Caesarion
By CP Cavafy
Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn
In part to ascertain
a certain date
and in part to while
away the time,
last night I took
down a collection
of Ptolemaic
inscriptions to read.
The unstinting
laudations and flatteries
are the same for all.
All of them are brilliant,
glorious, mighty,
beneficent;
every undertaking
utterly wise.
As for the women of
the line, they too,
all the Berenices and
the Cleopatras, are wonderful too.
When I successfully
ascertained the date
I’d have finished
with the book, if a tiny,
insignificant
reference to King Caesarion
hadn’t attracted my
attention suddenly… …
Ah, there: you came
with your indefinite
charm. In history
there are only a few
lines that can be
found concerning you;
and so I could
fashion you more freely in my mind.
I fashioned you this
way: beautiful and feeling.
My artistry gives to
your face
a beauty that has a
dreamy winsomeness.
And so fully did I
imagine you
that yesterday, late
at night, when the lamp
went out—I
deliberately let it go out—
I dared to think you came into my room,
it seemed to me you
stood before me: as you must have been
in Alexandria after
it had been conquered,
pale and wearied,
perfect in your sorrow,
still hoping they’d
have mercy on you,
those vile men—who whispered,
“Surfeit of Caesars.”
"A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely
motionless at a slight angle to the universe." E. M. Forster's famous
description of C. P. Cavafy--the most widely known and best loved modern Greek
poet--perfectly captures the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on
history and geography, sexuality and language. Cavafy wrote about people on the
periphery, whose religious, ethnic and cultural identities are blurred, and he
was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility.
His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual
moments often infused with his distinctive sense of irony. They have
established him as one of the greatest Greek poets of the twentieth century.
A striking number of his
poems are about characters from Roman and Greek history and some of them come
as nocturnal apparitions of those who have vanished into history. In “Caesarion,” he brings to life a figure
marginalized by history and brutalized by the imperial forces at history’s
command. Caesarion was the child of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra; he was murdered
(and possibly raped) by the henchmen of Octavius.
'Caesarion' shows how
even reading dry historical sources can arouse the sensual memory. Cavafy reads “a collection / of Ptolemaic
inscriptions” and discovers identical, interchangeable “unstinting laudations
and flatteries.” Then “a tiny, / insignificant reference to King Caesarion”
attracts Cavafy’s attention. A connoisseur of history’s castaways, Cavafy,
oddly, seemed tempted by his obscurity. Someone needed to intervene, and Cavafy
restores to Caesarion the “beauty” and “feeling” that history effaced, a sexual
favor that our boy Caesarion has travelled through time to repay. Here the poet
shows how the emotional and sensual participation with characters ignored by
history can illumine and immortalize them in the realm of art.
Cavafy’s use of “Surfeit
of Caesars” (meaning “too many Caesars”) smacks of history’s fluent,
ineluctably sensual appetite for violence.
Note: 'Caesarion' was the nickname of Ptolemy XV Caesar,
ostensibly the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, who was invested with the
title 'King of Kings' by Mark Antony. Following Antony's defeat at Actium in 31
BC the victor Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) ordered Caesarion's
execution.
Berenices: name of three queens of the Ptolemy family
