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The Julian Poems of C. P. Cavafy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

G.W. Bowersock
G.W. Bowersock*
Affiliation:
The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
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Extract

The publication of five poems, hitherto unknown, by the poet Cavafy - all on the theme of Julian the Apostate - and the projected edition of his reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall illuminate not only the poet’s obsession with Julian but also the principles of his craft. It is perhaps not too presumptuous for an historian to attempt an assessment of Cavafy’s work on Julian in the light of the rich new material, for he is said himself to have declared that he was an historical poet: This remark finds confirmation in a critique from May 1927, written earlier by the poet or by a sympathetic associate, with a threefold categorization of Cavafy’s oeuvre into Of the sensual and historical categories it is said that there is sometimes so great a degree of overlapping that classification becomes difficult but not impossible. Several of the Julian poems prove this point.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 7 , 1981 , pp. 89 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1981

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References

1. The five new poems appear in the present issue of BMGS in an editio princeps prepared by Renata Lavagnini. Also of use to me was Diana Haas’s unpublished article, ‘Cavafy’s Reading Notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’. I am grateful to both these scholars for their generosity in showing me their work before publication; and I am likewise grateful to my friend and former colleague, George Savidis, for first drawing my attention to the new poems in the Cavafy archive. Savidis and I gave them their world première at a talk to the Shop Club of Harvard University on 20 Dec. 1979. Savidis’ son, Manolis Savidis, undertook, with his father’s permission and mine, to offer a study of the Julian poems as his term paper in my last Harvard course, Historical Studies B-11 (‘The Christianization of the Roman World’), in the spring of 1980. His paper was full of valuable observations and citations, proving that a mastery of Cavafy’s work continues in the Savidis family. I am glad to acknowledge my debt to this paper. Finally I owe thanks to Edmund Keeley for his helpful comments on the present study as well as for more wide-ranging discussion of Cavafy.

2. Lechonitis, G., 2nd ed. (Athens, 1977), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

3. Savidis, G. P., (Athens, 1966), pp. 209–10 Google Scholar. Cf. the translation of this critique in Edmund Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 186–7.

4. Ibid.

5. For the dates of the published poems, see the annotations by Savidis, G. P. ad loc. in C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar, translated by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard, edited by G. P. Savidis. For the dates of the new poems, see R. Lavagnini’s edition in the present issue of BMGS.

6. Diana Haas hopes to publish her article in the near future.

7. Gibbon had referred to ‘the loose invectives of Gregory’, on which Cavafy responded, with accompanying quotations, ‘No artist - the word is not misplaced here - had spoken so boldly before’. For the article of 1892: Cavafy, C. P., (Athens, 1963), p. 49 Google Scholar, as noted by Haas in her article.

8. Cited by Haas.

9. Savidis, G. P., ed., 1882–1923 (Athens, 1968), p. 172 Google Scholar. On Cavafy’s Christianity, see Liddell, R., Cavafy (London, 1974), pp. 205–6 Google Scholar (wearing a cross around his neck, waiting for the patriarchal procession on Good Friday, the last sacraments) as well as Keeley, op. cit. (n. 3 above), p. 184. Savidis’ paper on Cavafy’s Christianity is fundamental, (Athens, 1973), pp. 115–20.

10. E.g., or variants of this title (1892), (1898).

11. (n. 3 above), p. 195. On the confessional notes, see also Liddell (n. 9 above), pp. 72–3. The unpublished material, in the possession of George Savidis, is cited by his son Manolis in stressing the importance of late 1911 as a turning point in Cavafy’s life. In April 1913, Cavafy turned 50. This seems to have been a mid-life crisis with liberating results.

12. On the nature of Cavafy’s work and sexual life from 1911, see Liddell (n. 9), pp. 155–71. The importance of the change in 1911–12 seems to be generally recognized. Cf. Seferis, G., A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945–1951 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), p. 139 CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘Up to a fairly advanced age (maturity), Cavafy seems to remain at a very low level; he seems to be unable to rise above a certain very mediocre ceiling (as it is called in aviation, ceiling, plafond). What happens at and beyond a certain point? How does he cross that threshold? Here’s a question that interests me - not only about Cavafy but in general’. Cf. Seferis’, 3rd ed. (Athens, 1974), I, p. 328 Google Scholar on Cavafy’s work after 1910 as one and the same poem in progress.

13. Cf. Seferis, A Poet’s Journal (n. 12 above), p. 137: ‘Julian represents a problem for Cavafy, he is a splinter on the horizon…. He is worse than a problem; he is a sort of illegal competitor’.

14.

15. Butcher, E. L., The Story of the Church in Egypt (London, 1897), I, p. 185.Google Scholar

16. In fact, the story is in MPG, XXVI, cols. 980C-81C.

17. Julian, 131A (p. 101 Budé).

18. Gregory in MPG XXXV, col. 549; Allard, P., Julien l’Apostat I (Paris, 1900), p. 263 Google Scholar. It is worth noting that Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. 19 ad init. gives Julian’s age at the time of the massacre as six; Allard also gives it as six, but Migne, in a note, says seven. Socrates (MPG, LXVII, 369) and Sozomen (LXVII, 1213) both give the age as eight. Cavafy’s poem has Julian at six.

19. Amm. Marc. 15.8.22: Tunc anus quaedam orba luminibus… exclamavit hunc deorum templa reparaturum. In the long form of the title Cavafy’s handwriting is unclear: templa or templis could be read, but the presence of reparaturum seems decisive to me.

20. Cf. Savidis, G. P. in Cavafy’s Collected Poems (n. 5 above), p. 430.Google Scholar

21. MPG, XXXV, cols. 577 ff.

22. Gibbon, E., Decline and Fall, eh. 23, Everyman ed., vol. 2, p. 367.Google Scholar

23. Allard (n. 18 above), vol. I, pp. 330–2. In her note 64 Diana Haas rightly raised the possibility of Allard’s discussion as the explanation of Cavafy’s change of title.

24. Allard (n. 18), vol. I, p. 347. Cf. Julian, Epist. 19, 79B (pp. 85–7 Budé).

25. Lavagnini, p. 76 (above).

26. Malanos, T., (Athens, 1957), p. 123 Google Scholar: Cf. Liddell, op. cit. (n. 9 above), p. 197.

27. Julian, Epist. 89B (p. 154 Budé): does not mean ‘seeing contempt’ but rather ‘seeing neglect (indifference, slighting)’ of the cults of pagan deities. Poem no. 5 is also based on Julian’s remarks to Arsacius in Epist. 84B (pp. 144–7 Budé).

28. Julian, Misop. 357A.

29. Sozomen 5.18.

30. Greg. Naz. in MPG, XXXV, cols. 551 and 632.

31. See notes 65 and 66 in Diana Haas’s article. Compare Gregory’s words (MPG, XXXV, 551)

32. Cf. Savidis in Collected Poems (n. 5 above), p. 424; also (n. 9 above), p. 172.

33. Theodoret 3.22. Cf. Sozomen 6.4 and Greg, in MPG, XXXV, cols. 708–12, all cited by Diana Haas in her note 69.

34. For Salutius, cf. Bowersock, G. W., Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 44–5 Google Scholar; for the proclamation at Paris, ibid., pp. 46–54.

35. See Libanius, Oral. 18.120; Mamertinus, Panegyric 27.5; and Greg. Naz. in MPG, XXXV, col. 685.

36. Amm. Marc. 22.3.7: ipsa mihi videtw flesse Iustitia.

37. On this affair, Bowersock, op. cit. (n. 34 above), pp. 88–90.

38. See Koch, W., ‘Comment l’empereur Julien tâcha de fonder une église païenne’, Revue beige de philologie et d histoire, VI (1927) and VII (1928)Google Scholar, published in four installments.

39. See Bowersock, G. W. in Gibbon et Rome à la lumière de i’historiographie moderne, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Lausanne, XXII (1977), pp. 210–12.Google Scholar

40. Amm. Marc. 22.9.15.

41. Polymnia Athanassiadi-Fowden, JTS, XXX (1979), 331–2.

42. Greg. Naz. in MPG, XXXV, col. 536A-B. The partisan effort to identify Hellenism with paganism may well go back to the Neoplatonist teachers Porphyry (on whom Cavafy wrote an early poem, now lost [note 10 above]) and Iamblichus.

43. Malanos reported that Cavafy once said to Stratis Tsirkas, Malanos, T. (Alexandria, 1935), p. 56 Google Scholar. On this remark see E. Keeley, op. cit. (n. 3 above), p. 111.