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Cavafy’s Byzantium*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Sarah Ekdawi
Sarah Ekdawi*
Affiliation:
The Queen’s University of Belfast
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Extract

Cavafy’s interest in Byzantium dates from a very early stage in his poetic career. In fact, the Byzantine empire appears to have been the first historical period to attract the self-styled ‘historian-poet’s’ attention. Some of Cavafy’s earliest historical poems and many of the poems of his maturity bear witness to this, and several of his early prose writings are also indicative of his keen interest in the period. In June 1882, shortly before and during his family’s temporary removal to Constantinople, Cavafy began to keep a journal called ‘Constantinopoliad. An Epic’. Ten years later, he wrote a newspaper article on the Byzantine poets, . The reason for Cavafy’s early and enduring interest in the Byzantine period, especially Middle and Late Byzantium, may well be connected with the fact that Cavafy had family roots in Constantinople. A second factor is that, for a Greek of the Diaspora, Late Antiquity, when the centre of Hellenism was no longer Athens, held a particular fascination. Cavafy was able, by means of Byzantium, to lay claim to an elevated genealogy, both for himself (as a descendant of the Phanariots) and for his poetry, as central to (through being descended from) the poetic tradition of Byzantine Egypt, rather than peripheral to the Modern Athenian School.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 20 , 1996 , pp. 17 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1996

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References

1. The fullest discussion of Cavafy’s early encounter with Byzantium can be found in Diana Haas’s doctoral dissertation, now in press, Le problème religieux dans l’oeuvre de Cavafy. Les années déformation 1882-1905, Université de Lille III [Sorbonne] (Paris 1987). Haas gives a meticulous account of Cavafy’s sources, as well as providing invaluable details of some of the unpublished documents in the Cavafy Archive. Although I differ with Haas over interpretation of some of the key poems relevant to this discussion, her contribution to this subject cannot be overestimated.

2. This unpublished manuscript is in the Cavafy archive; extracts were published by Lena Savidis in (Athens 1983). The period of the Cavafy family’s sojourn in Constantinople was July 1882-October 1885; see Liddell, Robert, Cavafy: a Criticial Biography (London 1974) 35–50.Google Scholar

3. Published in the newspaper (Alexandria 11/23 April 1892).

4. See Karagiannis, V., (Athens 1983)Google Scholar for an account of the composed by Cavafy in 1909.

5. See Cameron, Alan, ‘Wandering Poets: a Literary Movement in Byzantine Egypt’, in literature and Society in the Early Byzantine World (London 1985) 471–509 Google Scholar.

6. See footnote 10 below.

7. This would presumably be the stage at which all the ‘lost’ Byzantine poems were destroyed by the poet.

8. Savidis, G.P., (Athens 1987) 93–99 Google Scholar.

9. Haas, Diana, ‘Cavafy’s Reading Notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’, Folia Neohellenica 4 (1982) 25–96 Google Scholar. In her thesis, Haas also discusses the importance of Paparrigopoulos to Cavafy’s view of Byzantine history. For a short version of this discussion, see Haas, Diana, , in S.P. Spartses (ed.), 1983 (Athens 1984) 183–195 Google Scholar.

10. See Savidis, G.P., (Athens 1966) 137 Google Scholar. See also Haas, Diana, 5/6 (Athens April 1983) (Cavafy commemorative volume) 589–608 Google Scholar. The so-called ‘Thematic Catalogue’ (there is no indication that the term is the poet’s) remains unpublished in the Cavafy Archive. It is not available for inspection.

11. A photocopied reproduction of the page (or part of a page) laconically headed ’ appears in Diana Haas, 79. Although the poet’s handwriting is not unclear, the combination of his idiosyncratic abbreviations with the mass of scorings out makes it difficult to decipher. From the photocopy, Cavafy appears to have scored out the first, third, fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth and tenth of the poems listed.

12. See G.P. Savidis, 107.

13. In using the terms ‘canon’ and ‘unpublished poems’, I am following the well-established convention, whereby the former refers to the two-volume edition of Cavafy’s poems (edited by G.P. Savidis; first published in 1963, and revised in 1991) and the latter to poems which Cavafy chose not to publish, but did not disown (edited by G.P. Savidis, [Athens 1977]). Savidis has also edited and published a volume of Cavafy’s so-called ‘disowned poems’ ( [Athens 1983]) and a further volume which combines the unpublished and disowned poems, adding eight subsequently discovered texts to them [Athens 1993]).

14. Diana Haas, Le problème religieux … 38, eventually reaches the same conclusion, but by a different route, arguing that Cavafy knew Eudocia’s history from Paparrigopoulos. This may be the case, but it is nonetheless Gibbon who emphasises Eudocia’s title and its exclusivity. The proximity of Eudocia, the popes and the crusaders in Gibbon cannot be discounted in this context.

15. Savidis translates as ‘claims’ in ‘Gibbon, Cavafy and Byzantium’ 95; I am suggesting, instead, that Cavafy is using the word to render Gibbon’s ‘pretensions’.

16. Diana Haas argues that Cavafy experienced a crisis of poetic consciousness during the years 1899-1903, followed by purges and revisions of all his work to date; according to G.P. Savidis, this crisis was related to Cavafy’s reading of Gibbon (‘Gibbon, Cavafy and Byzantium’, 96). I would suggest that Cavafy was re-reading Gibbon, at this time, in the light of Paparrigopoulos, rather than encountering Gibbon for the first time after reading Paparrigopoulos.

17. Diana Haas, 184.

18. Savidis, G.P., ‘Cavafy, Gibbon and Byzantium’, 95 Google Scholar.

19. For a useful discussion of Cavafy’s Julian poems, see Bowerstock, G.W., ‘The Julian Poems of C.P. Cavafy’, BMGS 7 (1981) 89–104 Google Scholar.

20. Although Cavafy kept a note of ‘Poems written in Katharevousa’ (see, for example, the editor’s notes to C.P. Cavafy: Unpublished Poems, 215), the distinction between such poems and the rest of his mature oeuvre is by no means clear cut; it is a question, rather, of degree.

21. See especially 137. See also Hirst, Anthony, ‘Historical, Philosphical, Sensual: an examination of Cavafy’s thematic collections’, BMGS 19 (1995) 33–93 Google Scholar.

22. In a letter to Napoleon Lapathiotis, quoted in G.P. Savidis, , 63.

23. Hirst also calls attention to the high level of lexical echoing between the two poems, ibid.

24. This view is shared by Hatziphotis, who states that Cavafy is writing ‘with genuine pride of the great honours of our race [and] of our glorious Byzantinism’. See Hatziphotis, I.M., (Athens 1993) 77 Google Scholar.

25. Haas refers to as an example of a religious poem, see Le problème religieux …, Avant propos.

26. See, however, Agapitos, Panagiotis A., ‘Byzantium in the Poetry of Palamas and Cavafy’, 2 (1994) 1–20 Google Scholar, in which three of Cavafy’s later Byzantine poems are briefly discussed. Agapitos points out that Cavafy’s source for is Choniates (14-15).

27. Here, indeed, as Haas has argued, Cavafy would seem to be following Paparrigopoulos as an apologist for Byzantium. This cannot, however, be assumed to be the case in the earlier, lost Byzantine poems, whose Western perspective is clear from their titles.

28. The order of the poems under the headings is taken from the editor’s notes to C.P. Cavafy: Unpublished Poems; we cannot, however, be certain that the ordering is the poet’s, since the relevant manuscripts remain unpublished.

29. Agapitos argues that Paparrigopoulos is Cavafy’s primary source for this poem, ibid. 18.

30. Diana Haas, , 192.

31. Anne Comnène, Aléxiade, ed. Leib, B. (Paris 1967) II, v.9.3 (38)Google Scholar.

32. Beaton, R.M., ‘The History Man’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 10/1-2 (Spring-Summer 1983) 23–44 Google Scholar.

33. Savides, G.P., , 137 Google Scholar.

34. Ricks, David, The Shade of Homer (Cambridge 1983)Google Scholar. See also Ricks, David, ‘Cavafy the Poet-Historian’, BMGS 12 (1988) 169–183 Google Scholar.