The History Man

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24 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA as a whole within a generalized model which fails to account fully for all its features. Correspondingly, the poems in which Cavafy either uses history explicitly as an allegory or "alibi" for the present, or enters the world of myth and legend in which history most readily repeats itself, are very few. And all of them were written before the "watershed" year of 1911. There are altogether twelve poems in which Cavafy presents or refers to the past more or less explicitly as a moral allegory for the present.' The opening lines of "Thermopylae," in the Keeley and Sherrard translation, aptly demonstrate this (1901/1903: A103, tr. 12) 2 : Honor to those who in the life they lead define and guard a Thermopylae. (my emphasis) Not the historical pass defended and lost in 480 B.C., but any crucial moral "pass." A Thermopylae is a historical metaphor for a contemporary and generalized dilemma, the purpose of the appeal to history is to illustrate a perennial, and especially a present, moral truth. Similarly, in others of these poems: "our efforts . . . are like the Trojans' " (A26, tr. 17); the soul is to watch out for "some Artemidoros" giving warning (A18, tr. 24); Theodotos, bearing Pompey's head on a bloodstained platter, may even now be entering the house of some neighbor (A21, tr. 40); at the end of the Odyssean voyage, "you" will have learned "what Ithacas mean" (A23, tr. 29). The distinguishing features of these poems are the use of the present tense or imperative mood, and a first or second person where the speaker and/or addressee is not specifically included in the historical context of the poem. Thus in "The Satrapy" (A16, tr. 23), the absence of a consistent context for the person addressed forces it on the reader's attention that he is "not necessarily Themistocles or Demaratos or any other political figure" (Lechonitis, 1977: 23), and so allows the historical references that are in the poem (Sousa, the Demos, and the Sophists) to be taken metaphorically. "You" in the poem, in other words, is as likely to stand for Cavafy himself, or the reader, as for Themistocles or Demaratos, or even, pace Dallas (1974: 56-63), Alcibiades. '"Ithaca" (1894?/1910/1911: A23, tr. 29); "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1898/1904: A107, tr. 14); "The Intervention of the Gods" (1899: Anekdota, 111); "The Sea Battle" (1899: Anekdota, 121); "Trojan?' (1900/1905: A26, tr. 17); "Interruption" (1900/1901: A102, tr. 11); "Thermopylae" (1901/1903: A103, tr. 12); "Manuel Comnenos" (1905/1911: A47, tr. 46); "The Satrapy" (1905/1910: A16, tr. 23); "The Ides Of March" (1906/1910: A18, (?/1911: "The God Abandons Antony" (1910/1911: A20, tr. 27); "Theodotos" 19 A21, tr. 40). 2A11 references to Cavafy's poems in this artide give the date of composition first (where known) and then the date of publication. Thus, "Thermopylae" was written in 1901 and published in 1903. Where three dates are given, the middle date indicates a revision. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own.
The History Man 25 Two poems which could be included in this group, but which may be considered as borderline, are "The Sea Battle" and "Waiting for the Barbarians." "The Sea Battle" (1899: Anekdota, 121) represents the chorus of defeated Persians at the battle of Salamis whose ululations are taken from Aeschylus' play on the same theme, The Persians. In appearance, the poem is the dramatic monologue of the Persians shortly after their historical defeat, but it contains the lines: Why must it be: no sooner does one possess renowned Ekbatana, Sousa and Persepolis, than be calls up a fleet and goes toward the Greeks to fight at sea. (my emphases) "One" here introduces a generalized moral which seems to lift the "we" of the poem out of a specific historical context, to be reconstituted as a general moral exemplar. And "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1898/1904: A107, tr. 14) seems to belong with this group because of the unusual absence of any indications of context in place or time. Since we are not told which particular incident in the decline of an ancient civilization is being depicted, it is the generality of the picture that strikes us most forcibly; it could be (almost) any time, any place, and so we are irresistibly drawn to read the poem as a metaphor for contemporary civilization. This impression is reinforced by the use of the present tense throughout, without any distancing devices such as Cavafy uses elsewhere to place his speakers in perspective. All of these twelve poems were written before 1911, most of them considerably earlier. After that date Cavafy wrote no more poems (at least that he chose to preserve) in which the past serves as a moral allegory for the present. But he continued writing poems which deal with history, from which, however, explicit reference to the present is absent. The approaches to Cavafy's historical poems proposed. by Malanos, Tsirkas, and, to some extent, Dallis, assume that the past continues to function as an allegory for the present even where this is not explicit, although no reading based on the allegorical interpretation of history has so far claimed to account satisfactorily for all of Cavafy's historical poems. In terms of the perception of history as myth, we encounter a more complex situation. This is partly due to the ingenuity of the poet George Seferis, who first identified the "mythical method" as the mainspring of Cavafy's use of history, and partly to the dominance of the poetics of the Anglo-Irish-American writers Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound in both Greece and the English-speaking world for much of the last few decades. Before discussing the poems in which Cavafy makes use specifically of the mythical rather than the historical past, it will be necessary to summarize the debate initiated by Seferis and to comment on the position that Cavafy treated history as myth in order to "redeem the time." In a now historic lecture given at the British Council in Athens in 1947, Seferis gave striking evidence for parallels between what he called
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The History Man

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