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“Caesarion” as Palimpsest

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Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities

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Abstract

“Caesarion” (1918) has long been hailed as “virtually a key to our whole understanding of Cavafy’s work” (Robinson, 1988, p. 86). The poem’s title refers to Ptolemy XV Philopator Philometor, son of the seventh and most famous Cleopatra and allegedly Julius Caesar and nominally the last monarch of the Lagid dynasty in Egypt. He was born in 47 BCE and was put to death by Octavian seventeen years later, shortly after the suicides of Antony and his mother.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a detailed historical portrait of Caesarion see Gray-Fow (2014).

  2. 2.

    Cavafy’s portrayal as quasi-historian was set off by the poet’s own remarks but also validated by early commentators; see, for example, Sareyannis (1983, pp. 112–113).

  3. 3.

    As Duane W. Roller notes, for example, “the iconography of Cleopatra VII is elusive, although the subject of much scholarship. […] As with the biographical details of the queen’s life, the information is frustratingly limited” (2010, p. 173).

  4. 4.

    See, for example, Phillipson (2013, p. 447): “Surely the point has been already made that Cavafy’s reference to ‘a set of Ptolemaic inscriptions’ is no idle claim, but a simple description of what actually happened in this and in many other similar occasions […]. For this is how he spent many a lonely night during his later years, reading the verbose inscriptionese declaring ‘the most of this’ and ‘the highest of the other,’ chuckling at the ‘lovely barbarisms’ of the ancient stones […]. Until perhaps, if he were lucky, a minor mention or some detail about a character or another captured his fancy, and thus tired but wistful, he let his lamp wane, put away the book, and turned in for a bit of more amiable companionship.”

  5. 5.

    A brief note from Mahaffy’s book (1895, pp. 463–464) in Cavafy’s hand, featuring a reference to “Ptolemy Caesar, the God Philopator Philometor,” has been kept in the poem’s folder at the Cavafy Archive. See Cavafy, 2019.

  6. 6.

    M. Alexiou (1985, p. 184), suggests that “in the first stanza, the self-image of past rulers is subverted,” whereas D. Haas (1982, p. 33, n. 32) thinks the poem’s sarcasm is directed at the scribblers of inscriptions.

  7. 7.

    On the differences between the 1594 and 1607 editions of the play see Wiggins and Richardson (2013, pp. 216–219).

  8. 8.

    An Egyptian Princess was published in Greek translation in Athens, in 1875, and Serapis in Cairo, in 1890.

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  1. School of Humanities, Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece

    Takis Kayalis

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Kayalis, T. (2024). “Caesarion” as Palimpsest. In: Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34902-7_5

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