Making History Personal: Constantine Cavafy and the Rise of Rome

Frier, “Making History Personal,” page 37
“Their hearing, / sometimes, in moments of complete / absorption in their studies, is disturbed.
The secret call / of events that are about to happen reaches them. / And they listen to it reverent-
ly. While in the street / outside, the people hear nothing at all.” In his early collection, Cavafy
set this poem in relation to others depicting his subjects’ success, or lack of success, in discern-
ing what was about to happen in the world around them: Julius Caesar, elated by his victories,
but failing to comprehend the portent of Pompey’s gory beheading (“Theodotus,” 1911), and
then also ignoring a final warning on the very day of his assassination (“Ides of March,” 1906);
Antony successfully interpreting the “exquisite music” of an “invisible procession” (“The God
Abandons Antony,” 1910); and we may add the Emperor Nero’s smug failure to grasp the meaning
of a Delphic prophesy (“Nero’s Deadline,” 1915), among other poems. 116 The “wise men,”
the sophoi, are those individuals “who foresee the coming of dreadful things. They do not panic,
nor do they implore; they understand, stand, defend and, one suspects, even die. They are the
courageous still.” 117
John Anton remarks that: “Cavafy never seems to have doubted the belief that the man of
wisdom is a better judge of actions than the common man. By opting for a wisdom that includes
rational judgment as a guide and test of values, while illumining the demands of the desires, he
118
moves out of the shadow of Romanticism as well as that of symbolism.” It is against this
background, I think, that we today must approach Cavafy’s historical poetry. Cavafy is justly
famed for his success in creating a sort of surface candor, with little metaphor or apparent artifice.
My colleague Ruth Scodel has observed that: “Cavafy, unlike much Hellenistic poetry, is
immediately accessible. The difficulties of Hellenistic poetry are a barrier right from the start: its
language is difficult, the allusions are many, the social context is not always familiar, the narra-
tive structures seem peculiar. Cavafy, in contrast, is easy on the surface … [its] implied narratives
… not demand[ing] deep learning to make an immediate impression.” 119
However, as Scodel
immediately goes on to note, Cavafy’s apparent openness is, at the very least, deceptive. In
fact, what he wrote is learned poetry, informed by the rich Hellenistic traditions that Cavafy re-
drus 278D. See Anton, Poetry and Poetics (1995) 319-320. On the background to the composition of this and the
other Apollonius poems, see Bowersock, “Apollonios” (1983/2009) 154-158.
116
See Mendelsohn, Collected Poems (2009) 374-375. This poem should also be read in relation to “Finished”
(1910), which stresses the final futility of striving to “avoid the certain / danger that threatens us so terribly.”
117
Anton, Poetry and Poetics (1995) 258, citing also “Thermopylae” (1901).
118
Anton, Poetry and Poetics (1995) 319.
119 Scodel, “Preface” (2003) 2.