Ithaca gave you your fair voyage.
Without her you would not have ventured on the way,
but she has no more to give you.
And if you find Ithaca a poor place, she has not mocked you.
You have become so wise, so full of experience,
that you should understand by now what these Ithacas mean.
The above extracts illustrate one of Cavafy’s moods—intensely subjective; scenery, cities and legends all re-emerge in terms of the mind. There is another mood in which he stands apart from his subject-matter, and with the detachment of an artist hammers it into shape. The historian comes to the front now, and it is interesting to note how different is his history from an Englishman’s. He even looks back upon a different Greece. Athens and Sparta, so drubbed into us at school, are to him two quarrelsome little slave states, ephemeral beside the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed them, just as these are ephemeral beside the secular empire of Constantinople. He reacts against the tyranny of Classicism—Pericles and Aspasia and Themistocles and all those bores. Alexandria, his birthplace, came into being just when Public School Greece decayed; kings, emperors, patriarchs have trodden the ground between his office and his flat; his literary ancestor—if he has one—is Callimachus, and his poems bear such titles as “The Displeasure of the Seleucid,” “In the Month of Athyr,” “Manuel Comnenus,” and are prefaced by quotations from Philostratus or Lucian.
Two of these poems shall be quoted in full, to illustrate his method.[[2]] In the first he adopts the precise, almost mincing style of a chronicle to build up his effect. It is called “Alexandrian Kings” and deals with an episode of the reign of Cleopatra and Antony.
An Alexandrian crowd collected