Cavafy and the Classical Civilisation A-Level

Cavafy, Homer and Augustus

The Greek Poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) wrote on many themes (age, sex, place, and more) and very often wrote based on classical sources. I would like to look (briefly) at two.

Caesarion

Daniel Mendelsohn, from whose fabulous translation (available here) this is taken, adds in his notes:

"Octavian (later Augustus) had Caesarion put to death; as he gave the order for the murder, one of his advisors is said to have complained sardonically of the dangers of polykaisariê, “too many Caesars.” 

The Greek, polykaisariê, is a punning allusion to Homer's polykoiraniê, “too many rulers,” which appears in Homer’s Iliad, 2.203–6. In this famous passage, Odysseus berates the mutinous Greek troops who wish to abandon the siege of Troy and return home:

Not all of us Achaeans can be masters here;
too many rulers [polykoiraniê] is no good thing; let one man rule,
one king, to whom the crooked-minded son of Kronos gave the scepter and royal rights, that he may use them to be king."



Given the wars of words between Antony and Augustus prior to their clash in 31BCE at Actium, we might expect it to be Antony's children by Cleopatra who suffered, but in fact they seem to have survived. Caesarion was a threat because he too was apparently Julius Caesar's child; Antony declared him King of Kings and Caesar's heir!

Suetonius's account of the aftermath of Actium makes it clear why the clementia to be celebrated on the clupeus virtutis could hardly extend to Caesarion.

17 He returned to Italy [after Actium]... He stayed no more than twenty–seven days at Brundisium, just long enough to pacify the mutineers, then took a roundabout route to Egypt by way of Asia and Syria, besieged Alexandria, where Antony had fled with Cleopatra, and soon reduced it. At the last moment Antony sued for peace, but Augustus ordered him to commit suicide, and inspected the corpse. He was so anxious to save Cleopatra as an ornament for his triumph that he actually summoned doctors to suck the poison from her wound, supposedly the bite of an asp.

[compare Horace I.37 she scorned to be in the triumph & Propertius III.11 suggesting he saw her (effigy) in the triumph & Propertius IV.6 suggesting it would be shameful to have a woman led in triumph where once great men like Jugurtha were]

Though he allowed them honourable burial in the same tomb and gave orders that the mausoleum which they had begun to build should be completed, he had the elder of Antony’s sons by Fulvia dragged from the image of Divus Julius, to which he had fled with vain pleas for mercy, and executed. Augustus also sent cavalry in pursuit of Caesarion, whom Cleopatra claimed to be the son of Caesar, and killed him when captured. However, he spared Cleopatra’s children by Antony, brought them up no less tenderly than if they had been members of his own family, and gave them the education which their rank deserved. (Suetonius, Augustus 17)

With Caesarion and Cleopatra dead (on paper they had been co-pharaoh since 44BCE, though she was in charge), Octavian could get on with becoming the de facto Pharaoh himself (never took the title though)

18. About this time he had the sarcophagus containing Alexander the Great’s mummy removed from the mausoleum at Alexandria and, after a long look at its features, showed his veneration by crowning the head with a golden diadem and strewing flowers on the trunk. When asked, ‘Would you now like to visit the mausoleum of the Ptolemies?’ he replied, ‘I came to see a king, not a row of corpses.’ Augustus turned the kingdom of Egypt into a Roman province, and then, to increase its fertility and its yield of grain for the Roman market, set troops to clean out the irrigation canals of the Nile, which had silted up after many years’ neglect. 

Augustus annointed by Egyptian gods

So this young man of 17 had to die. Cavafy notes how few lines there are describing him in history and very few certain images. He plays with the flattery of the court "unstinting laudations" and with the cruelty of Octavian as history records, but uses the gap where history is silent, about the young man's appearance, character, etc. to play with a more homoerotic image of his being visited by an image of the prince when the light went out "I let it go out". Art exists in and exploits the gaps in history.

ITHACA

Cavafy's use of the Classics is also to be seen in perhaps his most famous poem, his reworkings of Odysseus's journeys in Ithaca.
This poem is also available spoken by Sean Connery. In this poem you will notice (again in Mendelsohn's translation) how Cavafy takes the stories of the Odyssey and allegorises them.

The Laestrygonians, Cyclops, Poseidon are none of them beings, but our own mental blocks and the issues you allow your soul to "set up before you".

The journey of Odysseus becomes an allegory for a life lived to the full travelling through Egyptian Alexandria (Cavafy's home) and Phoenicia with Ithaca never the reward we strive to reach, only the endpoint.

In some ways this plays with Tennyson's poem Ulysses which imagines Odysseus bored by the humdrum Ithaca.

"Ithaca gave you the journey"

This way of reading Homer is by no means unique, many writers have recognised the psychological possibilities of aspects of the Odyssey. Tantalus has entered English as our experience of wanting that which is just out of reach,

Sisyphus has entered English as Sisyphean meaning a task too hard for our endurance and as a model of pointless, but endless, even absurd, endeavour.

The Sirens of course are divorced from their original offering of knowledge and made erotic and tempting in everything from paintings to children's films.

Herbert James Draper Sirens and Ulysses

Of course they also leave room for humorous reworkings:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/110 

In studying the classics, we also open up modern literature and begin to understand that more fully.

Formulaic Lines and the Gruffalo

Where are you going to Little Brown Mouse?

I have a weak spot for the Gruffalo, having read it endlessly, and in reading the introduction and notes to Wilson's Odyssey found myself coming back to it. I read it again this evening and it recrystalised my thoughts about how it takes the form of a mini epic.

In the introduction (p.5) and translator's note (pp.83-4) to her new translation of Homer's Odyssey, Emily Wilson comments on how she has handled Formulaic Lines:

...

As she notes the repetitions can feel like moments to skip. Indeed one Twitterer made a similar (joking) point about the catalogue of ships in the Iliad being omitted from BBC's Troy

But there is a modern genre sharing many of the stylistic features of the Odyssey and showing how successful repetition, patterning and direct speech can be.



Julia Donaldson's Gruffalo shares with the Odyssey the tendency toward formulaic lines to mark a standard point:

Like The Odyssey this is a text designed to be heard rather than read so different rules apply and the verbal cues set up tension and in the final case "gruffal..." can be subverted.  It might also be noted that the poetic form of the Gruffalo (though rhymed rather than metrical) adds to its impact.

That being so the features of reading the Gruffalo aloud (or Dr Seuss's Zinniga-Zanniga with which it shares many features) perhaps carry over into the Odyssey. 

                                                                                         

The direct speech demands voices and inflections - would one speak Polyphemus as one does Odysseus, anymore than the Mouse as the Gruffalo?

The poetic form always takes second place to the dramatic impact, so anybody rests and extends, as Donaldson signposts, on the ooooooooo of that last Gruffalo as one might pause in BkX127 when Odysseus,
"...drew out my sword
and cut the ropes that moored my dark-cheeked ship"

Surely we expect Odysseus to fight a few cannibals killing his men, he does have twelve ships of warriors capable of sacking cities, so the sword drawing requires a pause before he fails us again.

Beyond that one trope of the Odyssey,  that it is better to have brains than brawn, to be Odysseus than the Cyclops, The Mouse than the Gruffalo is clearly stable across the millenia. The journey motif and the homecoming is likewise stable, though surprisingly Donaldson's mouse finds no reason to exterminate anybody: his/her (we are never told) nostos is altogether happier.

Clearly Donaldson is at some remove a literary descendent of Homer, but we do not only understand a modern work by reading the ancient, the impact of oral patterns we rapidly find are to felt most keenly when reading a story to an attentive (if quite young) audience.

We can only mourn Donaldson's abject failure to invoke the muses, have an arming scene, or bring a deity or two on.

Odysseus' Exploded Character

A First Post

A few years ago I wrote a piece on the ways in which Odysseus' character seems to be deliberately reminiscent of Polyphemus and how he takes on conflicting character aspects that put me in mind of the Dabbit. That piece was published in Omnibus and is available online with all their other, often excellent, articles.

Wittgenstein's Dabbit: Duck, Rabbit, both?

Since then I have had various thoughts and never actually written them up, but reading the new translation of Homer's Odyssey by Emily Wilson

I  have been struck by a series of thoughts some of which might even be true and wanted to explore them on paper.

Odysseus' Exploded Character 

Reading Wilson's translation of XVI.430-455 something jarred,  the "He" in 'He said, "Penelope you need not worry"'...  To find the antecedent of that pronoun requires returning to l.419 where Penelope responds to Antinous implying that "he" is in fact Antinous. Rieu's translation says explicitly that whilst Penelope is abusing Antinous, the respondent is Eurymachus son of Polybus and that is right.

Why does this matter?

It seems to me that amidst the 108 suitors Homer has very little interest in individualisation; quite the opposite, in their deaths they lie indistinguishable like fish hauled from the sea (XXII.380-90). The exceptions to these are Antinous, Eurymachus and Amphinomus.

These three are given individual deaths at the opening to XXII (Antinous shot in the throat; Eurymachus in the nipple and liver; and Telemachus plants a spear in Amphinomus' spine). They also have individual characters:

Antinous: 

He is the most physically violent suitor leading the ship to ambush Telemachus and plotting at XVI.360ff to ambush him after he escaped the ship. He is also the only suitor never to try and fail the physical contest with the bow in XXI.  His is a brute violence and had teh Odyssey been the Iliad a proper combat between he and Odysseus should surely have occurred rather than Odysseus' egregiously bad xenia in shooting him.

 Amphinomus:

Amphinomus is by some margin the most likeable of the suitors. He is Penelope's favourite (XVI390ff) and has the moral integrity and decency that leads even Odysseus to recognise that he should not be killed; that Telemachus, the boy he saved, is the one to stab in the back is a beautifully dark Homeric irony.

Eurymachus

It was the way Eurymachus seemed to lose his voice in this translation that made me think more about why it matters who says what. Eurymachus is a liar and a "sneak". According to Penelope XVI.420 he is "the smartest boy of all  those your own age in Ithaca". He tells Penelope how Telemachus is "now the man I love most in all the world"

What a liar!

Between the three of them we have brutality, principle and piety, and deceit; character traits we know very well (Cicones, sacrifices, Nobody) . It seems tempting to reach the conclusion that they are, presumably deliberately, aspects of Odysseus' character. If that is so, it raises the further question of whether Odysseus is himself different from the suitors and how we should see the ensuing massacre. This also takes me back to my thoughts in that earlier essay.

What this has also raised, for me at least, is why reading a new translation with new emphases is so rewarding.