This article’s title is a sweeping one, but this is in fact a discussion of just two poems by Cavafy — and both of those on mythological subjects. The aim is, in a small way, to bridge the gap between myth and history in Cavafy’s poetry; the title hints that this is by way of a respectful response to D.N. Maronitis’ valuable survey, ‘C.P. Cavafy: a poet-reader’ (Maronitis 1983a). It is also, of course, an adaptation of the term which Cavafy is said to have used of himself, . As a recent discussion has pointed out, this could mean ‘poet-historian’ or ‘historical poet’ (Beaton 1983); here I shall be mining the term with this particular emphasis: that Cavafy was a reader of history as well as of poetry, and that his poems bear the traces of historical texts. This may sound like news from nowhere; but I believe that I have something new to say about these two poems, which one has grown used to categorizing automatically as ‘mythological’. They are Amoxia (1901) and ‘Amoxia (1904) (Cavafy 1981: 1. 102, 109-110).