Making History Personal: Constantine Cavafy and the Rise of Rome

Frier, “Making History Personal,” page 22
lius Caesar is conspicuously ignored. This pleasure-loving crowd seems entirely composed of
Cavafy’s “generic heroes.” 70
Historians have long debated whether the Donations of Alexandria should be taken se-
riously, and, if so, what Antony’s motive was in making them. Some have concurred with Cava-
71
fy in seeing them as pure theater. But others have taken the Donations more seriously; arguing
that they would at least have appealed to Alexandrians notorious for their “hostility … to the po-
litical and military intervention of Rome in Egyptian affairs.” 72 It is even possible to see in them
a largely unexecuted attempt to create a wholly new political artifice, a “Romano-Hellenistic
Orient” that would reconcile the political and military might of Rome with the cultural legitimacy
of the last surviving Hellenistic kingdom. 73
“Alexandrian Kings” implies, what we should
anyway have anticipated from other evidence on his political views, that Cavafy reacted with
considerable skepticism to the patent unreality of such a solution to the “Hellenistic problem.”
The wolf does not run with the cat.
Octavian’s crushing defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium might seem to have
spelled the end of such pageantry; but not so. “In a Municipality of Asia Minor” (1926) is a cynical
poem in which an imaginary Greek city, presumably lobbying for benefactions, redirects a
proclamation written to celebrate Antony’s anticipated victory, so that, with only the slightest
change of wording, it now celebrates Octavian, “‘so richly worthy of encomia, / and of the narra-
tion of his deeds at length / in the Greek tongue, both in verse and prose: / in the Greek tongue,
74
which is the bearer of renown,’ / etcetera, etcetera. It all fits brilliantly.” The Alexandrians
70
Keeley, Alexandria (1976) 93: “a comprehensive portrait of the typical Alexandrian ‘man in the street’ of the
first century B.C.; … more responsive, more easily entertained, but—when it comes to insight about the character of
politics—only slightly less cynical than our third-century Alexandrian” (in “From the School of the Renowned Philosopher,”
1921).
71 2
Pelling, in Bowman et al., CAH 10 (1996) 36-48, esp. 40-41 (“It was all show … [b]ut … it doubtless went
down well in Alexandria.”), virtually paraphrasing Cavafy.
72
Fraser, Alexandria (1972) 127; see also Schäfer, Kleopatra (2006) 178-183.
73
Will, Histoire Politique (1982) 545, accepted by Green, Alexander to Actium (1990) 674-675. See also
Grant, Cleopatra (1972) 161-181; Benne, Marcus Antonius (2001) 28-53, 112-130; Hölbl, Ptolemaic Empire (2001)
242-244; Roller, Cleopatra (2010) 99-100; and, exhaustively, Schrapel, Reich der Kleopatra (1996), esp. 273-276
on Caesarion. Compare Haag, Alexandria (2004) 46-47: a “realizable, if ambitiously far-reaching, design for a new
Hellensitic empire based on Alexandria.” On Cleopatra’s dynastic politics, see Bingen, Hellenistic Egypt (2007) 57-
79.
74
On this poem, Mendelsohn, Collected Poems (2009) 440, quotes C. M. Bowra: “He shows the fundamental
indifference of the ruled to their rulers. No doubt he had observed this in Egypt.” But this misses the point entirely.
See also Jusdanis, Poetics (1987) 131-132. A general atmosphere of subservience is indicated by Dio 51.19.