[In the following essay, Maronitis provides a close textual and historical study of Cavafy's poem “Darius.”]

In times like ours, when history is produced and written by machines with human appendages, of what use can the poet's voice be?

In a small, poor country like ours, where land, seas, and men are transformed by the electronic computers of the powerful into programs of war, economic, and tourist policies, what can be salvaged by the few words selected by the poet's diffused senses?

In such a critical time as that of our land today, when the daily word is paid for dearly, why should the poet's voice make his and our guilty survival official?

I ask these three naive questions not to stimulate the superficial anxiety of the pseudo-sensitive, nor to indicate the way to resolve meta-physical lassitude, but in order to define the three kinds of prisons in which people of our century live, whether they understand it or not.

The first prison still has many comforts; its wounds are so well-decorated that it is hard to distinguish the howl from profiteering and advertising. The second trap is more familiar, since we have been in it for several years. Our present cell, however, is of the third kind: in it we live our own and other people's history, in it we keep vigil and wish for clean air and water.

Still, some people, with open eyes and sober mind, have shouted, and are still shouting, that it is very easy to pass from the first to the second prison, and from the second to the third. As they saw the space around them narrowing and closing, they quite early began to use a symbolic warning language, the prisoners' language. They knocked at closed doors, they wrote signal dates on the wall, they tested their biological reflexes: whether the sun still provides them with its driblets of optimism, whether the night does not paralyze their mind with its motorized nightmares, whether their dreams retain their sharp and threatening meaning, whether their memory is still pensive and hard, dwelling on whatever good or evil was said and done by our dead and our living. They asked and keep asking who are they who think they have the right to grab their daily food, sleep, and love in the name of history, of the ghosts of the past, or of the visions of the future.

And the poet? It depends on the kind of prison he is in; on whether his land had trained him in the symbolic language of prisoners; on whether he himself had the sincerity, the courage, and the art to carry that language even further and deeper; on whether his biological reflexes functioned well.

In our own land there has been no dearth of poets. It is the job of our poetry's scholars to study whether and how this symbolic language has grown and how far it has reached inside modern Greek poetry. In this essay, we shall dwell on a single poet, dead forty years, who knew that language well and practiced it correctly. I am referring to Constantine Cavafy, the Alexandrian, and, more specifically to one poem of his: “Darius,” one of the best known and most timely these days. It is a portrait fashioned around 1920 which narrates in tragicomic tone the poet's confusion as he is caught in the hooks of history. A poet in a cage, and the cage caught in a net; the poet a prisoner of his poetic idea, at the moment Roman legionnaires are preparing to catch him as well as his country in their net. An old-fashioned person would have given that portrait the title, “The Poet and History.” For us, too, this title is convenient. Yet, before going into our main topic, we must provide a few explanations to assure better communication.

Usually, when we speak of history, we think of it as dealing with the past, and see there its beginning or even its end. Actually, the reverse is true: history begins with today and moves toward tomorrow. We only link it with the past to derive help from the experience of others in fashioning our own fate, today and tomorrow, and not idly to contemplate and forget ourselves in what our ancient ancestors did. Some might say that if history is brought into the present, it risks becoming identified with current journalistic events. No. A clear and well-trained mind dwells on those events of the present which, by their magnitude and significance, will feed tomorrow's historical science. We would not dare call history our own loves, our marriage, or even our own physical death. But war or refugee migration, occupation or slavery, famine and mass death, violence and lack of freedom, these we call history, and rightly so. When we refer then to the poet's—or anyone's—historical consciousness, we mean his reaction to the deep wounds of our collective life, to those great waves which you cannot avoid even if you want to, even if you are a coward or a traitor.

The poet's historical consciousness is judged therefore by this common measure, which applies to everyone else, and by a second criterion: how and to what degree the critical historical event of the present is absorbed, transformed, and projected in the poetic work. The poet's political activity is the biographer's and the historian's domain. (His private life is nobody's concern, although recently it has become fashionable for psychologists and scandalmongers to deal with it, too.) The literary critic's task lies principally in the crystallized poetic work, which can be seen in two ways: either totally severed from the umbilical cord joining it to the poet, or in its immediate relation to its creator. I do not know which is best. The first way appears to me simpler and more natural, although affording greater probability for misunderstandings. The second, for those who have the means and time to follow it, appears more certain and more scientific, but leads, sooner or later, into a poetry that needs the crutches of critical interpretation, a poetry for the few and chosen. Our present topic however is more concrete: when we interpret a poem we should not forget that a good poem contains in itself the elements necessary to judge whether there is a gap between the poet's life and his writing, or whether they are consistent, and to what degree. Knowledge of the poet's life and activity does not alter this reality.

The reader may well wonder exactly why I chose Cavafy's “Darius.” I would reply: because I believe that this poem takes the bull by the horns, and provides a very clear and wise answer to our question about the relation between the poet and the critical historical events of his time and place. Of course, there are other answers as well in modern Greek poetry: Dionysius Solomos' answer, for instance (especially in the last, “antipoetic,” part of his “Hymn to Liberty”), appears to lie at the antipodes of Cavafy's; on the other hand, George Seferis' poetry, with the “Old Man at the Riverside” as its main signal, defines a third position, differing from the preceding two; finally, Odysseas Elytis' apologetic attitude toward the same problem, which appears most clearly in Axion Esti, is of equal interest. I should confess that my initial intention was to define and comment on all four positions, the one next to the other; but this would carry my study too far and require a book to do it. I limited myself, therefore, to Cavafy's “Darius,” which, I believe, remains, fifty years after its composition, a good and clear mirror where all of us—including our poets—can see our reflection. It may be that the image the mirror offers is not very comforting, but on the other hand it is truthful, even today—and that is important.

Lastly, I would like to explain my concern in this study with well-known and established names of our poetry—do I lack the courage to judge younger and more contemporary voices? In this instance, we need poems that do not deliberately belong to “engaged” poetry, so as not to come up against just or unjust prejudices; moreover, we need poems whose identity is known and easily perceived by all; finally, our very recent poetry cannot be deciphered without violent and hasty gestures, and it is useful to avoid these here. And now to Cavafy and his “Darius.”

Cavafy's historical consciousness can be subject to several interpretations. Not a few believe, and have maintained in their writings, that Cavafy's historicism (and, by extension, his symbolism) constitutes a conscious means of concealment, a fabricated alibi for the poet, to cover up personal wounds and, more concretely, his unorthodox sexuality. The leader of this psychoanalytical interpretation is Timos Malanos, who has devoted much time and effort to the Alexandrian poet's work, trying to interpret a poetry which at bottom repelled and scandalized him. Cavafy's concern with history was perceived more profoundly and more carefully by some recent students, Greek as well as foreign. According to them, history, in its daily flow or in its scholarly crystallization, constitutes the hinterland of Cavafy's poetry, the fertile soil in which the poet deposits his personal experiences and his individual feelings (not exclusively the sexual ones), awaiting later, sometimes for long years, the outcome of that sowing; if the plant that finally sprouts satisfies him, he embalms it in a poem—otherwise he buries it again. In addition to these somewhat general and vague comments, I should like to refer the reader more concretely to three interpretations given. Each illuminates Cavafy's historicism from a different angle; all three together show clearly the meaning, function, and high degree of sensitivity of the poet's historical consciousness.

The first interpretation is that of C. M. Bowra; it is found in an otherwise rather mediocre essay devoted to the Alexandrian poet.¹ I detach and quote here one paragraph which touches on a very important problem of the literature of our century, within the framework of which Bowra places Cavafy's historicism.

The poet needs symbols and myths to give individual form to his indeterminate thoughts. If he shrinks, as he well may, from abstractions because they are too vague and in the end too false, he must have symbols to convey his meaning in its fullness. This has not always been a serious problem. The ancient Greek poets had in their incomparable mythology images and symbols for any situation. Dante had hardly less in the coherent theology of mediaeval Christianity: even the Renaissance and the eighteenth century had in their revived classical myths something which served many useful purposes. But the modern world has no such coherent and recognized system. When Mallarmé set out to compose an entirely symbolical poetry, he found his symbols in his own experience, with the result that many of his readers are unable to catch his full meaning or his exact intonations. Other poets have seen the difficulty and tried to meet it by creating or adopting coherent mythologies. What Yeats found for a time in old Irish legends, what Eliot found for The Waste Land in figures and events from anthropology, Cavafy found much less laboriously in the Hellenistic past.

This is Bowra's interpretation; it indicates, although somewhat flabbily, the beginnings of Cavafy's historicism or better, of his mythology.

George Seferis has given the second interpretation in an essay entitled “C. P. Cavafy, T. S. Eliot: Parallels.” Commenting on Eliot's famous phrase concerning the “objective correlative,” which a poet must seek in his work, he adds:

What Eliot is saying I imagine, is that in order to be able to express his emotion the poet has to find a setting of situations, a framework of events, a form-type, which will be like the sights of a rifle; when the senses are “sighted” in this way they will find themselves directed at the particular emotion. The framework of events in the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, or Antony and Cleopatra, for example (and I mean not only the plot of these works, but also, and mainly, the psychology and pattern of behavior of their characters) is the “objective correlative” of the special emotion which Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare wish to express; the objective correlative is a tool of accuracy.

Cavafy seems to be constantly using this method; and as the years pass, he seems to reject altogether the unframed expression of emotion.²

I would like to continue this quotation to make Seferis' interpretation even clearer but the phrase quoted adequately explains that Cavafy's historicism was not a mere cloak for psychological inadequacy. And so I move to the third interpretation.

This is provided by Stratis Tsirkas in his large and valuable book on Cavafy and His Times (Athens, 1958). One may object to many points in this book, yet its importance is great, because it shows, not generally and vaguely but on unshakable evidence, how unself-centered was Cavafy's poetry (at least until 1911), how closely tied it was to concrete events of the period and of the poet's city, how the historical dimension of his work is born, and how it takes form. Somewhere in the middle of his book, a little before examining the poem “Expecting the Barbarians,” in a methodological chapter entitled “The Three Keys” (pp. 315-320), Tsirkas defines those three keys as follows:

The basic motif, at least in Cavafy's moralistic poems, is of course given by the contemporary real event. We shall call this the second key or the second source. The first key, which in its intensity covers the second, is the literary source, the historical event. The third key is still lower; only the trained ear can still hear it. This key suggests, it does not declare; precisely because of this its effect is slower but also more persistent. Its source lies in the poet's experiences, in the psychical event.

(p. 318)

Naturally the term “key” is used here in its musicological sense. A little later, Tsirkas uses an image to describe the way the three keys function simultaneously in Cavafy's poetry.

The harmonic correspondence of the three keys provides depth to Cavafy's poem. Depth in time; depth in vision; depth in thought; depth in emotion. The first two keys (the concrete incident and the literary source) operate like two mirrors facing one another: they create the sense of an endless perspective. Between the two mirrors the poet raises his lamp, his psychical ego. Its most minute movement reveals new worlds, still deeper, even more distant. Nevertheless, all these efforts toward the ideal goal never break down the consciousness of reality. This multiplication of the ego, while giving the impression of a great crowd behind the subject, offers at the same time the confirmation of its real presence in countless facsimiles.

(p. 320)

Finally, I add a fourth interpretation, the poet's own; after the preceding three we can perceive its true meaning. In the last years of his life, Cavafy used to say: “I am a historical poet; I could never write a novel or a play; but I feel inside me a hundred and twenty-five voices telling me that I could write history.” What kind of history? The reading of “Darius” will show.

“DARIUS”³

Phernazis the poet is at work
on the important part of his epic:
how Darius, son of Hystaspes,
took over the Persian kingdom.
(It's from him, Darius, that our glorious king,
Mithridates, Dionysus and Eupartor, descends.)(4)
But this calls for serious thought; he has to analyze
the feelings Darius must have had:
arrogance, maybe, and intoxication? But no—more likely
a certain insight into the vanities of greatness.
The poet ponders the matter deeply.
But his servant, running in,
cuts him short to announce very important news.
The war with the Romans has begun.
Most of our army has crossed the borders.
The poet is dumbfounded. What a disaster!
How can our glorious king,
Mithridates, Dionysus and Eupator,
bother about Greek poems now?
In the middle of a war—just think, Greek poems!
Phernazis gets worked up. What a bad break!
Just when he was sure to distinguish himself
with his Darius, sure to make
his envious critics shut up once and for all.
What a postponement, terrible postponement of his plans.
And if it's only a postponement, that would be fine.
But are we really safe in Amisus?
The town isn't very well fortified,
and the Romans are the most awful enemies.
Are we, Cappadocians, really a match for them?
Is it conceivable?
Are we to compete with the legions?
Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.
But through all his distress and agitation
the poetic idea comes and goes insistently:
arrogance and intoxication—that's the most likely, of course:
arrogance and intoxication is what Darius must have felt.

Perhaps it is enough just to listen to the poem, once or several times. If we do not limit ourselves to that, letting the poem approach us by its own autonomous movement, if we seek instead the assistance of the biographer, the historian, and the philologist, then, I fear, our misfortune and confusion will be no less than those of the poet Phernazis. For almost all the tools needed to put into effect Tsirkas' three keys are missing: namely:

• (a) We know nothing concerning the network of concrete events on which the poet exercised this particular poetic phantasy (Tsirkas' second key).
• (b) Nor is the literary source of the poem determined, so that its careful reading and comparison to Cavafy's text may show its place and its function in the poem (Tsirkas' first key).
• (c) Finally, while in some other poems of Cavafy's the psychical event (Tsirkas' third key) can be perceived through certain signal words of the poem or even through its omissions, “Darius” is a completely enclosed stage set, letting no whisper—or hardly any—from behind the scenes reach our ears.

To these essential deficiencies, a “pedantic” philologist might add a few more: in studying the form of the poem and trying, through its chinks, to perceive the hidden substance, he would seek at least three kinds of critical studies, which are in fact missing from the otherwise rich bibliography on Cavafy. More concretely:

• (a) There is no chart in which the poems are classified according to their linguistic form. Let me explain. “Darius” is written in a third-person objective narration; but how many and which other poems by Cavafy follow this particular form? Furthermore, how many and which project the first-person singular, whether authentic or fictional? For instance, “The Walls” is composed in an authentic first-person, whereas the “Melancholy of Jason Cleander” refracts, by its title, the first-person singular into a third person. Another series of poems shows a preference for the second-person singular. Why and to what extent does this happen in Cavafy's poetry? Finally, one would wish to know which of his poems use a genuine first-person plural (as in the “Interruption”) and which use it as an alibi (whether in the verb or in the use of the pronoun “our”), thus rendering, in ambiguous fashion, the poet and the reader accomplices in the poem's mise en scène. This is the case, for instance, in “Herodes Atticus,” in the line, “Alexander from Seleuceia, one of our good sophists,” or in the lines of “Darius,” “from him … our glorious king … descends.”
• (b) Also lacking in the bibliography on Cavafy is a study which would investigate carefully the use and meaning of the word “poet” in his poems. A hasty glance shows that Cavafy attributes this title with great care to himself and to some of his fictional personages. In most cases, however, he uses synonomous or related words, located nearer or farther away from the word “poet,” but in no case exact substitutes for it: technician, artisan, artist, sculptor; and, further, sophist, grammarian, orator, scholar, and so on.
• (c) Finally, in order to assess the character of the poet Phernazis, we would need a study of the professional artist's role in Cavafy's poetry; as in the case of the subjects of such poems as “Dionysus' Escort,” “Sculptor from Tyaneia,” and “Philhellene.”

I stop listing omissions because the reader might rightly accuse me of “arrogance and intoxication”; still, what I am asking for are the tools necessary in any research that aspires to avoid improvisation. Let us see now what we do have: I. The poem itself; II. The date of its composition (1920); III. Historical sources referring to Mithridates and his wars with the Romans, or to King Darius and the events, in history and anecdote, which brought him to the throne. I begin in reverse order, from end to beginning.

III. THE HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK.

With the exception of the poet, Phernazis, who both as a name and as a person appears to have been pure invention on the part of Cavafy, the other persons, events, and things in the poem (Darius, Mithridates and his wars with the Romans, the Cappadocians and Amisus) are authentic elements of history.

Concerning Darius, the Persian king (522-486 b.c.), who founded a new royal dynasty by replacing the last descendant of the dynasty of Cyrus through conspiracy, I refer to Herodotus (III, 61-81).

Concerning Mithridates VI, Eupator (126-63 b.c.), the Hellenized king of Pontus, who fought the Romans in the East with persistence and initially not without success, there are many references in ancient and later historical sources. They mention his strategic ability (never impeded, apparently, by moral principle), his linguistic ability, and his habituation to poison (the latter made it necessary for him, when at the last moment he wanted to kill himself, to resort to the sword of a Celtic mercenary—poisons could not affect him any more). The main sources are Appian's Roman History (book XII) and Plutarch's Pompey. These sources describe in detail the three wars associated with his name (86-63 b.c.), whose protagonists were, on the Roman side, Sulla, Murena, and Pompey, and on Mithridates' side, himself, Archelaus, and others. In addition to Plutarch and Appian, we find information on Mithridates, his activities, and his tragic end, in Strabo, Cicero, Diodorus, Dio Cassius, Athenaeus, and other later authors.

It is not easy to determine the exact fictional date of the poem; if we take line 14 literally, then we must be at the beginning of the First Mithridatic War, at the time of Sulla's campaign (86 b.c.). George Savvidis speculates that the fictional date of the poem is 74 b.c., that is, during the Second Mithridatic War, when the battle scene moved from mainland Greece to Asia Minor and the Pontus. I suppose that Savvidis was led to his guess by line 15, which is ambiguous, and by the fact that the poem needs a more dramatic moment for Cappadocia than that which 86 b.c. would provide. For the poem itself, the matter is of no particular significance. As for Amisus, we know that it fell to the Romans in 71 b.c.

A more substantive question concerns the concrete historical source or sources which Cavafy utilized in staging the historical framework of “Darius.” This is not an easy topic and requires systematic research. From a hasty comparison of the ancient sources and Cavafy's text, I am led to the supposition that Cavafy knew, directly or indirectly, the relevant narration of Appian. My hypothesis is based mainly on two details of expression which bring Cavafy's “Darius” close to Appian's narration. One is Mithridates' titles, “Dionysus and Eupator”; we can read both together in Appian: “And he was succeeded by his son, Mithridates, whose names were Dionysus and Eupator” (XII, 2, 10). The second, more indicative detail relates to Mithridates' descent from Darius. We read in Appian (XII, 16, 112): “And Mithridates died, being the eleventh descendant from Darius, son of Hystaspes, of the Persians.” This detail I did not find anywhere except in Appian; however, because I did not investigate all secondary sources, my hypothesis may well be proven totally unfounded.

The name of the fictional Phernazis, which Savvidis considers Persian, cannot be found in Pâpe's dictionary. Did Cavafy invent this too? Or did he know it from another source, a non-Greek one? If the former were true, then the only name which sounds similar to that of Phernazis and which has some relation to Mithridates is Pharnaces; this was the name of Mithridates' son, the one who betrayed him to Pompey. Is Cavafy playing with this name? Perhaps.

II. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND.

The date of composition, or only of publication, of “Darius” is, as we said, 1920. What was happening in Alexandria at that time that stimulated Cavafy to write “Darius”? Unfortunately Tsirkas' valuable study, which relates historical events in Alexandria, and more generally in Egypt, with concrete poems by Cavafy, stops at 1911. Indeed Tsirkas appears to believe that from 1911 on, after the British occupation, Cavafy was disillusioned with the Greek community's affairs, and ceased his poetic dialogue with his city's historical background. I do not know if he is right. Personally, in many of Cavafy's poems written after 1911 I feel a historical pulse which cannot be explained if Tsirkas' hypothesis were admitted. Let us hope that Tsirkas will continue his research into the more mature poems of Cavafy, thus the echoes of Alexandrian history will become clearer and more concrete in the poet's later production as well. For the time being, since we have no help on this point, we have nothing more specific to base “Darius” on than the political wartime confusion which dominated the Balkans in 1920.

I. THE POEM.

We shall start with certain observations concerning morphology, in the hope that this is the safest way to approach the poem's substance. First, punctuation.

1. Naturally I have not changed the punctuation of the poem.⁵ However, when a researcher is dealing with as characteristic a lack of orthodoxy in punctuation as that of Cavafy, his duty does not stop there. There is no doubt that punctuation in Cavafy is less syntactic (that is to say, it is concerned less with logical sequence) and more phonetic (it suggests, that is, to the person who will read, or better will recite, the poem a wholly binding manner for the expression of the poetic word). Through his punctuation the poet stages a scene; he does not allow the actor any arbitrary gesture. I am referring here not only to his famous dashes or parentheses but even to the manner in which he places a comma or a period. To attempt an analytical assessment of the punctuation of the entire poem would take us too far. I will mention only two examples to justify the emphasis I put on these general considerations. The first example concerns the comma or rather the two commas which [in the Greek text] isolate the adjective “envious” from the substantive preceding it, “critics,” and the adverbial phrase that follows it, “once and for all” [line 24 in the translation]. The second example relates to the unexpected period after the word “confound” [in the translation the effect described occurs with the period after “all”]. It emphasizes the content of lines 22-24 by turning into a main sentence what we had expected to be subordinate. This is not merely a matter of keeping the reader's voice in suspense; if the poet wanted to achieve that, he would have used suspension points. What occurs is a sudden lowering of the voice, a complete stop, prior to our hearing the exclamatory sentence of line 25.
2. “Darius,” as we have already stressed, is syntactically organized in a third-person narration. The poet is narrator and commentator as is shown clearly by lines 1-4, 11, 13-14, 16, 21, and 34-35 (on line 16 the poet's voice stops at “dumbfounded,” and on line 21 before the words “What a bad break”). But what exactly is happening in the rest of the poem? For instance, who speaks the lines within the first parenthesis? The poet? Phernazis? Or is there a third, invisible prompter? And how should we hear lines 14-15, without the quotation marks which would have allowed us to attribute them directly to a messenger? Who is the intermediary? The poet? Or Phernazis? And especially in lines 16-33 (without quotation marks, either), who gathers and communicates to us these confessed and unconfessed thoughts of Phernazis? Finally, who deciphers the last thought of Phernazis at the poem's climax? There is no doubt, I think, that, as a whole, the poem functions theatrically. Cavafy is the stage director and in part the actor; we are the audience, and at times his coactors; Phernazis himself—with the visions of his inspiration at the start, with the echo of the war's announcement in his ears afterward, and again alone at the end, until the conclusion—grimaces more than he speaks; he acts out a kind of pantomine while his words and thoughts reach us through the interposition of a prompter, who is not always and necessarily to be identified with the poet. Several students of Cavafy have said that in the technique of his poems the poet follows the teachings of the Alexandrian mimes of Herondas. Perhaps they are not wrong.
3. That morphological observation may help us pass to a more substantive question. It was Seferis, I believe, who first compared Cavafy to the sea-demon of the Odyssey, old Proteus, who changed forms, one after the other, in order not to betray his secrets and his identity. To tame him and to get from him certain, rather unpleasant, information, Menelaus needed the help of Proteus' daughter, Eidothea. Seferis' comparison goes straight to the point: Cavafy, like Proteus, does not give himself easily. Just when we think we hear his voice, we suddenly realize that what comes to our ears is only its echo from another room. The poet is usually absent from his poems; in his place there is an image, easily changeable and ultimately intangible. This is what happens in “Darius” as well: Cavafy sketches in the poem the portrait of a colleague of his, the poet Phernazis, in a staged historical moment. This fictional poet has his own manners in the poem and his own character. However, what is the relation between the fictitious poet and the other poet, the creator to whom he owes his existence? The question remains in suspense in the poem. Or rather, before we have time to ask, Cavafy throws the question back: what is the relation between Phernazis and us? Thus, Phernazis, silent in reality, serves in the poem as a mirror: whoever looks into it sees, before everything else, his own face—whether he be a poet or a simple reader. There is then no other solution for us but to study the features of this face, which is equidistant from Cavafy and from us.
4. Before looking at Phernazis' face, we must heed the conditions established in the poem for the operation of our perception. The poem has many levels of perspective. At the very rear of the stage stands Darius, hypothetical ancestor of Mithridates. In front of him moves the poet Phernazis, along with his contemporary persons and events (Mithridates, the silenced messenger, the scarcely visible but threatening legionnaires of Rome). A third level in the poem is determined by the narrator Cavafy, holding in his hands the date of the composition: 1920. Finally, in front of all that perfect staging stands the listener to the poem, part participant in its action, a changing person, each time with a different chronological identity. How does Phernazis' face appear through all these refractions?

When the poem begins Phernazis is busy working on his epic. He is writing about Darius. It is his intention to exalt thus indirectly the country's king, Mithridates, already laden with many glories; another glory to be added now, by emphasizing his descent from the great Darius. Is, then, Phernazis a mere sycophant, a flatterer of the powerful? Let us not hasten to draw such an easy conclusion; if so, a similar judgment should also fall on Pindar himself and on many other significant and famous poets of ancient, or even of more recent, times. Let us say, rather, that Phernazis is a professional poet, not a “disinterested” artist who follows only his Muse's commands. After all, the man is writing an epic—it is well known that epics, since Homeric times, are to be heard in royal courts.

That Phernazis is not a cheap sycophant is also shown by the very difficulty which stops him: he is asking himself about Darius' feelings, at the moment the Persian monarch seizes power. To determine the ultimate limits of Darius' psychology, Phernazis lets his hero waver between arrogance (and intoxication) and realization of the vanity of grandeur. Granted the latter limit is in praise of Mithridates, would the former (arrogance and intoxication—a form of hubris in ancient Greece) have flattered the king of Pontus? Phernazis is philosophizing, not speech-making.

Suddenly, however, momentous news arrives: war. Cavafy's careful formulation on this point (“the war with the Romans has begun”) shows that the storm does not break entirely unexpectedly. There already had been warning clouds in the sky. But Phernazis is dumb-founded; he did not expect this misfortune now. He thought time was on his side. Thus, initially the catastrophe stimulates only his reflexes as a poet: How can Mithridates now find the inclination to pay attention to Phernazis' epic, especially one written in Greek (“in the middle of a war—just think, Greek poems!”)? The ironic tone, not altogether missing at the start of the poem (Phernazis' philosophical profundity and his deep meditation sounded even there somewhat equivocally), is now heard more clearly. Nevertheless, irony is not derived so much from Phernazis' gestures as from the situation itself. It is the framework of war that makes Phernazis' moves ridiculous. In the last analysis, the problem is how to adapt to an unexpected and unpleasant reality. Who can do it easily and immediately? Phernazis' reflexes therefore function naturally and automatically. Personal concern initially overshadows collective misfortune. Such a spectacle is strange, annoying, or even comical, when we are in a position to watch it in others. Our tone, however, and our disposition automatically change the moment we bring Phernazis' mask closer to our own face. We discover with surprise how well it fits.

The poet Phernazis does not go easily beyond his personal concerns. In this critical moment he remembers his own circle: his envious critics. He had believed that with this epic he would have won the battle; he would have risen high, overwhelming his colleagues. The war thwarts or, rather, postpones (another surprising detail which shows the depths of Cavafy's psychological insight into his poetic personages) this well-planned project.

Phernazis' ambition here risks appearing like professional pretention. However, before condemning Phernazis we must search Cavafy's poetry to see how his colleagues behave in less critical moments: Dammon, for instance, in “Dionysus' Escort,” the Sculptor from Tyaneia, the engraver in the “Philhellene,” or the unknown man from Edessa in “He Himself.” What is needed specifically is not an ideal measure—which poet, dead or alive, would embody it in full?—but a realistic one. Thus measured, Phernazis is not so pretentious or so naive. Let us remember, moreover, that in these verses and those that follow Phernazis is not speaking directly—otherwise he would have known how to express himself more elegantly. His thoughts and words are snatched by a prompter who transmits them to us without any pretense. But the prompter's forthright gesture exposes Phernazis, who now grimaces perplexedly or even amusingly—for us the innocent, as Cavafy would say.

Phernazis finally does come out of his poetic cage; he begins to react like a common citizen of Amisus. The instinct of self-preservation now begins to function. It is expressed in a collective language: Phernazis plays the role of the citizen with a phraseology not lacking in affectation. Expressions such as “very well fortified” and “the Romans are the most awful enemies” betray a pedantry frayed into political rhetoric. It is not Phernazis' fault. As a poet he knew how to speak better. It is the fault of that damn war and the Roman legionnaires.

But Phernazis does not fully lose his poetic inspiration in the war's confusion. His mind works on a double level: with the common man's reflexes, on the one hand; with the poet's reflexes, on the other. What is strange is that the former now assist the latter, and the hard labor of the beginning now ends in birth: “arrogance and intoxication is what Darius must have felt.” Darius? Or is it Phernazis, and others like him, and like us?

At the very start the poem presupposes quiet waters. The first whirlpool appears with Phernazis' dilemma concerning Darius' feelings; the second, much more intense and much wider, with the announcement of the war. However, while this second circle besieges the first, it does not immediately cancel it. It encircles it tightly until from its center arrogance and intoxication leap up, to soak not only Darius but Phernazis as well, and us, too.

What other cause could have resolved Phernazis' dilemma in favor of arrogance and intoxication, if not the warlike atmosphere which has intervened? Thus, arrogance passes from Darius to Mithridates, throws its shadow on the Roman legionnaires, and in the end covers Phernazis himself. His inability to participate more actively in the historical event, caused by the self-centered psychology of man in general and the poet in particular, finds its poetic name in the conclusion of the poem with “arrogance and intoxication.” At this point indeed the word “intoxication” acquires a more concrete meaning when applied to the poet Phernazis, a meaning which it did not have in the beginning of the poem when it related to Darius' psychology.

Phernazis does not finish his poem on Darius. His deposition, however, concerning his tragicomic case helps Cavafy finish his own poem. Poets know that it is men who are deceived, not poems. To be completed, a poem requires total sincerity from its poet; otherwise it does not come out right, or if it does, it grimaces in protest against its imperfections. To tell his truth, a truth which of course depends on events and is not absolute, Cavafy needed Phernazis' mask. Cavafy himself may be hiding behind this mask, or perhaps we, readers of the poem, are. Phernazis, for his part, is totally sincere and realistic. Or is it that in the last analysis the same person is involved, since Phernazis is an imaginary personage? I do not wish to assert, of course, that Cavafy should be identified with Phernazis. Yet they are both poets and they share a common characteristic: they cannot create poetry without telling the truth, however bitter. This is their arrogance, the most innocuous form of arrogance that I know.

I fear the reader may be left somewhat puzzled and unsatisfied. He read an essay on “The Poet and History” expecting to find a portrait of a poet more robust than that of Phernazis. After all, the latter's participation in historical action is proved to be very limited, if not negative. I regret being the cause of the reader's disappointment. But I believe that in every effort our first step is self-knowledge. Everything else follows.

Notes

1. [C. M. Bowra, “Constantine Cavafy and the Greek Past,” The Creative Experiment (London, 1949), pp. 32-33; Greek version, p. 227, in] Anglo-Hellenic Review, IV, 225-237.

2. First published in the Anglo-Hellenic Review (vol. III), later incorporated in his Essays [Translated as, “Cavafy and Eliot—A Comparison,” in George Seferis, On the Greek Style. Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism, translated by Rex Warner and T. D. Frangopoulos (Boston and Toronto, 1966); quoted passage, p. 145.]

3. Translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard; from C. P. Cavafy: Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, in press).

4. Mithridates VI, Eupator Dionysus (the “Great”), King of Pontus from 120 to 63 b.c., was the last of a line ruling under the same name.

5. It is altered in the translation.

Material in square brackets has been added by the translator.