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Profoundly, the poet ponders the matter.
But he’s interrupted by his servant, who comes
running and delivers the momentous intelligence:
The war with the Romans has begun.
Most of our army has crossed the border.
The poet stays, dumbfounded. What a disaster!
How, now, can our glorious king,
Mithradates, Dionysus and Eupator,
be bothered to pay attention to Greek poems?
In the middle of a war—imagine, Greek poems.
Phernazes frets. What bad luck is his!
Just when he was sure, with his “Darius,”
to make his name, and to reduce his critics,
those envious men, to silence at long last.
What a setback, what a setback for his plans!
And if it had only been a setback: fine.
But let’s see if we are really all that safe
in Amisus. It’s not a spectacularly well-fortified land.
The Romans are most fearsome enemies.
Is there any way we can get the best of them,
we Cappadocians? Could it ever happen?
Can we measure up to the legions now?
Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.—
And yet in the midst of all his upset, and the disaster,
a poetic notion stubbornly comes and goes—
far more convincing, surely, are arrogance and intoxication;
arrogance and intoxication are what Darius would have felt.
[<1897?; 1917; 1920]
Anna Comnena
She laments in the prologue to her Alexiad,
Anna Comnena laments her widowhood.
Her soul is in muzzy whirl. “And with
freshets of tears,” she tells us, “I deluge
mine eyes. … Alack the breakers” of her life,
“alack for the upheavals.” Anguish burns her
“unto the very bones and marrow and rending of my soul.”
Nonetheless the truth seems to be that she knew one
mortal grief alone, that power-loving woman:
that she had only one profound regret
(even if she won’t acknowledge it), that supercilious Greekling:
for all of her dexterity she didn’t manage
to secure the Throne; instead he took it
practically right out of her hands, that upstart John.
[1917; 1920]
Byzantine Noble, in Exile, Versifying
Let the dilettantes call me dilettante.
In serious matters I have always been
most diligent. And on this I will insist:
that no one has a better knowledge of
Church Fathers or Scripture, or the Synodical Canons.
On every question that he had, Botaniates—
every difficult ecclesiastical matter—
would take counsel with me, me first of all.
But since I’ve been exiled here (curse that spiteful
Irene Ducas) and am frightfully bored,
it’s not at all unseemly if I divert myself
by crafting verses of six or seven lines—
divert myself with mythological tales
of Hermes, and Apollo, and Dionysus,
or the heroes of Thessaly and the Peloponnese;
or with composing strict iambic lines
such as—if I do say so—the litterateurs
of Constantinople don’t know how to write.
That strictness, most likely, is the reason for their censure.
[1921; 1920]
Their Beginning
The fulfillment of their illicit pleasure
is accomplished. They’ve risen from the bed,
and dress themselves quickly without speaking.
They emerge separately, covertly, from the house. And while
they walk rather uneasily in the street, it seems
as if they suspect that something about them betrays
what kind of bed they’d fallen into just before.
Nonetheless, how the artist’s life has gained.
Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write
powerful lines, that here was their beginning.
[1915; 1921]
Favour of Alexander Balas
Oh I’m not put out because my chariot’s
wheel was smashed, and I’m down one silly win.
I shall pass the night among fine wines
and lovely roses. All Antioch is mine.
I am the most exalted of young men.
I’m Balas’s weakness, the one he worships.
Tomorrow, you’ll see, they’ll say the race wasn’t proper.
(But if I were vulgar, and had secretly given the order—
they’d even have placed my crippled chariot first, the flatterers.)
[1916?; 1921]
Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D.
The aging of my body and my looks
is a wound from a terrible knife.
I have no means whatsoever to endure it.
Unto you I turn, Art of Poetry,
you who know something of drugs;
of attempts to numb pain, in Imagination and Word.
It’s a wound from a terrible knife.—
Bring on your drugs, Art of Poetry,
which make it impossible—for a while—to feel the wound.
[1918?; 1921]
Demaratus
