Visual Aesthetics in Meleager and Cavafy

Classical and Modem Literaure, 23/2 (2003): 67-87 Visual Aesthetics in Meleager and Cavay Kath yn Gutziller Cavafy's interest in visual imagery is indebted to the ancient ecphrastic tradition, including the many epigrams on works of art in the Greek Antholoy. So much has been noticed by others. 1 In ancient ecphrases, typically, a viewer stands before a work of art and reacts to it with amazement, or puzzlement, or, occasionally, some other emotion. 2 Cavay borrows from the ecphrastic tradition this viewer's stance, though with the difference that in his poetry visual images serve as a stimulus to erotic desire, often providing a means to recover a lost passion; and it is this desire, triggered by the visual and represented in the verbal, that becomes the Cavafian link between the aesthetic realms of art and poetry. 3 What I will argue here is that Cavafy had an ancient predecessor who also eroticized visual imagery in Meleager of Gadara, himself a great erotic 1 The influence of Hellenistic epigram on Cavay has been repeatedly noted since E. M. Forster, "The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy," in The Mind and Art of C. P. Cal'y, edited by 0. Harvey (Athens: D. Havey, 1983; originally published in 1923), 16 proclaimed Callimachus to be Cavafy's "literary ancestor." For a fuller discussion (with previous scholarship in note 1 ), see Valerie Caires, "Originality and Eroticism: Constantine Cavay and the Alexandrian Epigram," Byzantine and Modem Greek Studies 6 (1980): 131-155. 2 For the poetics of viewing in Hellenistic epigram, see Simon Goldhill, "The Naive and Knowing Eye: Ecphrasis and the Culture of Viewing in the Hellenistic World" in Art and T.t in Ancient Greek Culture, edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge U Pr, 1994), 197-223; Kathryn Gutzwiller, "Art's Echo: The Tradition of Hellenistic Ecphrastic Epigram," in Hellenistic Epgrams, He/lenistica Groningana 5, edited by M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, and G. C. Wakker (Leuven-Paris-Sterling, VA: Peeters, 2002), 85-112. 3 The parallel between art and poetry in the ecphrastic poems is the theme of Giannes Regopoulos, Ut pictura, poesis: TO "EK!PAETIKO" EY:ETHMA THE ITOIHEHE KAI ITOIHTIKHE TOY K. ABA!H (Athens: Smile, 1991). See, too, the subtle analysis by Margaret Alexiou, "C. P. Cavafy's 'Dangerous' Drugs: Poetry, Eros and the Dissemination of Images" in The Text and Its Margins: Post-Stncturalist Approaches to Twentieth-Centu,y Greek Literature, ed. Margaret Alexiou and Vassilis Lambropoulos (New York: Pella Publishing Co., l 985), 157-196. 68 VISUL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGER AND CAVAFY KATHRYN GUTZWILLER Meleager, Krinagoras, and Rhianus.7 Nothing more is said of this trio from the Antholoy, as the actor proceeds to recite the famous epitaph for Aeschylus, in which the dramatist is praised only for his valor as a soldier at Marathon. One of the young Sidonians, a "fanatic about literature," then utters a sharp criticism of the quatrain because in it Aeschylus seems to have forgotten his life's work as a playwright. Read together, these two poems suggest that for Cavafy Meleager was situated at an important juncture in history of Greek literature. Cavay apparently conceived the late Hellenistic period, in contrast to the heyday of Athens, as a time when poetry could be pursued as a purely aesthetic goal, not just as an adjunct to civic or political life. And in contrast to figures of later antiquity like Libanius who devoted his rhetorical powers to a defense of paganism, Meleager composed rom within Hellenic culture itself, at that period just before Roman dominance, Christianity, and barbarism began to effect its transformation. Cavafy's attraction to Meleager as a model poet of the Hellenic past is not hard to understand. Like Cavafy, Meleager was born into a Greek family living on the periphery of a decentralized Hellenic world where ethnicity was defined by an attachment to Greek culture and heritage rather than the civic identity of polis life.8 In four self-epitaphs (P 7.417419, 7.421) the epigrammatist claims birth in a "Syrian" land, namely, Palestinian Gadara, young manhood in Phoenician Tyre, and old age in Greek Cos.9 The literati depicted in both "Simeon" and "Young Men of Sidon" admire Meleager, one assumes, partly because he anticipates their own self-identity as Hellenes within the multicultural dynamic of late­ antique Syria. In addition, Meleager provided Cavafy a Hellenistic precedent for the writing of short erotic verse, a large percentage of which was pederastic in focus. The sensuality of Meleager's poetry, its focus on the speaker's emotional response to the beauty of a desired boy, the epigrammatist and the preserver of Hellenistic epigrams in his Garland of about 100 B.C. Not only was Meleager perhaps the first to unite ecphrastic motifs with amatory subject matter, but in doing so he represented the lover's internalization of the visual as a key to poetic creativity. I will also argue that Meleager anchors an important historical moment for Cavay, when the sensual freedom that he associated with Alexandria in its ancient orm had reached its culmination, just before the period of cultural decline and sexual repression associated with the new sensibilities of later antiquity. Cavay made Meleager's literary and historical importance explicit in two of his poems. In both of these Cavay treats the epigrammatist, not as the figure of decline and decadence that classical scholars then made him out to be,4 but more as he was seen by other modern poets, such as Pierre Louys and H.D., for whom Meleager encapsulated the best of the Hellenic aesthetic in his concise, but richly imagistic sensuality.5 One of the two poems in which he is mentioned, "Simeon," is spoken by a young lover of poetry who lived in late-antique Antioch. The youth comments on a contemporary poet, judged the best in Sria, who is "more learned in Greek than Libanius" but not "better than Meleager" (KP 104-5). 6 The other poem, "Young Men of Sidon (400 AD." (B 22) is also set in the Greek East in late antiquity. In this poem five youths are entertained by an actor who "recited a few choice epigrams," and the epigrammatists chosen are 4 See, or instance, Henri Ouvre, Miliagre de Gadara (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1894), 19-58 and Carl Radinger, Meleagros vo11 Gadara: Ei11e littera,geschichtliche Skizze (Innsbruck, 1895), reprinted in The Greek A11tholoy II, edited by Sonya Taran (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), both of whom view Meleager as unoriginal and lacking in sincerity, an assessment based, in part, on his "oriental" heritage as a Syrian. 5 Louys published a translation of Meleager, Poesies de Milagre (Paris, 1928); Meleager appears as a character in H. D.'s "Heliodora" and "Nossis" ( l 924). See Gregory Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavay: Text11aliy, Eroticism, Histoy (Princeton: Princeton U Pr, 1987) or a reading of Cavay's verse as modenist and self-relexive and Christopher Robinson, C. P. Cavay (Bristol: Bristol Classical Pr, 1988) or the inluence of the Decadents who "deined a modem sensibility" (2). I cite the Greek text of Cavay from the standard editions: C. P. Cavay, TA fIOIHMATA, edited by George Savidis, 2 vols., new ed. (Athens: Ekdoseis Nephele, 1992), cited as A and B ollowed by page number; C. P. Cavay, KPYMMENA fTOIHMATA, Meleager is chronologically the middle of the three. Rhianus composed homoerotic epigrams (AP 12.58, 12.93, 12.121) that served as important models or Meleager (cf. 12.256, 12.94, 12.122, 12.127), while Krinagoras, who was a cout poet of the Augustan age, signals the changes in literay subject matter and approach that accompanied Roman dominance of Hellenic culture. 7 6 1877-1923, edited by George Savidis (Athens: Ikaros, 1993), cited as KP ollowed by page number. The translations are taken from Theoharis C. Theoharis, Bfore Time Could Cha11ge Them: The Complete Poems of Co11sta11ti11e P. Cavay (New York: Harcourt, 2001). with occasional changes, oten in the manner of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, C. P. Cavay: Collected Poems, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton U Pr, 1992), sometimes my own adaptation. 69 t • 8 In describing Cavay's experience as "a Greek born in Alexandria, educated largely in England and Constantinople, and destined to spend the best part of his life . . . in Ept," Edmund Keeley, "The 'New' Poems of Cavay," in Harvey (above, note I), 55, speaks of his "lifelong amiliarity ith alienation." 9 On Meleager's statement of his poetic principles in these self-epitaphs, see Kathyn Gutwiller, "Meleager: From Menippean to Epigrammatist," in Ge11re i11 He/le11istic Poety, Helle11istica Gro11i11ga11a 3, ed. M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, and G. C. Wa.ker (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998): 81-93. 70 KATHRYN GUTZWILLER imagistic use of past Hellenic culture in the service of intense emotion, all anticipate the style and feeling of Cavay's erotic lyrics. 10 The "young men of Sidon" who enjoy Meleager and other epigrammatists provide an ancient model for the type of individual who would appreciate Cavay's own homoerotic verse. They are aesthetes, devoted to literature for its own sake, and they even recall the atmosphere of Meleager's verse in their choice of surroundings and adornment. They listen to the actor's recitation in a hall that "opened onto the garden; and held a soft fragrance of lowers that fused with the scent of the five young, perfumed Sidonian men." They become, then, reflections of Meleager's Tyrian youths, flowers all, who make up a "perfume-scented grove" of Aphrodite (P 1 2.256), as they may also recall the epigrammatists anthologized by Meleager, who identified the poetry of each with a plant or flower, intertwined to form his Garland (P 4.1). 11 My particular interest here is to explore how visual images of beautiful youths function thematically in the poetry of both Meleager and Cavay. Both use the imagery of artistic depiction as a means of illustrating the psychological process by which desire is stimulated, or past desire is re­ created in memory. Both summon up statues of handsome young men produced in the Hellenic past as models of perfected beauty, through which the youths they desire can be measured and celebrated. Both explore the similarities and differences between artistic and poetic creativity by depicting the mental process through which the poet converts a visual stimulus into verbal expression. Although Cavay was, in all likelihood, directly influenced by Meleager's use of ecphrastic motifs, 12 it is essential to 1 ° Caires (above, note I) 155 observes that Cavay turned to Hellenistic epigrams as a source because of their "sexual explicitness" but asserts that his purpose was "less frivolous than theirs." While of course the ancients were more at ease with sexual relationships between males than Cavay's contemporaries, the epigrams that seem to have influenced Cavay are not as explicit as Caires sugests. I would arue that the expression of passion, tersely and imagistically conveyed, was central to Cavay's interest in the Hellenistic epigrammatists; R. Liddell, Cavay: A Critical Bigraphy (London: Duckworh, I974), 165 reports that Cavay once commented on the "wonderful succinct expressions" ound in theA11tlwloy. 11 For the garland as the image that links Meleager's erotic subject matter with the aesthetic process of composition and arrangement, see Kathyn Gutziller, "The Poetics of Editing in Meleager's Garland," TAPA 127 (1997): 169-200. For the connection between perfumes and poetic composition in Cavay, seeAlexiou (above, note 3), 177-179. 12 Liddell (above, note 10), 121 reports that Cavay's library included J. W. Mackail's Select Epgrams from the Greek Antholoy (London, New York: Longnans, Green, and Co., 1890; 2nd ed., 1906; 3rd ed., 1911), which contains two of the three Meleagian epigrams I discuss here, AP 12.56 and 12.127. But the library when examined was no longer intact, and we now that Cavay read much more idely. VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGERAND CAVAFY 71 recognize as well how the divergences between their poetic treatments of artistic depictions reflect their differing cultural situations. For Meleager the most famous images of the Greek artistic tradition can take new form in the living beauty of the boys he knows and desires; his subtle message is that the greatness of canonical Hellenic culture is yet recoverable through personal, erotic experience. For Cavafy the images of ephebic beauty wrought in ancient Greece stand at a much further remove, knowable only through rare physical survival or textual report. While ancient images do offer a historical validation for his own devotion to attractive male bodies, the erotic meaning of these depictions is no longer readily apparent in his own culture. Contemporary equivalents-portraits, sketches, photographs, even reflections in mirrors-are shown to have similar homoerotic purposes and similar effects of arousal, 13 but their meaning is now esoteric, hidden away for the select few who understand and imitate the erotic life of the old Greeks. First, Meleager. Meleager's poetic genius should be appreciated through his intertextual relationship ith earlier Greek epigram. His most striking characteristic as a poet is his brilliant combination of motifs from different types of epigrams to move the "art of variation" to a new creative level. 14 Epigrams of the ecphrastic type, concerning statues, paintings, or other kinds of artistic works, are known from as early as the late fourth century B.C., and the form continues to be popular with epigrammatists into late antiquity and the Byzantine age. But the surviving corpus of Meleager's poetry preserves no purely ecphrastic epigram, since his preferred method is to incorporate ecphrastic motifs into other epigrammatic types, most commonly the erotic. 15 One of the best illustrations of the importance of the visual to Cavay's erotic verse is Duane Michals, Homage to Cavay (Danbury, N. H.: Addison House, 1978), where translations of ten Cavafian poems are juxtaposed with homoerotic photographs. For Cavay's "photographic sensibility" and its relationship to his nostalgia or the past, see Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, "Hellenism in C. P. Cavay," /oumal of the Hellenic Diaspoa 21 (1995): II 5-129. 13 14 See Sonya Taran, The Art of Variation in the Hellenistic Epigram (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 4, 167-168. In addition to the three epigrams about boys discussed below, Meleager also used ecphrastic motifs in AP 5.149, about a girl named Zenophila, and AP I 6.134, where earlier treatments of statues of Niobe are reversed to explore the ecphrastic paradox of a living woman tuned to stone; on the last, see Gutzwiller, (above, note 2), 107-109. Epigrams about an erotic depiction of a beloved are surprisingly rare in the Antholoy; see Rufinus AP 5.15, where a statue of a girlriend is ished or, and Strata 12.190, about a portrait of a boy, both later and significantly different in tone from Meleager's ecphrastic poems, or those of Cavay. 15 72 KATHRYN GUTZWILLER In a linked pair of epigrams, Praxiteles' statue of Eros at Thespiae becomes not the subject itself but the means of praising a beautiful boy (AP 12.56-57). By the late Hellenistic period this statue of Eros as a winged youth, nude, and without a bow, had become one of the most famous in the ancient world. The statue's fame was enhanced by the rich anecdotal tradition, in which Praxiteles was reported to have modeled his Eros on the desire he felt in his heart for the hetaira Phryne, who later dedicated the statue at Thespiae. 16 According to one of the epigrams about the statue, Praxiteles fashioned Eros' appearance so accurately that viewers fell in love merely by meeting the gaze from the statue's eyes: pLhp. ,Lx,w ouxEn ,o�:uwv, _..' .,:v��6µ:vo;, "I produce love magic not now with my bow but by my intense gaze," AP 16.204. The traditions about Praxiteles' creation of the Eros statue from his own feelings rather than rom physical reality are, as I have suggested elsewhere, an important source for ancient theories of artistic creativity. 17 We find here the theoretical beginnings for a view of artistic creativity formulated much later in words that Philostratus (VA 6) attributed to Apollonius of Tyana: "Imagination (phantasia) as a craftsman produces wiser works than imitation (mimesis) does, for imitation portrays what it sees, but imagination what it cannot see." Meleager chose not to add to the epigram series about the statue through variation, but to utilize the tradition to praise a boy, named Praxiteles, who was his own object of desire; in doing so, he was not just trivializing the subject, but adapting a theory of artistic creativity through imagination to the poetic realm. In the first epigram of the pair Meleager sets up the paradox that the Eros sculpted by the famed Praxiteles has been replaced by a boy named Praxiteles, sculpted by Eros to be another Eros: o: dxovc µ:v Dcpl) v ½woyM , o; ivucr"Epwro; Dpc;vr:A); KurptOO; 'CL0( "U'W'X LeVo; · vuv o' 6 &ewv XXAAL't"O;'Epw; :µ,uxov iycAµc, x.rrOv .1t�(.xovl.a.�, E:n;A.re n p x�t:rt):riv, o, p' 6 µ:v EV &vc,o.; 6 o' EV ct&:p, , lA,pc �pc�euJ y}; &' XL C XCL fLCXXpwv 'X")t"po, opwrt Do&ot. 16 The principal texts for the anecdotes about Praxiteles and Phyne are Pliny HN 36.22, Athenaeus I3.59Ib, Pausanias 1.20.1-2, 9.27, and Alciphron Epist. 4.1. Evidence for the popularity of the statue as a tourist attraction comes from Cicero Verr. 2.4.2.4, 4.60.135 and Strabo 9.2.25. Epigrams about it begin in the third centuy B.C. (Leonidas AP l 6.206, and, probably, "Praxiteles" 16.204) and continue into late antiquity (Tullius Geminus AP 6.260, 16.205, and Julian of Egypt 16.203). 17 Kathy n Gutzwiller, "Herennia Procula and Praxiteles' Eros at Thespiae," forthcoming. VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGERND CAVAFY OA�LO't") Mep6rwv lepa. 1'OAL;, & &e6rc,oc c,vov'Epw,c v:wv &p:,ev u ,cyeµovc. AP 12.56 = HE 110 18 73 A sculptor created a statue of Eros in Parian marble, Praxiteles, who molded Aphrodite's boy. Now Eros, the most beautiful of the gods, has modeled a living statue of Praxiteles, by copying himself, So that Desires, allotting love potions to mortals and in heaven, may hold power over both eath and the gods. Most blessed is the holy city of the Meropes, which nurtured a new Eros, a god-child, leader of its youth. Ecphrastic epigrams typically remark that an art object is so accurately rendered it appears actually to be "alive." But here the boy is called a "living statue" (tµJuxov .y..µ.) because he really is alive, yet as beautiful as a statue. The other central inversion of the epigram, of sculptor become sculpted, is grounded in the poet's relationship to the Greek past, signaled by the µev . . . vuv linking the first two couplets. While a sense of distance from past greatness is evident in the reuse of a famous name for a mere boy, Meleager also implies that Praiteles' accurate depiction of Eros has now escaped its frozen perfection to be re-created in one who outshines other Coan youths. Echoing P 16.204, an epigram attributed to Praxiteles and likely inscribed beneath the Thespian statue during the Hellenistic period, 19 Meleager declares that the boy Praxiteles now joins Eros in practicing his love magic (pLhp. �p.�:.ni; cf. plhp. ,Lx,w, A P 16.204) against both gods and mortals. The implication is that the boy has the same effect on those who see him as Praxiteles' statue has on Thespian viewers. While the first epigram praises the boy from a civic perspective, as the most handsome youth in Cos, the second of the pair personalizes the subject, by maing clear the poet's own desire: o: o: Dpc;L":A) ; 6 'XACL ½WoyM , o; i�pov iyc.µc i,uxov µop,'j; xw, ov heu;e t"U1'OV, rhpov Eve,oo, opwv · 6 o: vuv :µiuxc µcyeuwv "OV ,pmcvoupyov'Epw,' 'AC'eV EV xpcol:. � ,xxc "O\JVOµ' exec "(U"OV µ6vov, :pyc o: xprrw, ou .l&ov ina. , pevwv rveuµc µewppu&µlrc;. 18 The texts of Meleager's epigrams are taken from A F. S. Gow and D. L. Page, eds., The Greek Antholoy : Hellenistic Epigrams (Cambridge: Cambridge U Pr, l 965), except that in 12.56.6 I read D\&o, with the ms. instead ofD6&wv and in 12.57.5 I read xprrw with the ms. instead of xprrwv. 19 See Antony Raubitschek, "Phyne," RE 39 HB (1941): 899; ntonio Corso, Prassitele: fonti epigraic/ie e letterarie (Rome: De Luca, l 988-91), 1.42. 74 KATHRYN GUTZWILLER 'O.xo� nAiarot ''Ov EµOv rp6rov O ppx runWmx; :v,o; : -�v ,ux�v vtov'Epw,o; "XQ· AP I2.57 = HE 111 Praxiteles, the sculptor of old, fashioned a delicate statue, lifeless, a dumb image of fonn, by bringing shape to stone. But today's Praxiteles bewitches he living, having molded that ultimate rogue Eros in my heart. The name is perhaps the same but his accomplishments greater, since he has shaped not stone but mind's breath. Kindly may he mold my character so that once he's shaped my soul within, he may possess a temple or Eros. The boy is now compared, not to Eros, but to the sculptor Praxiteles himself. While the great Praxiteles had molded his Eros on the longing that he felt in his own heart, the boy Praxiteles sculpts Eros ithin the poet's heart as he reshapes Meleager's soul to become the god's shrine. Again, intertextual knowledge of the tradition about the Thespian statue is essential to understanding Meleager's maneuver. In the sense that Meleager has Eros in his heart, he too becomes a new Praxiteles, with the result that, like the sculptor of yore, he too can create a model of the god by artistic means. Through the intermediary of the Coan boy, then, Praxiteles' sculptural art is analogized to Meleager's poetic art, both products of erotic desire. A complex pair, these two epigrams provide an excellent example of Meleager's ability to use ecphrastic motifs to convey the intensity of his own longing. In doing so, he suggests that the greatness of the Hellenic past, as in Praxiteles' accurate depiction of erotic desire in the concreteness of stone, is not a lost art but one that continues in the reality of young male flesh. The third of the Meleagrian epigrams is even more remotely ecphrastic, since here the image, or dowAov, of the boy exists only in the dream-memory of the poet: 20 dv6owv r,dxov,t -CO"�" -�PLVOV doov 'AAe�LV xpn XO-lV xtptwv xeLpO-EVOU &cpeo;. OLtAt o' ax,lvc; -C Xl'"E> Aeyov, tl f-EV'Epw,o; ttLOO; at' O>&tA-WV, tl ok 1ttp' �eALou. XAA' &; -EI vu� tu&,; :xotµ,rsv, &; o' l:v \vdpoL; dowAov -Opqrj; µinov a'mpMy,rsv · Aurlrcovo; S' :-rEpou; E7r' EµoL t6vov Unvo; E'£U�Ev, eµtvouv tup ,uxJ XXAAO; XteLXOVC"l;. AP 12.127 = HE 79 20 On the link between sculpted images and dream images in Meleager, see Davide Susanetti, "Gli epigrammi di Meleagro: sogni e simulacri d'amore," Atti: semi11ari Piero Treves (Venice: Fondazione Scientifica Querini Stampalia, 1999), 47-61. VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGER AND CAVAFY 75 At noon I saw leis walking along he road, in that season when summer is just trimming he foliage of the crops. A dual set of rays inlamed me, those of Eros coming from he boy's eyes and those from he sun. Night at once put to sleep the sun's rays, but in my dreams the image of his form kindled the other even more. Sleep that releases the labor of others brought labor upon me by depicting in my soul his beauty as living fire. As ecphrastic epigrams often begin with a reference to viewing a work of art, here the poet begins with a chance viewing of a beautiful boy (doov •AA:��v). The first quatrain emphasizes the harmony between the speaker's experience and its setting in nature, as the heat of a late summer's noon parallels the heat generated by a glance from Alexis' eyes. But in the second quatrain this harmony dissolves in contrast, as night puts to bed the sun while an image of the boy appearing in the poet's dreams rekindles his passion. The final line makes it clear that the fire now dwelling in the poet has come there through a dual visual process, since the initial sighting of Alexis has been transformed through dream into an dxwv, or statue, molded in the poet's soul. Here too, as in P 12.57, Meleager becomes a version of Praxiteles: both have in their hearts an image of someone desired, an image that must issue forth artistically. Since t6vo; is the mot juste for the Hellenistic poet's hard work at composition,2 1 the final paradox about sleep-that it releases labor for others but has produced labor for Meleager-fuses the erotic and the literary: the t6vo; of passion wrought by Alexis' image is this intricate poem itself.22 Cavay's use of ecphrastic elements in his poetry shows striking similarities to Meleager's innovative eroticizing of the ecphrastic tradition in epigram. For both poets, the canonical ephebic beauty of Greek statuary is the standard by which to measure a beautiful body, seen and desired. For Meleager a specific statue, Praxiteles' Eros, provides a known image through 21 The loc11s classic11s is Theocritus Id. 7.51, µ,Mop,ov e�rn6vtrt cf. 7.85. In AP I 2.99 an anonymous epigrammatist speaks of Mourcwv o t0M; 1t6vo;. 22 Meleager images himself as a poetic sculptor elsewhere as well. In AP 12. I 06 he claims to have eyes for Myiscus alone and to be blind to all else, meaning hat everything he looks at takes on the appearance of Myiscus (1tiv,t o' xelvov :µol ptv,i�"tL). Under the orce of desire, pza11tasia replaces perception. In AP 5.212 Eros through his love magic places in the poet's heart the known "image" (,uto;) of the one he desires. Finally, m AP 12.125 the need for real visual perception, even as an initial step, vanishes, as the poet explains how Eros placed in his bed at night the dream-image of an eighteen-year-old ,outh. Now, s�ys the p_oet, he has always in his eyes sleep as the hunter of the boy's w1�ged image (tn1vou ptrµt,o;)-meaning that his dream-images crowd out the waking world-and prays that his soul no longer be warmed only in dreams with empty "images of beauty" (dowAOL; xineu;). 0 76 VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGERANO CAVAFY KATHRYN GUTZWILLER antiquity, itself historically layered, and that of his own experiential world, which defines itself both through and in contrast to ancient precedent.24 By depicting the cultural uses to which visual images were put in antiquity, Cavay could return to a time when beautiful male bodies were openly appreciated, even worshiped as divine. In "Before the Statue of Endymion" (A 69) the speaker, who has sailed from Alexandria in a purple trireme, arrives at Mt. Latmos in a white chariot drawn by snow-white mules to offer baskets of jasmine before Endymion's image.25 This richness of reference to color and scent prepares the reader to join in the devotee's sensual experience, and, as in many ancient ecphrases, the scene represented is the viewing moment (toou ,o xyxAµx), with its attendant emotions: "Now in ecstasy I behold the famed beauty of Endymion." Since the aesthetic beauty of the image is the true object of his worship, the sacred seems to blend, seamlessly, with the erotic. But when in the last line the worshiper claims his tributes have revived "the pleasure of ancient days," we realize that even here the pleasure desired belongs to the past. The homoerotic character of the speaker's devotion, his longing for Endymion's beauty, is a condition of this distance, which can only be bridged by those few who, like him, are willing and able to make long journeys and incur great expense to worship beauty carved in stone. Elsewhere too in Cavafy's historical poems, idealized Hellenic antiquity, when males might openly desire other male bodies, is only regressively present, seen through the longings of unusual, sensitive individuals. Other poems about antiquity are concerned with craftsmen who preserve the beauty of youthful bodies through the images they make. Here too the bodies desired are physically absent, known only through imagination or memory. The dramatic date for "Tyanan Sculptor" (A 46) is just before, or perhaps after, the death of Kaisarion, about 30 B.C. The artist, a Cappadocian with ties to both Greek and Roman culture, gives a tour of his workshop, which progresses rom the most staid of subjects-a reverential, archaic Rhea and some famous Roman statesmen of both recent which the reader is to picture the boys he desires, as it suggests a theory of artistic creativity that he adapts for his own eroticized poetics. For Cavay, who sees himself as a direct heir of ancient Hellenic culture and yet distant from it, a general reference to Greek sculpture is sufficient to conjure up a long-standing aesthetic tradition. So in "I've Gazed So Long, So Much-" (A 87) he explains that he has looked at beauty for so long his vision is now replete with it, a motif reminiscent of Meleager's blindness to all but Myiscus (P 12 .106). Cavay then describes the young male body that illustrates this beauty with details suggesting a painting or, as specified, a statue: "Lines (ypxµµt�) of the body. Red lips. Voluptuous limbs. Hair that seems taken from Greek statues (iycf)sµx,x tH) vixcf); always beautiful, though it be uncombed, and falling, lightly, on white brows." Not only is the recognized beauty of ancient statuary here the standard by which Cavay evaluates a youth's beauty, but, as he goes on to say, these bodily images were what his "poetry needed them to be," when encountered furtively during the nights of his youth. So for Cavay, as for Meleager, the vision of a statue, or statuelike beauty, is a stimulus for poetic creativity. Eros is again the link between beauty seen and poetry composed in "At the Entrance to the Cafe" (A 58), where Cavay adapts Meleager's conceit of Eros as the sculptor of a beautiful boy: 23 And I saw the beautiful body that seemed like Eros had made it at the crest of his skill­ molding the shapely limbs with joy; marking a height or the sculpted frame; moved when he created the ace and leaving, from the touch of his hands, a feeling on tJ1e forehead, on the eyes and lips. As the god's creative touch gradually devolves into desirous caress, it becomes clear that Eros the sculptor is here simply a mirror of the poet's own desire to touch, and then to preserve in art. But as we explore Cavafy's adaptation of the Meleagrian aesthetics of visual imagery, it is essential to keep in mind the cultural diference established by his distance from the Hellenic past. While Meleager sought to renew past greatness in living flesh, for Cavay the past is more complex-the source of all meaning, yet ultimately nonrecoverable. It exists in two registers, that of remote 23 Other scholars have suspected the influence of Meleager here; see Caires (above, note I), 143-145 and John P. Anton, The Poet,y and Poetics of Constantine P. Cavay: Aesthetic Visions of Sensual Reaiiy (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, I 995), 283, note 21. 77 r t 24 Cavay's sense of temporal identification, his blending of past and present, is well recognized. Fundamental studies are the essay of George Seferis, "Cavafy and Eliot-A Comparison" in Harvey (above, note !), 60-88, in which Cavay's use of history is compared to Eliot's, and Edmund Keeley, Cavy's Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Prgress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U Pr, 1976), in which it is argued that Cavay's poems, read together, create a coherent image of a mythical Alexandria. See too Tsakiridou (above, note 13) for a rereading of his Hellenism as an "originary horizon" that defines his poetic identity. 25 Pausanias 5.1.5 reports that the people of Heraclea in Caria, near Mt. Latmos, honored Endymion with a shrine. 78 KATHRYN GUTZWILLER and more distant past-to depictions of young men-Patroklos, a subject that still intrigues the artist, and Kaisarion26-and from there to the ideal or ethereal-the horses of Poseidon that must seem to run on water and finally the sculptor's favorite work, on which he has lavished his greatest care: This one-one day in the summer's heat when my mind rose to ideal thingsthis one came as I dreamed of the young Hem1es. The sculptor's masterpiece is the god who represents ephebic perfection, and as such can only be imagined, under rare circumstance. Just as the beauty of Meleager's Alexis was so burned into the poet's vision by the intensity of late summer that it returned in dream at night, so the sculptor of Tyana escapes from the mundane to the ideal in a moment of seasonal extremes, when midsummer's heat stimulates his imagination to form dream-images of Hermes' perfect form. In "Craftsman of Winebowls" (B 36), set in the second century B.C., another artist guides us in a viewing of a crafted object; again, it is the creative process, the summoning of absence into perceivable form, that is revealed, and again this process is shown to have an erotic motivation. Here a silversmith admires a winebowl he has made for Herakleidis, the treasurer of ntiochus IV Epiphanis, in whose house "great elegance reigns": Behold: elegant flowers, and streams, sprigs of thyme, see also in the midst how I have placed a handsome youtl1, naked, erotic; he keeps one shin in the water still.I prayed, oh Memoy, tl1at I'd find you a perfect aid, and so make tl1e young man I loved tl1e figure that he was. Great hardship was involved, since fifteen years or so had passed, from tl1e day he fell, a soldier, in the defeat at Magnesia. The artistic task was nothing less than a resurrection, since the youth's charm as he seductively dangles his leg remains still to be observed, by the lover as by others.27 Unlike Cavay, this ancient craftsman has no reason to conceal, from his interlocutor or his patron, the erotic motivation for his choice of subject matter, and the accuracy of the depiction, after such a 26 Carmen Capri-Karka, Love and tlze Symbolic Jouney in the Poet,y of Cavafy, Eliot, and Sferis (New York: Pella, I 982) 38, notices the hint of attraction to male form tluough the reference to Patroklos and reminds us of Patroklos' homosexual relationship witl1 Achilles. 27 Cf. Tsakiridou (above, note I3), !20: "The dead soldier's body comes to life in he engraver's hand in what is obviously a phantasy of seduction and intercourse." VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGERAND CAVFY 79 passage of time, seems a special source of pride. But even in this ideal antiquity when men who were respected as artists and warriors might openly express their love, Cavafy chooses to focus on loss, on the dificulty of transmuting the past into art. The crafted youth was made only with great effort, requiring the aid of Memory as Muse. In two other poems Cavafy links present with past by picturing himself as the viewer of an image from antiquity. The poem entitled "Orophenis" (A 39-40) begins in genuinely ecphrastic fashion as the poet contemplates a portrait on an ancient coin, a rare tangible link to the sensual world of the remote Greek past: The man on this four-drachma piece witl1 sometl1ing like a smile on his face, his handsome, refined face, tl1at man is Orophemis, son of Ariarathis. We may assume that Cavay ran across an illustration of this coin during his historical researches and re-creates in the poem the interaction between his emotional response to the attractive portrait and his intellectual awareness of the facts of the man's life. The poet proceeds to create a biography or this minor monarch from second-century B.C. Cappadocia by combining an imaginative account of his youthful experiences with the few facts known from history. Orophernes was sent as a child to Ionia, where Cavay imagines that "in consummately Greek form, he first knew fully passion's joy"; though in his heart he remained Asiastic, he became in speech and appearance Greek, "of all the handsome Ionian youths" the most handsome, the most perfect. Afterwards the Syrians put him on the Cappadocian throne until his greed and incompetence led to his removal. Exiled to Syria, he plotted unsuccessfully against the Seleucid Demetrius I (187-50 B.C.), and the poet comments that his end, now unnown, was perhaps too slight a matter for history to record. In this Cavafian biography, the utter uselessness of Orophernes' life in moral and political terms contrasts sharply with the aesthetic value provided by his delicate beauty, and ironically this is what survives, the image on the coin becoming Orophernes' one contribution to posterity. The poem ends with a return to the ecphrastic mode: The man on this four-drachma piece left one grace from his handsome youth, one light from his poetic beauty, one aestl1etic memory of a boy from Ionia; tl1at is Orophernis, son of Ariaratl1is. 80 KATHRYN GUTZWILLER The final line, repeated from the opening, is no longer a simple identification of an image seen, but a statement of what constitutes a life, what is worth remembering, in the refined aesthetic vision of Cavay. In "Kaisarion" (A 73-74) the image from antiquity exists only in the mind's eye of the poet, who visualizes in full detail the unfortunate son of Cleopatra VII, illed on the command of Octavian at age seventeen. Here the visual is created from text alone by a process that Cavafy carefully explains within the poem. On the previous night, he says, he was reading through a book of Ptolemaic inscriptions when his attention was caught by a single reference to Kaisarion. Having set the scene of the night before, the poet suddenly turns to address the youth, mysteriously present with his indefinable charm (&6ptr,j yo)rda), and describes how his mind gave form to Kaisarion: I made you handsome and sensitive. My art gives your face a dreamlike, alluring beauty. AndI imagined every part of you, in such detail, that late last night, as my lamp went out-I let it go out deliberately­ ! thought you came into my room, it seemed to me you stood before me; as you would have been in conquered Alexandia, pale and weary, ideal in your sorrow, still hoping compassion for you might stir in them, the vile ones-who munnured, "Too many Caesars." Although the language (ecAara, ,txvi µau) images the poet as a sculptor, Cavay, as a ashioner of words, must move beyond the still image to speech and movement. So the appearance of the long-dead Kaisarion in his bedroom occurs in two stages, first the dreamlike mental image admired by the poet as if it were a statue and then a willed presence of something more like an apparition, a figure conjured up by the poet's imagination (pav-rr&rpw.) to behave like a living being. The "visual" image is the link between the historical text with which Cavay begins and the poetic text that represents the animated Kaisarion of his literary imagination. 28 It is not surprising, then, that the youth's ghostly appearance recalls a famous scene in Greek literature, the visit of Patroklos' ghost to Achilles, and we 28 As the last line reveals, it was the unique word toAuxtLrtpl 1) (Plutarch, Life of A11tOJI 81) that set the poet's vision in motion. For reading as a source of Cavay's inspiration, see Diskin Clay, "The Poet in the Reader," /oumal of Modem Greek Studies 5 (1987): 65-83. See too Jusdanis (above, note 5), 10-12 on how this poem illustrates he poet's conscious control over the creative act. VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGER AND CAVAFY 81 may remember that in "Tyanan Sculptor" statues of Patroklos and Kaisarion are described in the same stanza, both handsome Greeks who died too young. But the image from the past is here, as so often, eroticized: Cavafy puts out the lamp perhaps better to imagine the youth and perhaps better to savor the pleasure of his presence. As an object of erotic fantasy, 29 Kaisarion may remind us of the Alexis who fills Meleager's nighttime vision (P 12.127), but this youth of seventeen, dead centuries ago, will have no waking reality. Cavay's erotic obsession with the fragile, doomed Kaisarion has to do with the historical moment he represents, the moment of Alexandria's downfall when the dominant political and cultural forces became indifferent to the sort of ephebic beauty worshiped by Meleager only a few decades beore. As survivals from antiquity such as coins or historical references may trigger for Cavay an imagined vision of a desirable youth from the past, so a visual image from his own world may stimulate memory of beauty once seen and desire once aroused. The visual serves, then, both as a link to antiquity and as a stimulus to memory of the poet's own sexual experience and so to its transformation into literary art. 30 As the initial impetus to desire is seeing an attractive youth, so the memory of that desire is based on seeing again. But what is seen again is not the youth himself, whose beauty has certainly faded, but a reflection of him in a form that both preserves his youthful appearance and holds it at a remove. Visual aesthetics are thus fundamental to Cavay's poetic process since seeing a mimetic image is the catalyst for memory of seeing, a process of presence­ in-distance that allows Cavafy to convert his emotional life to poetry. Meleager suggests a similar view of poetic creativity when he claims that the boy Praxiteles has sculpted Eros in his heart or that an dowAov of Alexis' beauty appeared in his dreams to set alame his soul. Both poets use seen images as the link between initial desire and desire reexperienced through memory, but the process by which the visual leads to the verbal, to poetry, is more self-consciously explored in Cavay. The visual images from Cavay's own world take a variety of forms. In "From the Ship" (B 17) the speaker, who may be closely identified with the poet, contemplates a pencil sketch of a youth, sensitive to the point of 29 Marguerite Yourcenar, Prtfse11tatio11 critique de Co11sta11ti11 Cavay (Paris: Gallimard, I 978; first published 1958), 39 speaks of Cavay here as a "necromant amoureux." On the erotic tone of the poem, see too Peter Bien, Co11sta11ti11e Cavay (New York: Columbia U Pr, 1964), 22 and Capri-Karpa (above, note 26), 66-67. 30 Among the best studies on memory in Cavafy are Alexander Nehamas, "Memoy, Pleasure, and Poety: The Grammar of the Self in the Writing of Cavafy," /011mal f Modem Greek Studies 2 (1963): 295-319 and Jusdanis (above, note 5), 89-92. 82 KATHRY GUTZWILLER illness, apparently a former lover. 31 It begins, like many ecphrastic epigrams from the Antholoy, with a reference to the accuracy of the dep1Ct10n: It's like him, surely, this small picture of him, done in pencil. The ancient viewers who speak in epigram often comment on how the realistic nature of the image brings to life the depicted figure. In a similar way, the speaker in Cavafy's poem reacts to the image by reviving in memory the occasion when the picture was drawn: Quickly done, on the ship's deck; one magical afternoon. The Ionian sea around us. It's like him. Still, I remember him more handsome He seems more handsome to me now hat my soul calls him back, out of Time. Out of Time. All these things are very old­ the sketch, the boat, the afternoon. The accuracy of the sketch has, paradoxically, a value beyond mim�tic truthfulness since the memory it stimulates is preferable to the drawmg itself, the y;uth being more handsome as rememb�red: But as the last l� ne suggests, the moment of memory is precarious, fadmg like the sketch, which . is, however, present now as it was then, when there also existed the boat and the afternoon. The sketch is, then, the bridge between loss and recovery, made lasting only when transmuted into verbal art. In anothe: poem, entitled "Gray" (A 92), the poet, "looking at a half-gray opal, remembers "two beautiful gray eyes" he had seen twenty years before. They belonged to a young man who was his lover for a month, before �e left for Smyrna, never to be seen again. The e�es, the p� et knows, will "have turned ugly-if he's living," and "the beautiful face will h�ve become a ruin. " But memory, which, Muselike, the poet addresses,_ 1s asked to . preserve those eyes and to bring back for one night whatever 1t �an _ of his . lost love. Memory, then, aids Cavay to become an artist as it_ did the silversmith in "Craftsman of the Winebowls," but, because Cavay is a poet and not a sculptor, the tangible object that mimics th� belove_d-t�e . opal-is not now what is made but what cues memory. In The � irr� r m . the Vestibule" (B 87) an old mirror assumes the role of a lover, digmfied but aging, as it exults and stands "to its full proud h�ight" after displaying for five minutes the image of a beautiful youth, a delivery boy, who stared See Liddell (above, note JO) 172-173 for an attempted identification of the occasion and individuals. 31 VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGER AND CAVAFY 83 into the mirror while waiting for a receipt. The relection in the mirror is an important addition to this set of visual images, because it reveals most clearly the narcissism in Cavay's fascination with depictions of beautiful youths: 32 for the five minutes during which the delivery boy is reflected in the mirror, his inaccessible beauty is completely possessed and his unattainable youth reanimates the aged. The mirror is clearly an emblem of the aging poet (the poem was written in 1930), who has also "seen and seen again . . . thousands of things and faces" but would rejoice to relect "beauty, in its entirety, for a few minutes." As the final lines show, the subject of representation is not in fact the youth seen and reflected but the emotional response of the mirror to his beauty, desired and momentarily possessed. Again, the visual triggers the poetic. In two much earlier poems, Cavay more explicitly comments on the relationship between the viewing of erotic images and the composition of poetry. In "Painted" (A 55) the poet describes a day when he had difficulty writing, a dismal day, "all wind and rain." The solution to mental fatigue and despondency is escape into a different visual realm: I'm more in the mood to see than to say. I gaze at this painting, now, at a beautiful boy who has lain down near a spring, where running has ired him. What a beautiful child: what a godly noon has caught him up in sleep.I sit and gaze like this for a long time. Through the means of art, I rest from all its labors. Here the poet finds release from the dreariness of his day and the toil of composing, as his attraction to the beautiful boy pulls him into the painted scene and the different mood expressed there. The poem could be read as a statement that the production of verbal art is replaced by the viewing of visual art, the poet being transformed rom artist to audience. But the language of the last line, suggesting that the -dxvJ of painting and that of poetry are the same, points in a different direction. The poet's repose, mirroring that of the boy in the painting, results not in a cessation of composition but in the poem itself: by describing his experience of viewing, Cavafy becomes a successful painter of words. In "When They Are roused" (A 85) the poet struggles with the difficulty of being just that, of putting the mental visions of his erotic life into verse: 32 On Cavay's homoerotic narcissism, see Tsakiridou (above, note 13), especially 121: "Love in Cavay is silent and refleive, like an embodied mirror." 84 KATHRYN GUTZWILLER T y to keep them, poet, those erotic visions of yours, however few of them there are that can be stilled. Put them, half-hidden, in your lines. T y to hold them, poet, when they are aroused in your mind at night or in the shining light of noon. Here the poet conronts directly the paradox of converting what is seen (r: 6pc.µ:-r:) into what is said (ppc.rw;). These erotic visions are awakened in his mind during the quiet of night or the hour of midday and must be "stilled"-converted metaphorically into statues or paintings-before placed, furtively, in his poetry.33 So in both of these poems the process of seeing, whether a work of art or an imaginary vision, is shown to be a crucial step in poetic creativity. Though no exact precedents for this self­ conscious reflection on the poet's craft and its relationship to art are found in Meleager, the principal dichotomies with which Cavay works in these poems-labor and repose, noon and night, waking and sleeping-use imagery found throughout his corpus. 34 Visual images, because they are silent, have for Cavay the advantage of preserving beauty without revealing its homoerotic meaning; as a result, they facilitate love between males in a society that now forbids it. In a poem entitled "In an Old Book" (B 39), the poet discovers a watercolor, unsigned, "forgotten between the pages" of a book "close to a hundred years old." The drawing of a young man bore the title "Representation of Eros" (i:pourL:cri½ roO 'Epw-ro½), but the poet thinks it better interpreted as "-the eros of exacting sensualists." The ploy of playing on the dual meanings of the word "eros" so that the young man in the watercolor represents both the god Eros and the desire of those who would appreciate his beauty harks back to Meleager, who expected his audience to understand that, if the Coan Praxiteles was molded by Eros to look like Eros, he was then naturally an object of desire. But while the implications of calling a boy a "living statue" of Eros would be transparent in antiquity, in Cavay's world the true meaning of resembling Eros, though recoverable from the ancient tradition, is evident only to a select few who know how to read the signs. As Cavay explains, 33 On the artistic metaphor here, cf. Alexiou (above, note 3), 174. 34 In Meleager wakefulness is often an image for passionate longing and sleep for release from desire: AP 5.212 (oui' � vu� . .. lxol Ltcrcv); 5.215 ('Epw;, -rov &yputvov E LOL t6&ov'H.,oowpx; xol ,trov); 5.190 (&xol ,)TOL ... ;jAot); 7.196 (puywv -rov'Epwcx . . . UtVOV &ypcurw). VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGERANO CAVAFY 85 ... the young man in the drawing was not intended for those who love somehow healthily, who abide by what is manifestly pennitted­ with chestnut, deep-shaded eyes; with elite beauty in his ace, with his ideal limbs anned or beds the current morality finds shameful. And even the possession of such a silent image has its dangers. In "From the Drawer" (KP l 09) the poet finds a photograph that he had once intended to display on the wall of his room, now marred from the dampness of the drawer. As usual, the visual image holds open the fantasy of a return to past love: "Those lips, that face-oh that or just a day, for one hour only, their past might come again." But the damage to the photograph signals, symbolically, the difficulty of recovering erotic experience, which must, like the photograph in the drawer, remain hidden, tucked away in the recesses of the poet's mental and emotional life. 35 The poem ends with a decision not to display the image: Besides, even if it were not marred, it would irk me to be on my guard lest some word, some tone of voice betray me­ if hey ever questioned me about it. Visual images are important to Cavay, then, because they preserve a source of erotic pleasure even in the absence of the desired person, sometimes after many years of separation; they are also important because they are silent, acquiring their meaning only through interpretation, so that they hide from others the erotic stirrings they foster in lovers of male beauty. In that sense a visual image differs from a poetic one, because erotic reaction to the visual is dependent on the viewer's desire, while poetry represents-discloses-the viewer as desiring agent. So Cavafy's earlier poems about depictions of youths either disguised their homosexual meaning or remained unpublished,36 and for years he used the ancient register of his poetry as a place where the homoerotic use of art could be more safely explored, so that poems like the "Craftsman of Winebowls" 35 Another hidden poem, "So" (KP 95), on a pornographic photograph, shows the poet as viewer reading through the sexually explicit nature of the image to see the youtl1's beauty as "molded and given for Hellenic pleasure," as "my poetry says tl1at you are." 36 Capri-Karka (above, note 26), 82 points out hat "From the Ship," written and published in 1919, was "the first of Cavay's personal poems in which the sex of the beloved is explicitly defined." On Cavay's careful use of pronouns to conceal or reveal the sex of a love object, see Liddell (above, note I 0), 160-162. 86 KATHRYN GUTZWILLER contain the same themes of erotic viewing and of remembering a lost beloved that appear in Cavay's later poems on contemporary life. My principal thesis here is that Cavafy found a precedent for his erotic interpretation of art in Hellenistic epigrams, particularly those of Meleager, who, like Cavafy, uses visual imagery to explore a lover's reaction to a beautiful youth, but more openly, as part of a Hellenic tradition of love between males that had not yet suffered suppression. In a brief concluding section, I will argue that Meleager represented for Cavay an ideal moment when the eroticized gaze could still be directed, openly, and even publicly, to beautiful male bodies, both in flesh and in image. In several poems set in the Greek East, but after the lifetime of Meleager, Cavafy seems to project his social anxiety about his own homosexuality onto young men of the past, who lived at a time when new cultural orces were establishing standards of morality and spiritualism that conflicted with their aesthetic preferences and sexual desires. In "Of the Jews (50 AD.)" (B 15) a young Jew, "painter and poet, runner and discus­ thrower, beautiful as Endymion," struggles to live an honorable life according to the dictates of his faith, by abandoning "beautiful and demanding Hellenism, with its reigning fixation on perfectly shaped, corruptible white limbs." But while this young Jew feels the conflict between the ethnic group to which he belongs by birth and the aesthetic pull of the cosmopolitan Hellenic culture in which he resides (named Ianthis, he is son of an Antony), Greek values still dominated the world of 50 AD. so that eventually "the Hedonism and Art of Alexandria kept him for their own devoted son." Three poems set in fifth-century Sidon show a different picture: Hellenic tradition with its devotion to eroticized male beauty is now under pressure from internal cultural forces. In "Young Men of Sidon (400 AD.)," as we have seen, a perfumed youth who enjoys epigrams by Meleager and others objects to the epitaph for Aeschylus because his literary accomplishments are unmentioned, forgotten in favor of patriotic militarism. The Aeschylus epitaph apparently symbolizes for this youth the danger threatening Hellenism in this late-antique world, where the aesthetic essence of the past is understood only by the isolated few, increasingly segregated from the culture around them. This view is confirmed by another poem, called "Theater of Sidon (400 AD.)" (B 43), clearly intended to refer to the same cultural situation. A young man who writes for the theater, "an honorable citizen's son," explains that his literary life has a secret, dangerous side: I sometimes compose, in Greek, utterly scabrous verses, which I naturally circulate vey secretly-Gods! may they not see tl1em, VISUAL AESTHETICS IN MELEAGERND CAVFY 87 those who go about darkly clothed mouthing morality­ verses of an exceptional pleasure, one that leads to barren love and to opprobrium. These secret verses-which clearly parallel Cavafy's own hidden po�try-may simply be homoerotic epigrams in the manner of Mereager, Rh1anus, and Strato, but the youth who writes them shows evidence of having internalized guilt for his aesthetic and sexual preferences.37 "Barren love" and "opprobium" are the words of the moral censors, also half his own. Fin�lly, we return to "Simeon," the other poem to mention Meleager, . set 1 Antioch of 450 AD. The young man who speaks in this poem is asked to comment on Lamon, "Sria's chief poet," whom he judges "more _ learned 1 Gree!� than Libanius," yet not "better than Meleager." But in fct ' �he poem 1s about the speaker's inability to focus on books and a . _ tnv1aht1es because, as he says, he is on this day "troubled" (c1.p.yµtvo;). The reason fo� his emotional upheaval is a visit he made the day before to _ the pillar of Suneon Stylites, who had sat there, facing God, for thirty-five years. In the face of t�is incredible act of religious devotion, the youth is unable to care about literature or the aesthetic pleasures it brings, and Cavafy here shows us, I think, with sympathy and appreciation for the spiritualism of Christianity,38 how the homoerotic life of ancient Hellenism beca1:e submerged, hidden in the folds of history. The old sacredness of bea�tJful youths like Endymion was replaced by a sacredness that disdained desne between men. But traces remained, sensual epigrams, such as those �f Meleager, or an occasional visual image of a handsome, refined youth, like the com of Orophernis, telling a story of ancient passion to those who know how to read and to view. Universiy of Cincinnati 37 In "Temetl10s, Antiochian, A.O. 400" a poet uses a pseudonym for his lover to . hide tl1e relationship. 38 See Bien above, note 29), 23-3 I, for discussion of Cavay's treatment of the � . tens10n between Chnsuamty and paganism in historical Alexandria.