The History Man

38 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
can be read in the same spirit as the poem "In the Month of Athyr," as
a human testament at once present and infinitely remote. But the poem
becomes more interesting when the speaker tells us that the author of the
epitaph was a poet who knew almost nothing about the dead man. The
purpose of the epitaph, potentially a tiny piece of the source material of
history, turns out to have been not so much to record the facts of the
young man's death, as to console or possibly to flatter a bereaved relative.
And the irony is that the poet's well-meant shot in the dark has misfired
badly: Kimon's true feelings are dominated by bitterness toward his dead
cousin over the very relationship so idyllically extoled in the poet's
epitaph. And the epitaph, immortalizing that relationship in verse, puts
Kimon's lover Hermoteles forever out of his reach.
One effect of this poem is to cast doubt on the truth of the historical
record as a transcription of actual experience. But it also introduces a
new figure into the business of recording history: the poet. Since he
knows almost nothing, and in any case could never know the literal truth
of what he has written in the epitaph, the poet can only have created the
whole text out of his imagination. Truth to fact (historical truth) is
blatantly subverted by the interfering well-wisher, the poet. But what the
poet has written has a power and permanence that have nothing to do
with its truth: thanks to the poet's work, the dead Marullus will always
come between Kimon and the object of his desires, Hermotêles.
Two poems which deal not with inscriptions but with the business of
writing history are also important here. The first is "King Demetrios"
(1900/1906: A27, tr. 18) :
Not like a king, but as an actor, he disguised himself in a dark
cloak instead of that tragic costume, and slipped way unnoticed.
Plutarch, Life of Demetrios
When the Macedonians deserted him
and proved they would rather follow Pyrrhos
King Demetrios (great
was his soul) did not at all—so it was said—
behave like a king. He went
and doffed his golden garments,
kicked off his royal sandals
all of purple. In simple dothes
he quickly dressed and fled.
Doing as an actor does
who when the show is over,
changes his clothes and comes away.
The essence of this seemingly simple poem is that Cavafy's text retells
precisely the same facts—no more, no less—as the historian Plutarch in the
"Life" from which the epigraph is taken, but completely changes their
meaning. The historical record (unimaginatively) condemns the loser