Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities

"Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities is a fascinating and meticulous study of how the Greek poet breathes life into artefacts and textual fragments from the classical past. Kayalis delves deeply into the poems in order to lay bare the extraordinary complexity that hides beneath the surface. His book shows that modern poetry, modern homosexuality and even British imperialism were shaped by encounters with Hellenistic culture."

- Stefano Evangelista, Professor of English, University of Oxford

"Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities offers an original critique of the poet as a belated antiquarian by redefining his archaeological poetics and aligning them with his Anglophilia and colonial positionality. Kayalis's revisionist appraisal of Cavafy's historicism presents compelling new readings of signature poems and forges new connections to overlooked homoerotic and popular sources. A brilliant contribution to Cavafy studies."

- Peter Jeffreys, Associate Professor of English, Suffolk University

This book reinterprets C. P. Cavafy's historical and archaeological poetics by correlating his work to major cultural, political and sexualized receptions of antiquity that marked the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on selected poems which stage readings of Hellenistic and late ancient texts and material objects, this study probes the poet's personal library and archive to trace his scholarly sources and scrutinize their contribution to his creative practice. A new understanding of Cavafy's historicism emerges by comparing his poetics to a broad array of discourses and intellectual pursuits of his time; these range from antiquarianism, physiognomy and Egyptomania to cultural appropriations of the classics which sought to legitimate British colonial rule as well as homoerotic desire. As this volume demonstrates, Cavafy embraced antiquarianism as an empathetic and passionate way of relating to the past and shaped it into a method that allowed his poetry to render modern meanings to Hellenistic antiquities.
Takis Kayalis is Professor of Modern Greek Literature at the Hellenic Open University, Greece. He has published extensively on nineteenth-century prose and modernist poetry and co-edited Teaching Literature at a Distance: Open, Online and Blended Learning (2010) and Cavafy as World Literature (forthcoming). In 2019 he co-curated the Cavafy Archive's Digital Collection (Onassis Foundation).

1 Introduction. - Part I: Cavafy Reads a Coin. - 2 A golden coin? . - 3 How to read a coin portrait in the early 1900s. - 4 What is a `poet-historian ? . - Part II: Cavafy Reads Inscriptions. - 5 `Caesarion as palimpsest. - 6 `In the month of Athyr : Leucius and his friends. - Part III: Looking at Antiquity from Inside the Empire. - 7 Imperial desires. - 8 A Hellenistic Empire. - 9 How to read Cavafy inside the British Empire.