name or event turns up in the course of such speculations offering a plausible point of connection between the legends of India and the rational histories of Greece or Rome,—a collision between the fortunes of an eastern and a western hero,—forthwith a speedy and spreading interest is excited which cannot be satisfied until the subject is thoroughly sifted by the examination of all the ancient works, western and eastern, that can throw concurrent light on the matter at issue. (Quoted in Mairs, 2018, pp. 576–77) 6

The special colonial interest assigned to the Indo-Greek coins may be more fully understood when they are placed against the backdrop of the orientalist fascination with India’s privileged connection to Europe, particularly through the discoveries of historical philology, which allowed scholars to argue “that both the British and Indians were at one point in the past the same” (Mantena, 2010, p. 54). Strengthened by the philological discovery of the Indo-European language family, this supposed kinship led to “an ideological promotion of affection between the ruler and the ruled – a kind of political rhetoric of love” (p. 55). At the same time, imperialist thinkers employed “classical models of empire (particularly Rome) to elaborate a policy of ‘Anglicization’ of India” and contrived “an imperial vision of English” as a universalized language that could be projected onto “a world connected by the political and cultural framework of empire” (pp. 56, 63). Set against such orientalist conceptualizations, the Indo-Greek coins would seem to signal the harmonious co-existence and cultural osmosis that once had taken place between Indian cultures and colonial Hellenism. They probably manifested the universalized imperial outreach of the Greek language and a symbolic type of cultural fusion, that seemed to have left behind it “the original violence that established territorial empire” (Mantena, 2010, p. 61). In this spirit and by the symbolic suggestions of its coins, Bactria would later come to be viewed as a Hellenistic kingdom “that became a genuine paradise in which Greeks and non-Greeks, Hellenes and Hellenistai, lived together as equals and embraced one another in Law and Love” (Holt, 2005, p. 152). In this view, The later Greek kings of Bactria and India allegedly did what Alexander nobly dreamt—they created a true partnership with the native population, the peaceful union of Greek and barbarian that Alexander had intended… .

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Scholars who were themselves products of nineteenth-century European empires saw in Bactria the best of all ancient worlds, a place where the “Greek Man’s burden” converted the Asian savages into useful political and social partners. These scholars viewed Hellenistic culture [in Bactria] as a synthesis of Greek and non-Greek traditions, a harmonious and creative mixture. (Holt, 1999, pp. 11–12)

As we saw in a previous section, the questions of assimilation, racial fusion and cultural hybridity of colonized populations were of great interest to imperialist thinkers, who mined antiquity with a view to the Empire’s future and searching for successful examples of dealing with imperial “otherness.” Clearly, these ancient “coins with Indian inscriptions” did not come to Cavafy’s attention as mere antiquarian oddities signaling a forgotten episode of Greek history, but as objects that had already been deeply immersed in colonial discourse: as precious tokens that were conspicuously deployed to bridge the vast outreach of ancient Eastern Hellenism with the current aspirations of British imperialism. Cavafy’s interest in the Greek presence at the farthest reaches of Asia was surely developed long before this poem’s writing. While reading Mahaffy’s Empire of the Ptolemies, for example, Cavafy noticed the Irish historian’s mention of Bactria as a Greek kingdom, which he marked on his copy with a pencil note in the text’s margin (Mahaffy, 1895, p. 202; my emphasis). 7 Also, in his poem “In the year 200 B. C.” he presents a boisterous Eastern Greek directly claim Alexander’s colonial heritage: “And the Greek koine language -/ all the way to inner Bactria we carried it, to the peoples of India” (Cavafy, 2003a, p. 373). But the poet’s library also features a book by William Robertson, entitled An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India; and the Progress of Trade with that Country, prior to the Discovery of the Passage to it by the Cape of Good Hope. With and Appendix Containing Observation on the Civil Policy – the Laws and Judicial Proceedings – the Arts – the Sciences – and Religious Institutions of the Indians (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844) (Karampini-Iatrou, 2003, p. 71). This is an important early colonial work, first published in 1791, whose presence in Cavafy’s library suggests the poet’s interest in British colonialism, especially with regard to the conquests of Hellenism in Asia. Despite its encyclopedic title, Robertson’s volume highlighted the ancient colonization of India as a specific example for the present and the future of the British Empire. As Phiroze Vasunia clarifies, Robertson “was a

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forerunner of Droysen in this benevolent image of Alexander as a ruler who brought the benefits of Hellenic civilization to the natives of Asia”; in his book, “the spread of Hellenism and the consequences of Alexander’s conquests in Asia” were discussed “in the context of imperial theories and practices” (2013, pp. 40, 41): Robertson remarks that “the European powers, who now in their Indian territories employ numerous bodies of the natives in their service, have, in forming the establishment of these troops, adopted the same maxims; and probably without knowing it, have modelled their battalions of Seapoys upon the same principles as Alexander did his Phalanx of Persians.” Robertson was arguing that Alexander was a benevolent ruler and that the British would help in the upliftment of the Indian people if they fashioned their rule in India after him. (Vasunia, 2013, pp. 40–41)

Turning to the poem, we note that its speaker observes the reaction of a specific reader of the “wise book”: the Graikos, who is not simply a Greek or a Hellene, as has often been unfortunately rendered by the poem’s translators, nor “the average Greek” as has also been suggested (Roilos, 2009, p. 185). Graikos is a word of ancient origins; in modern times, it is mainly used to refer to an individual of Greek origin in a way that is void of the implications of modern Greek nationalism or, more generally, to a Greek person who is not specifically connected to Greece as a modern state. As Sarah Greene confirms, “With the creation of the new Greek state in the 1820s, Graikos fell out of favor and was replaced by the disemic split that Herzfeld refers to between ‘Hellene’/Hellenism and Romios/Romiosini. … whereas ‘Hellene’ and Romios carried highly politicized (and often opposing) meanings of Greekness, Graikos seemed to have fallen out of favor. That is, the word is not particularly strongly related to nationalist discourses of Greekness” (Green, 2005, p. 82). As Yiannis Dallas further clarifies, “For the Greek, a ‘Graikos’ means Greek-Orthodox. For the Greek of a diaspora community, more specifically, it also points to the identity of common ancestry” (Dallas, 1986, p. 63). In Cavafy’s poetry, the term Graikos and its derivatives usually connect the modern diaspora in the East with its distant past: Hellenistic, Late Antique and also Byzantine Hellenism (see Dallas, 1986, pp. 60–67). The term is used with reference to Ptolemy VI Philometor (in “The displeasure of the Seleucid”), Anna Komnene and Theophilos Palaiologos, in the

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poems bearing the same titles, Greek demotic songs (in “Parthen”), and also in connection to the Greek population of Alexandria, Osroene, Pontus and Jerusalem in Late Antiquity and Byzantine times (in  the poems “Fugitives,” “A town in Osroene,” “Parthen,” and “Before Jerusalem”). When Graikos is used in poems set in modern times, as in “Coins” and “In the church,” it clearly signifies a person or community connected to this “old” heritage. In Cavafy’s early drafts for “Caesarion,” the last of the Ptolemies is mentioned as a “dear” or “beautiful” “child of an exhausted dynasty of the Graikoi” (Cavafy, 2019e). As this brief survey demonstrates, the use of this term in “Coins” is certainly not as “an ironic (self-)designation, given its Western (Roman, Frankish, and Venetian) etymology,” although it does mark “the speaker as distinct from the nationalized (and classicized) ‘Hellene’” (Mufti, 2021, p. 196). More precisely: it marks the poem’s speaker as a long-standing member of an Eastern Greek paroikia, such as that of Alexandria, whose precarious position in the colonial context was discussed earlier. The poem’s language also makes it clear that the Graikos is not the reader to whom the “wise book” is primarily addressed, but an accidental recipient, whom we might call: a fortuitous reader. We may picture him as a member of the Egyptiote Greek community reading this particular book in a colonial setting, as in a library of Alexandria hosting European scholarly works, who is instantly overwhelmed with emotion upon discovering signs of his own tradition in the numismatic transcriptions of ancient Indian coins. But who is the other, the typical, non-Graikos reader to whom the wise book is mainly addressed? The answer to this question was surely self-evident to every colonial subject, including Cavafy. But Whitehead clarified it in his introduction: The intrinsic interest of the coins described in this work is great, and they make a strong appeal to the favourable notice of collectors, especially to those belonging to that European nation which is the first to have accomplished from the sea what Greece did from the land, and so may be regarded as the legitimate successor of the Greeks in the Punjab. (1914, p. v)

The wise book that Cavafy’s Graikos is reading is primarily and explicitly addressed to the British, as participants in the Empire and as legitimate modern successors of ancient Indian Hellenism (just as Bevan’s House of

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Seleucus was specifically addressed to “us, as students of the world, as Christians and as Englishmen”) (Bevan, 1902, v. 1, v). The poem’s narrator is of course fully aware of this subtext as he reads the wise book and quotes transcripts of the Indo-Greek coins from it in his poem. As my analysis demonstrates, the Graikos of Cavafy’s poem is not moved simply because he reads Greek words on an ancient coin, but is emotionally engaged, at the time of reading, with the question: who is the legitimate heir and successor of Eastern Hellenism? He obviously acknowledges that in his days, and for some time to come, the Greek East, as a legacy of power and rule, will belong exclusively to the British Empire. This awareness is implied in the poem’s reference to “the most powerful monarchs,” which presents the coins as tokens of political dominance and military strength. As a colonial subject, the poem’s Graikos is also aware that current-day coins with Greek inscriptions are politically as well as economically valueless. He may even know of W. M. Thackeray’s sneering remark on these “beggarly coins,” from his visit to Athens in 1845: “I would rather have two hundred a year in Fleet Street, than be King of the Greeks, with Basileus written before my name round their beggarly coin” (Thackeray, 2018, p.  34). What he explicitly claims, as a Graikos who reads inscriptions “in Hellenic writing” inside the Empire, from an imperial book and from specimens of material antiquity heavily invested with colonial meaning, is this inherited past’s emotional and aesthetic value: “the face of the king,” the sound of the kings’ Greek names, the “good side” of the coins. An echo of cultural kinship, which can only be staged in aesthetic terms, as nostalgic emotion vis-a-vis a heritage which, at the level of political power, clearly has little bearing to the colonial Graikos and even less to the mainland Greek of 1920. Cavafy’s Graikos, therefore, may feel pride for his cultural roots but he is not a fool who would dream of recapturing a Greek Eastern Empire, as many of his compatriots in Greece did at the time of the poem’s writing. The poem would certainly be very different if it focused on a mainland Greek reader, instead of a Graikos; we may imagine such a Greek reader located at a different space of learning, as in the National Library of Athens, who might indeed be tempted to interpret the Indo-Greek coins as evidence of his nation’s past glory and as an inspiration for its current geopolitical yearnings. In fact, we do not need to imagine such a reader; we may observe him at work in a different text, which can be compared to Cavafy’s poem. Consider the reading of these same coins proposed by

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Ioannis Svoronos, an important Greek numismatist, at the turn of the twentieth century. In introducing the Greek edition of B.V. Head’s Historia Numorum, Svoronos referred to the significance of ancient coins “for us Greeks”: Because nothing surpasses coins in demonstrating the unity and uniformity of the Greek nation, and the vast expanse of this nation and its civilization on the whole of the ancient world, whose coins carry Greek inscriptions – from the Tauris to the North up to Arabia and Ethiopia to the West and from the Pillars of Hercules to the West up to Bactria and the Indian peninsula to the East. (Head, 1898: δ’–ε’; my translation)

Cavafy’s poem clearly rejects the nationalistic interpretation of IndoGreek coins exemplified by Svoronos’ text. Instead, it proposes a diasporaGreek perspective that has been shaped inside the British Empire and reflects the understanding of a Graikos, who is also a colonial subject. In this context, the speaker’s nationalism is manifest at an entirely different, linguistic level (Fig. 8.4). The names of the “most powerful monarchs,” as paratactically copied in the Greek poem from the wise book’s transcriptions of the “Indian

Fig. 8.4  Passage from B. V. Head’s Historia Numorum (1887, p. 709)

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inscriptions,” are distinctly cacophonous: Evukratidasa, Stratasa, Menadrasa, Heramayasa. 8 This hybridic cacophony, which results from the orientalized form of their presentation, is contrasted to the clear and harmonic authentic sounds of the Greek transcriptions: Hermaios, Eukratides, Straton, Menandros. The Graikos is moved when he reads these Greek names in their authentic and aesthetically pleasing form, dehybridized and restored, as it were, to their original form from the one they had acquired through the reverse colonization to which they were subjected during their imperial adventures. This allows him to feel that these obscure kings in the farthest depths of Asia, whom he clearly perceives as Graikoi themselves, were not entirely deprived of their heritage, since they kept and used their original names parallel to their hybridized versions.9 In this way, the emotional outburst of the Graikos upon reading the rulers’ names in their authentic form provides a sense of closure to the complex colonial situation, which enters the poem by the sheer content of the transcribed inscriptions it incorporates, a situation which could clearly not be further conceptualized or otherwise resolved, either by Cavafy or by his persona as a Graikos reader. As Aamir Mufti eloquently describes it, This image of a two-faced power seems to foreground what, in the context of the exercise of power in the British Empire, Ranajit Guha has referred to as “dominance without hegemony” – a mode of governance in which the dominated “indigenous” or subaltern symbolic order survives in partially assimilated form in the language of power as one of its distinct idioms, having been itself worked over and thus appearing, we might say, in Orientalized form. (Mufti, 2021, p. 197)

We may also observe here that, due to the poem’s grammatical form, its speaker maintains a measure of ironic distance from the episode he narrates. In Cavafy’s earlier notes, we do find instances of first-­person narration, as in “I read – with emotion – Greek letters” (Cavafy, 2019a). But in the final text, the speaker never reveals his own feelings directly; instead, he is shown to observe an ostensibly different figure, the Graikos, as the latter is startled and then moved by what he reads in the wise book. Of course, the speaker observing and the Graikos being observed cannot but be one and the same. But the poem’s speaker relates his own reaction as a Graikos, in that capacity or identity, obviously not the only one he possesses. He may also be, for example, a cultured colonial subject and an amateur historian, or a present-day antiquarian in a corner of the British Empire who

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initially opened the wise book in this capacity. In this case, the phrase “And here how he stops at once,” in l. 9, would seem to pinpoint the sudden interruption of a general antiquarian reading of a work of colonial numismatics and the rise of an alternative, emotionally charged perspective (let us say: a diaspora Greek reading), which is not antagonistic to colonial learning, but claims a privileged position inside its fold by virtue of its connection to “Hellenic writing.” The voice speaking in Cavafy’s poem clearly reads the wise book as a colonial subject, but as one who also happens to enjoy a privileged linguistic, aesthetic and emotional link to Eastern Hellenism. This link is his own cultural capital, a precious inheritance which promises empowerment and a chance to strengthen the position of the Graikoi inside the Empire against a proliferation of negative stereotypes, as exemplified by Cromer’s notorious comments in Modern Egypt. Reading the Greek inscriptions on the Indo-­Greek coins, the Graikos comes across his own “secret language,” the “quasi-mystical” apparatus of superiority from which, as the African boy in the story shared by Barbara Goff and quoted at the start of this section, he claims to derive his special power. At the close of these reflections, a further clarification may be needed. In this chapter I have attempted to tackle the important question of “how exactly we can understand Cavafy’s orientation toward antiquity in relation to imperial philhellenism” (Mufti, 2021, p. 180) without trying to provide conclusive answers to it. Rather, I have tried to illuminate and outline colonial conceptual contexts with which Cavafy’s poetic project is definitely in contact and interaction and to trace new interpretive clues that may enable fresh, engaging and more accurate readings of his work. Surely, Cavafy’s treatment of themes of imperial and colonial interest is not “triumphalist in the manner of his British imperialist sources”; Cavafy was clearly no Kipling, nor any other “(British) colonial poet” (Mufti, 2021, pp. 180, 181). But it is also true that “Cavafy cannot be considered an anti-colonial writer,” nor can he be “counted among the opponents of British imperialism” (Kazamias, 2009, p. 189). Cavafy was neither naïve nor militant in his political understanding. But if the poet’s specific ideological and political commitments are hard to pinpoint, his poetry’s implications are far more ambivalent and puzzling. As I have suggested, reflections of the imperial and colonial context on Cavafy’s poetry lay out a fascinating and certainly under-researched terrain which needs to be probed with specific, analytical and historically informed readings of his work, instead of being hastily set aside with sweeping generalizations and

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overall impressions. Moreover, in this pursuit critics need to be vigilant of the poet’s great range of evasive and distracting tactics, his ironic technique and mastery of the art of suggestion. These qualities are probably part of what Giorgos Vrisimitzakis, a politically sensitive and exceptionally perceptive early critic of Cavafy’s work, described in 1926 as his poetics of “cunning”: [Cavafy’s] politics is a politics of disillusionment but also, at the same time, of the struggle for adaptation. His politics is not for the use of conquerors at the stage of expansion but for their use when, having accomplished the conquest, they fight not to be conquered themselves, not to be assimilated and absorbed by emergent new enemies. It is not a Machiavellian politics, it is merely defensive; not a politics of power, of might, but one of cunning: [it shows] how with the use of cunning we may thwart the violence of the powerful. … Cunning alone can preserve what has been conquered by force. Cavafy’s politics is a politics of decline or at least of people who, as I said before, have culminated their conquest either for geographical reasons or more often because their conquering force was finally gratified or dried up. (Vrisimitzakis, 1984, p. 41)

As Edward Said perceived, and as Cavafy also knew from experience, “it is the first principle [of colonialism] that a clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction should remain constant between ruler and ruled, whether or not the latter is white” (Bayoumi and Rubin, 2000, p. 301). Cavafy was intensely interested in hierarchies and surely aware of his own colonial position and of his perception as “a Levantine Greek wedged between English overlords and the Egyptian rank-and-file” (McKinsey, 2010, p. 123). From this position, and living as he was in an important outpost of the empire and in the high times of Colonial Hellenism, Cavafy could see that the establishment of Hellenistic and Eastern antiquity as the specific cultural and aesthetic heritage of the Graikoi could strengthen the position of an Egyptiote Greek intellectual in the imperial context and even produce a much-needed sense of stability and belonging. Cavafy’s historical exchanges with his colonial superiors at Alexandria’s Third Circle of Irrigation, as previously discussed, may have been yet another way for him to promote this claim. But the poet also seems to have made his meaning clear in more direct terms to his colonial friend E. M. Forster, in 1918:

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Never forget about the Greeks that we are bankrupt. That is the difference between us and the ancient Greeks and, my dear Forster, between us and yourselves. Pray, my dear Forster, that you—you English, with your capacity for adventure—never lose your capital, otherwise you will [come to] resemble us, restless, shifty, liars … (Quoted in Zeikowitz, 2008, p. 23; see also Gourgouris, 2017, pp. 135–137)

Notes 1. On the complex issue of Cavafy’s perception of Egyptian people and Arab culture see Hala Halim’s illuminating discussions (2013; 2021). 2. Commenting on the poem “Return from Greece,” Edmund Keeley suggests a slightly different taxonomy, focusing on Cavafy’s emplotments of Hellenism in his poems. In this reading, Cavafy’s “three faces of Hellenism” consist of “that of the mainland Greeks …, the critical, demanding standard–bearers of Hellenism and the objects of emulation among those aspiring to the name Hellene; that of the diaspora Greeks of Cavafy’s ancient world (Egypt and Syria first of all) who bring to Hellenism ‘Asiatic tastes and feelings,’ which are sometimes ‘alien’ to Hellenism but which in right measure and combination can be the source of the particular pride, passion and self-awareness that characterize the Hellenes of Cavafy’s mythical city; and that of the provincial pretenders to Hellenism, represented by the petty kings of this poem with their ‘showy Hellenified exteriors,’ and by the earlier ‘not … un-Hellenized’ Philhellene” (Keeley, 1996, p. 109). 3. On Cromer’s Orientalism see Kerr, 2008, esp. pp. 223–230. 4. See also Aamir Mufti’s powerful reading of the poem in response to an early draft of the present chapter (Mufti, 2021; Kayalis, 2021). 5. As Oikonomides noted, “two other reference books on the subject that Cavafy might have found in the library of the Archaeological Museum of Alexandria are: Catalogue of Indian Coins in the British Museum. Vol. 1, The Coins of the Greek and Scythic Kings of Bactria and India by P.  Gardner (London, 1886) and Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum, Calcutta etc. Vol. I, Ancient Coins by V. A. Smith (Oxford, 1906)” (Oikonomides, 1984, p. 37n). Savidis opted for Gardner’s book as Cavafy’s possible source (Cavafy, 1993, p. 187). Dallas repeated Savidis’ suggestion, but also mentioned Whitehead as a possibility (2000, p. 72). 6. As Frank L. Holt comments, “One of the greatest achievements of this period arose from the study of bilingual coinages bearing Greek texts on one side and Middle Indo-Aryan (Prakrit) inscriptions on the other. Using the mintages of Menander, Apollodotus, and others as miniature Rosetta Stones, James Prinsep endeavored to link the Greek words on the obverses directly to their Indian equivalents on the reverses. … [Thus he] managed

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to decipher most of the semisyllabic Prakrit scripts now called Kharoshthi (probably derived from Aramaic, and read from right to left) and Brahmi (derivation contested, and read left to right)” (Holt, 2012, pp. 40–41). 7. I wish to thank the Cavafy Archive of the Onassis Foundation for granting me permission to inspect the poet’s copy of Mahaffy’s book at an early stage of my research for this book. 8. I note here a small error in G. P. Savidis’ transcription of the Indian form of Strato’s name from Cavafy’s manuscript (Fig. 8.3). The Prakrit form of this name is rendered “Stratasa” in numismatic transcriptions (see for example here, Fig. 8.4), in accordance with the suffix given to all the other kings’ names. This suffix is correctly translated as “-ζα” in Cavafy’s manuscript (Εβουκρατιντάζα, Στρατάζα etc). But in Strato’s case, Savidis mistakenly read “Στρατάγα” on Cavafy’s manuscript (see Cavafy, 1977, p. 181; Cavafy, 1993, p. 107). This has misled the poem’s translators to repeat the error in their English renderings, writing Strataga instead of the correct: Stratasa. 9. Dallas suggests that, as the Graikos reads the kings’ names in Greek, he is moved by the prospect of “a slight hope that before the ultimate absorption  – the barbarization  – idols of Greek forms may still emerge” (1974, p. 181).

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Thackeray, W.  M. (2018). Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. Frankfurt: Outlook. Thompson, J. L. (2007). A Wider Patriotism: Alfred Milner and the British Empire. London: Pickering and Chatto. Tsirkas, S. (1982). Ο πολιτικός Καβάφης (4th ed). Athens: Kedros. Tsirkas, S. (1983). Ο Καβάφης και η εποχή του (7th ed). Athens: Kedros. Vasunia, P. (2013). The Classics and Colonial India. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Vrisimitzakis, G. (1984). Το έργο του Κ. Π. Καβάφη. G. P. Savidis (ed.). Athens: Ikaros. Warner, C. D. (ed.). (1895). John Pentland Mahaffy. In C. D. Warner et al (Eds.), Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern (vol. 24, pp. 9569–9579). New York: R. S. Peale & J. A. Hill. Whitehead, R. B. (1914). Catalogue of Coins in the Panjab Museum, Lahore. Vol. I.  Indo-Greek Coins. Published for the Panjab Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilde, O. (1887). Mr Mahaffy’s New Book [unsigned review]. Pall Mall Gazette, 9 Nov., 3. Young, R.  J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Zeikowitz, R.  E. (ed.). (2008). Letters Between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index1

A Abu’l’ Ala (Al- Ma’arri), 244 Adams, S. J., 114 Addison, J., 45, 48, 52, 60 Aelian, 24, 31, 92 Agras, T., 174 Aldrich, R., 118, 119, 155, 181, 200 Alexander Helios, 188 Alexander, son of Marc Antony and Cleopatra, see Alexander Helios Alexander the Great, 1, 15, 47, 49, 52, 82, 188, 212, 213, 217–221, 225, 242, 248, 250–253 Alexandria, 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 12, 16, 32, 60, 63, 65, 90, 95n5, 102, 106, 107, 111, 121, 129, 130, 137, 138, 142, 145, 186, 194, 195, 210, 219, 226, 227, 234, 236–245, 254, 259, 260 Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, 226–228 Alexandrini Techni (Alexandria journal), 34

Alighieri, Dante, 29, 234 Alma-Tadema, L., 200 Alvarez, D., 60 Amalgamation cultural, 223 racial, 223 Anagnostou-Laoutides, E., 186 Anastasiadis, P., 235 Anna Komnene, 253 Antinous, 117, 151 Antiochis, 22, 82, 87 Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, 81 Antiquarianism, 4, 5, 7–9, 14, 45, 59–67, 130, 150, 194, 198–201, 239 Antoniadis, J., 239 Antonius, G., 15, 210, 234–236 Antonopoulou, A., 152 Antony, Marc (Roman Triumvir), 130, 239 Apollodotus, 260 Apostolidis, R., 31, 81

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Kayalis, Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities, The New Antiquity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7

269

270 

INDEX

Apostolidou, A., 173 Appian, 24, 30, 78 Arata, S., 179–181 Archaeology, 4–6, 14, 126, 160, 200, 216 Areius Didymus, 101 Ariarathes IV Eusebes, king of Cappadocia, 21, 23, 33, 87 Ariarathes V Eusebes Philopator, king of Cappadocia, 26, 79, 81–83 Artaxerxes II Mnemon, king of Persia, 52, 222 Arvanitakis, G., 142 Assimilation, cultural, 252 Athanasopoulou, A., 4 The Athenaeum (London journal), 149 Athenaeum Club, Alexandria, 107, 219 Athenaeus, 24, 31 Athena Polias, temple of, 25 Attalus II Philadelphus, king of Pergamon, 80 Auden, W. H., 194, 203 Augustus, Caesar, Roman Emperor, 68, 101, 117, 120, 128 Ausonius, Decimus Magnus, 143, 144 B Bacchylides, 244 Bacon, F., 115, 201 Bactria, 28, 51, 225, 245, 247, 249, 251, 252, 256 Badenas de la Pena, P., 31 Baerlein, H., 244 Bakirtzis, H., 12, 141, 142, 144, 145 Bann, S., 114 Baring, E., see Cromer, Earl of Barker-Benfield, G. J., 176 Barnstone, W., 4 Baron Corvo, see Rolfe, F. W. Barrow, R., 67 Barthes, R., 201, 203

Baudelaire, C., 186 Bayoumi, M., 259 Beaton, R., 4, 111, 112, 139 Benjamin, W., 65 Bentley, M., 235 Bergstein, M., 63 Berk, H. J., 28 Beutin, W., 116 Bevan, E. R., 10, 11, 15, 33–38, 56, 62, 70n4, 77–82, 87, 177, 188, 216–218, 221, 223, 225, 226, 254, 255 “Greeks and Barbarians,” 225 A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty, 221 The Ηouse of Seleucus, 10, 15, 33 Bieber, M., 59 Bien, P., 4 Blanshard, A., 124, 172, 196, 219 Boeckh, A., 106 Boissier, G., 224 Bolingbroke, H., 70n1 Book of Judith, 28–30, 35 Boone, J. A., 155, 177, 195 Borges, J. L., 4 Botti, G., 239 Bouché-Leclercq, A., 30–32, 80, 81, 104 Bowra, C. M., 4, 188, 201 Boyle, S. S., 236 Bradley, M., 211 Bradshaw, D., 119 Brady, S., 180 Brand, A., 181 Brand, V., 25 Bray, A., 175 Breccia, E., 107 Brier, B., 104 British Empire, 3, 14, 15, 104, 107, 171, 176, 189, 209–260 British Museum, 10, 25, 28, 34, 35, 46, 54, 222, 235, 244 Brooke, C., 182

 INDEX 

Brown, J., 227, 228 Browning, R., 56, 57, 70n3, 84, 144, 198 “A Death in the Desert,” 144 “Protus,” 56, 57, 84 Bruhm, S., 143 Buchanan, R., 176 Buchbinder, D., 173 Burke, P., 45 Burnand, F. C., 106 “Antony and Cleopatra; or, His-tory and her-story in a modern Nilo-metre,” 106 Bush, B., 175, 186 Butler, S. J., 224 C Caesar, Julius, 101, 117, 128, 130, 239 Caesarion, 9, 11–13, 55, 101–130, 131n5, 142, 157–159, 161, 187–190, 203n3, 219, 238, 249, 254 Caires, V., 140, 152 Callataÿ, F. de, 44 Callimachus, 235 Cannadine, D., 189 Cappadocian Zeus, temple of, 81 Caravaggio, 200 Carlyle, T., 86 Carpenter, E., 12, 13, 118–120, 155, 161, 182 Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship, 118 Carter, J. C., 25, 26, 83 Catsaouni, H., 83 Cavafy Archive, 12, 131n5, 144–148 Cavafy C. P. archive of (see Cavafy Archive) and Britain, 156 colonial network of, 3, 230–236

271

historicism of, 4, 6, 24, 93, 211, 235 library of, 33, 38, 104, 107, 120, 145, 209, 216, 219, 230, 231, 244, 252 mode of circulation of his work, 7 narrative persona of, 30 as national poet, 183 poems; “Abandonment,” 129; “According to the recipes of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians,” 154, 183; “And I lay down and rested on their beds,” 162; “At the coffeehouse entrance,” 162; “At the theatre,” 162; “Before Jerusalem,” 254; “Caesarion,” 9, 11–13, 101–130, 142, 157–159, 161, 187–190, 203n3, 219, 238, 249, 254; “Che fece ... il gran rifiuto,” 184; “Coins,” 16, 35, 210, 245–260; “Company of four,” 154; “Craftsman of craters,” 154; “Dareios,” 53; “Days of 1909, ‘10 and ‘11,” 14; “December of 1903,” 162; “Epitaph of Antiochos, King of Commagene,” 160; “For Ammonis, who died at age twenty-nine in 610,” 162; “From the Drawer,” 64; “Fugitives,” 254; “Half an hour,” 162; “He came to read,” 162, 236; “Hidden,” 162; “I brought to Art,” 183; “In an old book-,” 162, 191; “In a town of Osroene,” 154; “In the month of Athyr,” 9, 11–13, 110, 137, 138, 140, 144–150, 156, 157, 159; “In the Street,” 190;

272 

INDEX

Cavafy C. P. (cont.) “In the year 200 B.C.,” 183, 252; “Ionic,” 203n1; “I went,” 185; “Julian and the Antiochians,” 162; “Kimon, son of Learchos, 22 years old, student of Greek Letters (in Cyrene),” 154, 160; “Lovely white flowers,” 154; “Of Demetrius Soter (162-150 B.C.),” 80, 81; “Of Ptolemy Caesar,” 104, 105, 110, 124; “Of the ship,” 162; “Of the store,” 195; “On the stairs,” 162; “Orophernes,” 9–11, 13, 21–36, 43, 44, 49, 51, 54–57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67–69, 70n6, 77, 79–89, 91–94, 95n5, 157–160, 172, 174, 175, 177, 179, 187, 189–192, 235, 249; “Parthen,” 254; “Passage,” 14, 192, 197, 202, 256; “Perception,” 162; “Philhellene,” 10, 38, 57, 58, 216, 226; “Pictured,” 162; “Picture of a twenty-three year old man, painted by a friend of the same age, an amateur artist,” 64, 162; “Return from Greece,” 162, 226, 260; “Sculptor of Tyana,” 12, 122–123; “So long I gazed-,” 162; “Temethos, Antiochian, A. D. 400,” 67, 162; “That is How,” 14, 64, 65, 162, 191, 192, 195, 202; “Their origin,” 162, 193; “Thermopylae,” 179, 184; “Tomb of Eurion,” 154, 162; “Tomb of Iases,” 140; “The horses of Achilles,” 184; “The item in the newspaper,” 91; “The next table,” 162; “The photograph,” 64, 70n6;

“The Potentate from Western Libya,” 226; “The Rest Shall I Tell to Those in Hades Below,” 216; “The Tomb of Ignatius,” 149; “The tomb of Lanes,” 10, 65, 67, 162; “The Trojans,” 184; “The Windows,” 184; “Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias,” 149, 154, 162; “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.,” 244; “Very seldom,” 162; “Walls,” 184; “Young men of Sidon (A.D. 400),” 154, 162 prose works; “Genealogical Gossip or Various bits of the History of our Father’s & Mother’s family thrown together,” 7; “Genealogy,” 7; “Memorandum about the Cavafy family,” 7; “The Regiment of Pleasure,” 186; “The Ships,” 186 “self-comments” on his poems, 11, 88, 89, 91, 93, 123 use of historical sources, 77–83 Chamberlain, M. E., 225 Chaniotis, A., 147 Chaucer, G., 29 Chauncey, G., 161 Chislett, W., 179 Chryssanthopoulos, M., 4, 86, 93, 94 Clain-Stefanelli, E. E., 46 Clarke, A. O., 25, 26 Clarke, E. O., 180 Classical Association, the, 15, 223, 245 Cleopatra, 11, 12, 52, 101, 103, 104, 106, 111, 113–117, 120, 122, 123, 128–130, 142, 203n3 Cleopatra VII, see Cleopatra Cocks, H. G., 156, 161 Cohn, D., 95n3, 95n4 Coin portraits

 INDEX 

ancient, 44, 45, 48–50, 62, 63, 158 perceptions of, 44–46 Colby, S., 5, 126, 127, 154, 160 Colby, V., 48 Colla, E., 104 Collingwood, W. G., 46 Colonial Hellenism, 210–223, 231, 233, 251, 259 Colonialism, British, 16, 229, 231, 239, 241, 252 Comparative Desire, 214 Comparative Empire, 214 Constantine I (the Great), 188, 189 Cook, E. T., 46 Corley, J., 29 Cornelia (mother of the Gracchi), 220 Cory, W., see Johnson, W. Cosmopolitanism, 15, 209, 223–230, 243 Courtney, J. E., 216 Courtney, W. L., 216 Cowling, M., 61 Crane, S. A., 5, 9, 198, 201 Crary, J., 43 Crawley Quinn, J., 182 Cromer, Earl of, see Cromer, Lord Cromer, Lord, 4, 15, 214–217, 223, 224, 228, 231, 232, 239–245, 258 Abbas II, 244 Ancient and Modern Imperialism, 15, 217, 223 Modern Egypt, 239, 243, 244, 258 “Translation and Paraphrase,” 244 Cummings, e. e., 141 Cunnally, J., 44, 59, 67 Cunningham, V., 47, 173 D Daguerre, L., 63 Dallas, Y., 4, 21, 31, 36, 37, 49, 70n4, 87, 92, 106, 127, 161, 175, 253, 260, 261 Daniel, S., 113

273

The Tragedy of Cleopatra, 113 Daskalopoulos, D., 44 Daston, L., 63 Decadence, 118, 125, 152, 179, 182, 183, 196, 232 Dellamora, R., 152, 153, 161, 229 Delopoulos, K., 30, 81, 106 Demetrius I Soter, king of Syria, 28, 36n5, 38n19, 79–81, 85 Der Eigene (Berlin journal), 181 Diaspora, Greek, 2, 3, 7, 14, 16, 210, 230, 236–239, 241, 253, 256, 258, 260 Dilettanti, Society of, 25, 36 Dimaras, C. Th., 103 Dinshawai Affair, 244 Dio Cassius, 24, 31, 104 Diodorus Siculus, 24 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 70n1 Dittenberger, W., 106 Donatello, 29 Douglas, Alfred “Bosie,” 245 Dowden, E., 57, 70n3 Dowling, L., 127, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179, 180 Doyle, Conan A., 181 Droysen, J.-G., 253 Dubufe, E., 200 Duff, T. E., 126, 154, 155 Dussaud, R., 70n4 E Eakins, T. C., 200 Eastham, A., 125 Eastlake, E., 62, 63 Ebers, G. M., 12, 115–117, 119, 227, 240, 241 Cleopatra, 116 Egypt: Descriptive, Historical, and Picturesque, 227, 241 An Egyptian Princess, 116, 131n8 Serapis, 131n8 Eckhel, J. H., 45

274 

INDEX

Edinburgh Review, The, 244 Effeminacy, male, 14, 120–122, 171–180, 182, 188, 190 Egyptiote Greeks, 60, 238, 254, 259 Egyptomania, 104, 116 Ekdawi, S., 126, 152 Elagabalus, Roman Emperor, 177, 188, 189 Elder, E., 79, 80, 159 Eliot, T. S., 183 El Kayar, I., 210, 211 Elkins, N. T., 45, 46 Elytis, O., 183 Emmerich, K., 8 Epigraphy, 5, 48, 104, 216 Eriksen, A., 8, 93 Erle, S., 62 Erotic archaeology, 14, 126, 160, 200 Erskine, A., 77, 78 Eukratides I (the Great), Greco-­ Bactrian King, 247, 257 Euthydemus I, Greco-Bactrian King, 51 Evangelista, S., 156, 160, 174, 196–198, 202 Evelyn, J., 60 Ewald, H., 28 F Facella, M., 25, 95n1 Fahmy, K., 227 Fatouros, G., 142, 150, 189, 203n3 Faubion, J., 179 Fearn, D., 244 Fettel & Bernard (Alexandria photographers), 63 Fontana, E., 50 Forsdyke, E. J., 15, 34, 210, 234–236 Forster, E. M., 36, 114, 119, 149, 182, 231, 235, 259, 260 Howards End, 114

Forster, J., 114 Forsyth, T. D., 250 Fortuny, M., 200 Frampton, S. A., 143, 144 France, A., 183 Fraser, D., 118 Frederick the Great, 12, 118 Freud, S., 143 Friedlaender, B., 182 Frier, B., 4, 94 Fulvio, A., 45, 67–69 Illustrium imagines, 45, 67, 68 Furness, R. A., 15, 210, 235, 236 Fusion cultural, 152, 225, 251, 252 racial, 152, 225, 252 G Galdi, V., 196 Galison, P., 63 Garantoudis, E., 129 Garcia Morcillo, M., 129 Gardner, P., 10, 46, 48, 260 Gautier, T., 12, 126, 127 “Arria Marcella: A Souvenir of Pompeii,” 12, 126 Geroulanos, S., 31, 33 Ghika, K., 7 Giannakopoulou, L., 124 Gibbon, E., 5, 80, 85, 177, 188, 189, 214 Gide, A., 182 Gikas, I., 241 Gloeden, W. von, 13, 14, 156, 157, 172, 194–203 Glymenopoulos, E., 60, 239 Goff, B., 211, 245, 258 Gogarty, O., 10, 47, 50 “With a Coin from Syracuse,” 47, 50 Goldhill, S., 116, 117

 INDEX 

Goldman, J., 195, 197, 203 Goldschmidt, N., 138, 140 Goodspeed, G., 109, 110 Gorman, A., 237, 239, 241, 242 Gosse, E., 173, 174, 198 Gould, R., 5 Gourgouris, S., 209, 260 Graeco-Roman Museum, Alexandria, 130, 239 Grafftey-Smith, L., 235 Graham, J., 61 Graikoi, 236, 254, 258, 259 Grammata (Alexandria journal), 137, 142 Grand Bretagne Hotel (Athens), 213 Gray-Fow, M., 131n1 Greater Britain, 213 Greater Rome, 15, 213, 231 The Greek Anthology, 142, 159, 234 Greek love, 172–174, 178, 196, 245 Green, P., 128, 253 Greene, S., 253 Guazzoni, E., 12, 128, 129 Guépin, J. P., 33 Guha, R., 257 Gutzwiller, K., 126, 174, 175, 194, 199 H Haas, D., 6, 7, 38, 80, 84, 86, 89, 95n2, 115, 131n6, 214 Habicht, C., 25, 95n1 Hadrian, Roman Emperor, 117, 130, 151, 239 Hadziiossif, C., 226, 227 Hagerman, C. A., 211 Haggard, Rider H., 181 Halim, H., 59, 142, 237, 238, 244, 248, 249, 260 Halvatzakis, M., 210 Hanley, W., 224

275

Hannavy, J., 197 Hardy, T., 10, 47, 49 “In the Old Theatre, Fiesole,” 47 Harloe, K., 159 Hart, G., 142 Hartley, L., 61 Haskell, F., 36, 44, 52, 59, 67 Hatchuel, S., 113, 114 Hathor (Egyptian Goddess), 139, 142, 143, 147 Haverfield, F., 223, 225 Haynes, K., 33 Head, B. V., 10, 31–33, 35–37, 46, 51, 52, 222, 235, 249, 256 Heffernan, J. A. W., 57 Hellenism, 16, 70n5, 156, 183, 189, 210–223, 229, 231, 233, 234, 236–245, 248, 250–253, 260 Hercher, R., 142 Heredia, J.-M. de, 10, 49, 52, 231 “Médaille,” 52 “Médaille antique,” 49 Heringman, N., 6, 9 Hermaios Soter, Indo-Greek King, 247, 257 Herring, S., 197 Herzfeld, M., 253 Hicks, E. L., 10, 28–33, 35, 54, 55, 69, 70n1 Hill, G. F., 10, 28, 46, 70n2 Hillis Miller, J., 124 Hingley, R., 214, 223 Hirschfeld, M., 118, 125, 185, 191 The Homosexuality of Men and Women, 185 Hodne, L., 152 Hogarth, D. G., 223, 225 Holland Day, F., 203n6 Holm, A., 243 Holt, F. L., 249, 251, 252, 260, 261 Homer, 101, 199, 200, 244 The Iliad, 101

276 

INDEX

Houghton, A., 28, 36 Houssaye, H., 104 Hume, D., 6 Huysmans, J. K., 125 Against Nature (À Rebours), 125 Hybridity, 14, 15, 23, 139, 141, 152, 200, 209, 223–230, 252 I Imperialism, British, 3, 13, 49, 213, 215, 219, 230, 242, 252, 258 Imperialism, Roman, 213 Imperialist discourse, 14, 15, 177, 209, 217, 226, 229 India, 16, 176, 212, 213, 217, 222, 225, 230, 247, 248, 250–253 Indo-Greek coins, 35, 245, 249–251, 255, 256 Ioannidis, K., 63 Ireland, 219–221, 223, 230 Iris (Alexandria moviehouse), 12, 129 Iser, W., 160 Isotta degli Atti, 52 J Jeffreys, P., 3, 6, 7, 44, 115, 121, 140, 144, 153, 155, 186–189, 194, 201, 203, 231, 248 Jenkins, I., 25 Jenkyns, R., 178 Johnson, W., 173 Ionica, 173, 203n1 Johnston, H. H., 241 Jong, F. A. de, 29 Josephus, 80, 81 Journal of Hellenic Studies, 34, 235 Jusdanis, G., 21, 23, 69, 86, 93, 94, 102, 103, 138, 150, 229 Justin, 24, 30, 77, 81

K Kalter, B., 45 Kalvos, A., 183 Karampini-Iatrou, M., 104, 107, 114, 129, 140, 144, 145, 151, 230, 244, 252 Karayiannis, V., 7 Katsigianni, A., 186 Kayalis, T., 4 Kaye, K., 185, 191 Kazamias, A., 2, 210, 227, 237–239, 241, 242, 244, 258 Keats, J., 6 Keeley, E., 59, 247, 260 Kelly, J. M., 25 Kerr, D., 260n3 Keyserlingk, D. von, 118 Kipling, R., 181, 258 Kitchener, H. H. (Lord), 232 Kitroeff, A., 238 Klimt, G., 29 Kocziszky, E., 138, 152, 162 Kostiou, K., 23, 58, 69, 70n7, 86, 93 Kraay, C. M., 25 Krafft-Ebing, R. von, 118 Krishnaswamy, R., 176, 182 Kupffer, E. von, 12, 13, 118, 155, 181, 182 Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur, 118 L Lagids, see Ptolemaic dynasty Lagoudis Pinchin, J., 86 Lahanokardis, I., 130, 238 Lake, C. B., 6, 9 Lambert, C., 158 Lambropoulos, V., 150 Landor, W. S., 12, 113–117, 119 Antony and Octavius: Scenes for the Study, 114 Imaginary Conversations, 114

 INDEX 

Lapathiotis, N., 195, 203n5 Late antiquity, 152, 211, 254 Lavagnini, R., 70n6, 104 Lavater, J. C., 61, 62 Lawrence, T. E., 15, 210, 231, 232, 236 Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 232 Lechonitis, G., 77, 81, 88, 89, 95n5, 123 Lee, V., 10, 47, 155 Les Aventures d’une Pièce de Monnaie, 47 “On Friendship,” 155 Lefebvre, G., 144, 145, 147, 149, 150 Leiris, M., 29 Letronne, M., 106 Levantines, 211, 212, 237, 239, 241, 259 Levine, P., 176 Liddell, R., 33, 189, 211 Liveley, G., 126 Livy, 24, 30, 78 Loescher, F., 200 Lorber, C. C., 28, 36 Lugard, F. J. D., 213 Lyon, H., 8, 9 M Maccabean Revolt, 218 Mackail, J. W., 140 Mac Kenzie, J., 6 Mackridge, P., 23, 69, 70n7, 93, 187, 192, 193 Magill, F. N., 77 Magna Grecia, 229 Mahaffy, J. P., 11, 12, 15, 36, 38, 55, 106–113, 120, 131n5, 158, 159, 216, 217, 219–221, 223, 228, 252, 261 The Empire of the Ptolemies, 11, 106, 107, 216

277

Greek life and thought from the death of Alexander to the Roman conquest, 219, 220 Mahaira-Odoni, E., 151 Mahdism, 218 Mahoney, K. M., 48 Mairs, R., 212, 213, 220, 223, 249, 251 Malanos, T., 30, 33, 37, 70n4, 81, 89, 106, 183 Malatesta, Sigismondo Pandolfo, 52 Mantena, R. S., 251 Marangoulis, M., 243 “Marcantonio e Cleopatra,” film, 12, 128, 130 Marchand, S., 116 Marcus Fabius Rufus, 123 Marmontel, J.-F., 113 Cléopâtre, 113 Maronitis, D. N., 139, 142, 184 Masson, Bernard (Alexandria photographers), 63 Matzner, S., 201 McDowell, R. B., 107, 219, 220 McKinsey, M., 3, 15, 59, 210, 212, 223, 229, 259 McKitterick, R., 214 Meerheimb, R. von, 118 Megali Idea, 238, 247 Meleager, 174 Melman, B., 232, 235 Menander I Soter, Indo-Greek King, 247, 257, 260 Menandros, see Menander I Soter, Indo-Greek King Mendelsohn, D., 139, 153, 203n2, 248 Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, 245 Meredith, G., 198 Michaud d’Humiac, L., 12, 120–122 Caesarion, 120, 121

278 

INDEX

Militia amoris, 186 Miller, P. N., 5, 9, 199, 201 Milner, A. (Lord), 242 England in Egypt, 242 Milner, T., 6 Minkin, S., 228, 239 Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus, 53, 222 Momigliano, A., 5, 8, 9, 199, 201 Mommsen, T., 82 Monsman, G., 114 Montserrat, D., 106, 116 Morgan, T. E., 176, 177 Morkholm, O., 51, 52 Morley, J., 15, 230, 231 Morris, W., 176 Mosse, G. L., 182 Moyer, I. S., 216, 221 Mufti, A., 2–4, 59, 210, 222, 229, 237, 238, 254, 257, 258 Müller, K. O., 45, 46, 177, 180 Die Dorier, 177 Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, 45 Murphy, P., 2, 3 Mutamassirun, 237, 241 Myrone, M., 7 N Nagy, G., 140, 150, 151 Naples Museum of Anthropology, 200 Nationalism, 3, 129, 228, 235, 241, 244, 253, 256 Nea Zoi (Alexandria journal), 32, 37 Nebuchadnezzar, king of Assyria, 28 Nehamas, A., 139 Neroutsos, T., 239 Neville, G., 54 Newby, Z., 159 Newton, C. T., 10, 25–28, 30, 33, 36, 37, 43

Nicodemus, Gospel of, 151 Numismatics, 5, 10, 21, 24, 28–33, 35, 46, 48, 51, 56, 58, 60, 62, 70n5, 83, 104, 216, 247, 249, 254, 258, 261 Nye, R. A., 182 O Octavian, see Augustus, Caesar, Roman Emperor Oikonomides, A. N., 70n4, 247–249, 260 Oikonomopoulos, D., 106, 111, 238 Alexandrinos Diakosmos, 111, 238 Olophernes, Assyrian general, 27–29, 36 Onassis Foundation, 1, 146–148, 210, 261 Orientalism, 128, 230, 231, 236 Orophernes, 9–11, 13, 21–36, 43, 44, 49, 51, 54–57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67–69, 70n6, 77, 79–89, 91–94, 95n1, 95n5, 157–160, 172, 174, 175, 177, 179, 187, 189–192, 235, 249 Orrells, D., 173, 178 Osterhuis, H., 181 Østermark-Johansen, L., 50 Owen, R., 216, 245 P Paglia, C., 125, 161 Palamas, K., 183 Pallis, A., 234 Pallis, A. A., 234 Panegyptia (Alexandria journal), 129 Papadimitriou, S., 210 Papanikolaou, D., 94, 155, 171, 184, 203n2 Papanikolaou, M., 195

 INDEX 

Papargyriou, E., 64, 65, 192 Paparrigopoulos, C., 80 Papatheodorou, Y., 4, 210 Pargas, S., 137, 142 Parkinson, R. B., 162n2 Paroikia (Greek community in Alexandria), 60, 236, 247, 254 Parramore, L., 104, 116 Pater, W., 10, 13, 14, 47, 50, 61, 114, 125–127, 140, 144, 153, 155, 160, 161, 173, 174, 177–180 “Emerald Uthwart,” 144 “An English Poet,” 47, 50 Imaginary Portraits, 114 Plato and Platonism, 14, 177 The Renaissance, 160, 178 Pax Britannica, 243 Pax Romana, 243 Pearl, S., 61, 62 Pechlivanos, M., 210 Peltz, L., 7 Penna, V., 70n5 Pentin, H., 28 Percival, M., 61 Peridis, M., 145 Perrin, B., 221 Petrarch, 44 Pharnaces II, king of Pontus, 51 Philetaerus, king of Pergamon, 51 Phillipson, G., 150 Philostratus, 78, 159 Imagines, 159 Physiognomy, 44–46, 59–67, 189 Pieridis, G., 137 Pieris, M., 36n7 Plantzos, D., 127 Plato, 14, 154, 155, 172, 178, 179 Charmides, 154, 155 Plüschow, W. von, 196 Plutarch De Alexandri fortuna aut virtute, 226

279

Life of Antony, 188 Life of Solon, 142 On Isis and Osiris, 150 Pocock, J. G. A., 176 Politis, A., 16n1, 241–244 Politou-Marmarinou, E., 49 Polukaisarie, 104, 117 Polybius, 24, 28, 30, 31, 54, 55, 69, 78, 79 Polychronakis, D., 150, 152 Pompeius Trogus, 78 Pontani, F. M., 30–32, 54, 55, 81, 106, 142 Poole, R. S., 10, 46, 48, 49, 51–53, 222 Pound, E., 114, 141, 144 “Papyrus,” 144 Priene, 25–27, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 79 Prinsep, J., 250, 260 Propertius, Sextus, 186 Proust, M., 9 Ptolemaic dynasty, 101, 111, 120, 220 Ptolemy I Soter, king of Egypt, 55 Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 110 Ptolemy VI Philometor, 253 Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (Physcon), 220 Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor, see Caesarion Ptolemy Caesar, see Caesarion Ptolemy Caesar, the God Philopator Philometor, see Caesarion Ptolemy Philadelphus, 188, 203n3 Ptolemy (son of Marc Antony and Cleopatra), see Ptolemy Philadelphus Pullan, R. P., 25 Q Queen Victoria, 189 Quinault, R., 214

280 

INDEX

R Rawlinson, G., 82 Reid, D. M., 104, 116, 130, 232, 239, 245 Reinach, T., 30, 32, 33, 38 Reisz, E., 214, 228, 245 Renan, E., 106, 120 Report of the Elliott Commission on Higher Education in West Africa, 245 Richards, F. T., 78 Richards, J., 156 Richardson, C., 131n7 Richter, G. M. A., 28 Ricks, D., 56, 57, 87, 140, 144, 152, 153 Rider Haggard, H., see Haggard, Rider H. Rigney, A., 7, 94 Roberts, N., 114 Robertson, W., 15, 252, 253 An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, 15, 252 Robinson, C., 101, 103, 112, 184, 194, 202 Robiou, F., 145 Roessel, D., 174 Rogers, A., 214, 223 Roilos, P., 21, 31, 57, 85, 86, 92, 139, 187, 248, 253 Rolfe, F. W., 200, 203n6 Roller, D. W., 122, 123, 131n3 Rosen, C., 64 Rosenberg, J. D., 44 Rossetti, D. G., 176 Rubin, A., 259 Ruskin, J., 25, 45, 46, 49, 53, 54, 69, 70n2 Russel, L., 29

S Sachperoglou, E., 23, 58, 65, 66, 85, 92, 102, 123, 129, 138, 154, 191 Said, E., 209, 215, 230, 232, 259 Saint Callinicus, 151 Saint Leucius, 151 Saint Tyrsus, 151 Sallustius, 144 Salvesen, H., 25, 28, 31, 36, 37, 43 Sarazin, J., 94 Sareyannis, J. D., 90, 91, 113, 131n2 Saslow, J. M., 153, 155, 175 Savidis, G. P., 21, 34, 63, 70n6, 88, 95n5, 124, 140, 144, 182, 183, 210, 229, 247, 260, 261 Sayles, W. G., 28 Schrader, H., 33 Scott, W., 6 Seeley, J. R., 15, 231 Seferis, G., 36, 84, 89, 183 Seitler, D., 63 Seleucid dynasty, 15, 209 Sergeant, P. W., 104 Shakespeare, W., 113 Antony and Cleopatra, 113 Shell, M., 46 Sifaki, E., 58 Sikelianos, A., 183 Silver, S., 60 Sinclair, U., 29 Singopoulo, A., 34, 88, 89, 95n5, 124, 235 Sladen, D., 104 Smalls, J., 118, 153 Smith, V. A., 260 Smith, W., 10, 11, 38, 79–82, 104 Solomos, D., 183 Sophocles, E. A., 104 Stanford, W. B., 107, 219, 220 Stassinopoulou, M., 44 Steyn, G. J., 28, 29 Storrs, R. S., 15, 210, 232–234, 236, 239, 245

 INDEX 

281

Strabo, 78 Strachan-Davidson, J. L., 223 Strack, M. L., 106 Stratigis, G., 84 Strato I, Indo-Greek King, 247, 257, 261 Straton, see Strato I, Indo-Greek King Suetonius, 104, 116 Sulcer, R., 161, 180 Sullivan, V. P., 12, 117 The Siren and the Roman (Cleopatra and Anthonius) or Luxury, Love and the Lost, 117 Sutherland Orr, A., 70n3 Svoronos, I., 33, 36, 256 Sweet, R., 5–7, 199 Swinburne, A. C., 12, 115, 176 “Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor,” 115 Symonds, J. A., 13, 155, 161, 180–182, 198, 202, 203n2 Synaxaristis, 151 Synesius of Cyrene, 142

Tomprou, M., 56 Translatio imperii, 212, 216, 220 Tryphonopoulos, D. P., 114 Tsakiridou, C. A., 64 Tsirimokou, L., 87 Tsirkas, S., 37, 54, 81, 90, 95n5, 106, 107, 210, 219, 230, 243, 244 Turner (Tennyson), C., 10, 47, 49 “On seeing a little child spin a coin of Alexander the Great,” 47, 49 Tytler, G., 61 Tzortzi, M., 70n7

T Tardieu, A., 189, 190 Les attentats aux moeurs, 189 Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal. A Physiological Romance of To-day, 71n8 Terribili-Gonzales, G., 12, 128 Thackeray, W. M., 255 Thaniel, G., 36 Theocritus, 199 Theophilos Palaiologos, 253 Thompson, H. A., 36n3 Thompson, J. L., 231 Thonemann, P., 25, 26 Thwaite, A., 198 Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Roman Emperor, 68 Tobin, R. D., 118

W Walker, S., 123 Walters, H. B., 51 Watson, J. L., 154, 194, 202, 203n2 Waugh, T., 194, 198 Weigall, A., 104 Weiss, R., 44, 67 West, S., 58 Whitehead, R. B., 249, 254, 260 Whitman, W., 155, 180 Wiegand, T., 33 Wiggins, M., 131n7 Wilamowitz, U. von, 118 Wilde, O., 14, 65, 66, 71n8, 90, 107, 118, 126, 177–179, 181, 183, 198, 219, 220, 245 Picture of Dorian Gray, 65 “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” 126

V Valaoritis, A., 183 Valassopoulo, G., 144, 149 Vasunia, P., 16, 211–214, 250, 252, 253 Vauvenargues (Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de), 244 Verdicchio, P., 196, 199, 200 Vine, A., 5, 199 Vrisimitzakis, G., 34, 259

282 

INDEX

Wilson, M., 189 Winckelmann, J. J., 5, 152, 173, 174, 196, 223 Woods, G., 178 Wotherspoon, G., 118, 119 Wroth, W. W., 10, 30–32, 35, 46 Wyke, M., 106, 116, 128, 129 Y Yeats, W. B., 114 Young, B., 189

Young, R. J. C., 213 Youngkin, M., 122 Yourcenar, M., 33, 34, 38, 64, 151, 162 Z Zeikowitz, R. E., 260 Zerba, M., 139, 141 Zerner, H., 64 Zimmerman, V., 49 Zizinia, S. (Count), 239 Zorn, C., 155, 161