Ancient Poetry, Modern Poetry

Discussing Cavafy

By Professor Ruth Scodel

On March 15-16, the department, along with the Cavafy Chair and the interdisciplinary program Contexts for Classics, sponsored a conference called “Greek at a Slight Angle: Cavafy and Classical Poetry.” Many classicists are admirers of Cavafy’s poetry, and scholars of modern Greek are fully aware of how carefully and extensively Cavafy read ancient texts, but this was the first formal discussion of Cavafy by a group of classicists. Since there are so many scholars of Hellenistic poetry in the Midwest, and Hellenistic poetry was so important to Cavafy, the conference especially considered both how reading Hellenistic poetry illuminates Cavafy, and how Cavafy’s reading can help us notice new aspects of ancient texts.

The Gerald F. Else Lecture in the Humanities began the program as Daniel Mendelsohn showed how Cavafy resolved his poetic and personal crisis of how to speak openly about homosexual desire by turning to the Hellenic (and particularly Hellenistic) past and “giving voice” to the beautiful dead of ancient times. In his earlier poems, Cavafy presents the dead as mute, passive, objects. But as Cavafy’s self-confidence as a poet of homosexual desire grew, he presented them as speaking subjects—particularly in the “Tombstone” poems purporting to be the inscriptions on Hellenistic and late Antique grave monuments, in which the beautiful dead finally speak for themselves.

The eight papers on the following day were both varied and coherent, offering different approaches to related themes and repeatedly turning to the same poems—not always the most famous ones. Ahuvia Kahane looked at “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” linking the poem with an anecdote of Cavafy’s own death. David Kutzko returned to one of the “Tombstone” poems, “In the Month of Athyr,” as he examined Cavafy’s view of Herodas’ fragmentariness. He also showed how Cavafy’s joke on the “wounded” meter of Herodas points to Herodas’ own self-reflexive allusion to his meter in Mimiambi 1.66-67. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes also treated “In the Month of Athyr” in comparing how Callimachus and Cavafy treat memories of objects, poetic voices, and bodies. Stephanie Winder looked at the unreliable speaker in Callimachus and in Cafavy’s “If Dead Indeed”—a poem that was also central to Mary Depew’s paper on Cavafy’s and Callimachus’ aesthetics. The speakers revealed rich affinities between Cavafy and Callimachus, even though Cavafy never explicitly names that earlier poet.

In my talk I treated “Young Men of Sidon”—the topic of Lambropoulos’ inaugural lecture —arguing that the famous epitaph celebrating Aeschylus only as a warrior at Marathon was based on an anti-democratic tradition, but came to be read as an expression of simple patriotism. In the world represented by Cavafy’s poem, where it is performed along with other epigrams, its patriotism is just another aesthetic attitude. Patricia Rosenmeyer showed how Cavafy moved away from the ancient convention of the “locus amoenus” as the setting for love poetry. The poem “For the Shop,” is typical of Cavafy in replacing real flowers with jewels. Kathryn Gutzwiler showed similarities in how Meleager and Cavafy imagine poetry as a medium for capturing transient beauty. The day as a whole was exemplary for showing how much such comparative study can enrich our reading, and we expect that the publication of the papers will attract readers from a variety of fields.

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