THE BEST OF THINGS

 

In C.P. Cavafy’s Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene, a grieving princess returns from the funeral of her brother and decides that his tomb requires an inscription commensurate with his virtues. The deceased is Antiochus, king of Commagene, whom Cavafy describes as having lived temperately and gently and as being exceedingly learned. Fortunately, an accomplished man of letters is available for the task. Callistratus, a sophist from Ephesus, frequently resides in the little kingdom and has been received “gladly and repeatedly” by its royal household. With suggestions supplied by the Syrian courtiers, he composes an appropriately impressive memorial. Antiochus had been a beneficent king and provident ruler, he declares, just, wise and courageous. These attributes, formidable though they may be, remain insufficient. «Υπήρξεν έτι το άριστον εκείνο, Ελληνικός». He possessed, in addition, that most excellent quality: he was Greek. Humanity, Callistratus continues, possesses no more honourable attribute, «ιδιότητα δεν έχ’ η ανθρωπότης τιμιοτέραν». Beyond that exalted condition, «εις τους θεούς ευρίσκονται τα πέραν»: only among the gods can anything superior be found.

Cavafy could scarcely have arranged the circumstances more suspiciously. Callistratus’s repeated enjoyment of royal hospitality, the bereaved sister’s commission and the intervention of the courtiers place the epitaph within a network of gratitude, grief and patronage, yet Cavafy leaves the sincerity of its author tantalisingly unresolved, allowing the language itself to perform the comedy. Antiochus is already beneficent, provident, just, wise and courageous when ἔτι, “in addition”, introduces the final qualification. Το άριστον εκείνο raises expectation further, and the rhetorical ascent resolves into the deceptively simple adjective Ελληνικός. The claim then expands once more: humanity possesses no more honourable quality, while anything beyond it belongs to the gods. Callistratus has elevated Greekness so far that his encomium has nowhere left to go except Olympus.

The location of this apotheosis makes it more peculiar still. Commagene was a small kingdom between Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia, situated within the heterogeneous world of the Hellenistic East. Cavafy reduces its political pretensions with the almost mischievous κρατίδιον, the “little state,” juxtaposing the magnificence of the epitaph against the modest dimensions of the kingdom whose ruler it celebrates. A monarch from this eastern borderland is being declared supremely Greek by an Ephesian sophist, acting upon suggestions supplied by Syrian courtiers. The circumstances already make the apparent simplicity of Ελληνικός difficult to sustain.

Even the word upon which Callistratus erects his extraordinary climax contains an ambiguity of its own. Antiochus is Ελληνικός, rather than Έλλην. The noun would identify him directly as a Greek, placing him within a people, while the adjective attributes Greekness to him as a quality, alongside the justice, wisdom and courage already bestowed upon him. In the world of Commagene, Ελληνικός can consequently suggest something acquired and cultivated: a man formed through Greek language, paideia and cultural models while inhabiting a kingdom situated on the margins of the Hellenic world. The formulation opens a small but significant distance between being Greek and possessing Greekness.

Cavafy entangles his own poem in the uncertainty created by that distance. Every route towards Antiochus passes through language already formed by another consciousness, and the king remains inaccessible behind those representations. Any unmediated Antiochus capable of confirming or disproving the inscription is withheld, creating a characteristically Cavafian predicament: the poem encourages distrust of the epitaph while leaving that epitaph virtually our sole means of access to the person it commemorates.

The Syrian courtiers, however, introduce a further complication, one that unsettles any assumption that their presence merely exposes Antiochus’s Greekness as artificial. Cavafy’s imaginative geography repeatedly locates Hellenism across Alexandria, Syria, Asia Minor and the culturally mixed cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Within that world, a Syrian can participate in Greek culture while remaining Syrian. The apparent incongruity of Syrians participating in the proclamation of Ελληνικός therefore turns back upon the reader who finds their participation incongruous. Their presence raises the possibility that Greekness derives some of its historical vitality precisely from its capacity to circulate beyond ancestry and territory.

The aforementioned courtiers acquire a further significance when the poem is placed beside Cavafy’s earlier Philhellene. There, a ruler somewhere beyond the Zagros orders the word “Philhellene” to be engraved upon his coin and, confronted with the remoteness of his kingdom from the Greek world, offers among the proofs of its Hellenisation the sophists who occasionally arrive from Syria. In Epitaph of Antiochus, Cavafy rearranges the same cultural traffic. An Ephesian sophist now resides in Commagene, while Syrian courtiers supply the suggestions from which his supreme proclamation of Ελληνικός emerges. Syria has moved from providing evidence of Hellenisation to participating in the definition of Hellenism itself. The reversal makes any simple geography of centre and periphery increasingly difficult to maintain. Greek culture passes through Ephesus, Syria and Commagene without any one of them possessing exclusive authority over its meaning; those who receive it also interpret it, transmit it and confer it upon others. Cavafy’s Hellenistic world consequently resembles a network more than a series of concentric circles radiating from an uncontested Greek centre. Ελληνικός acquires meaning through circulation, and every act of transmission leaves something of the transmitter within it.

The history of Commagene complicates that possibility further. The precise Antiochus intended by Cavafy remains uncertain, although Antiochus I of Commagene provides an especially suggestive point of comparison. His surviving royal programme fashioned dynastic identity through Greek and Persian inheritances simultaneously. At Nemrut Dağı, Antiochus placed himself within genealogical traditions reaching towards both the Macedonian and Achaemenid worlds, while the gods of his royal cult themselves possessed composite identities: Zeus-Oromasdes, Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes and Artagnes-Herakles-Ares. Cultural hybridity in Commagene became a language through which sovereignty, ancestry and sacred authority could be expressed. If Cavafy’s Antiochus recalls this ruler, even indirectly, the paradox becomes sharper, since the man commemorated through the supreme adjective Ελληνικός belongs to a dynastic culture capable of presenting plurality as a source of legitimacy.

Callistratus imposes a different grammar upon this plurality, selecting one constituent and elevating it through το άριστον εκείνο into the measure of the whole. Calling Antiochus Ελληνικός presents less of a problem than requiring Greekness to explain him completely.

The same history unsettles the distinction between an authentic centre and a derivative diaspora. The imagined pristine original against which diasporic forms are measured may itself be less historical than the mixtures it seeks to discipline.

Against this history of cultural transmission, the anxiety with which Greek identity is so often approached in diasporan communities such as those in Australia becomes especially revealing. Greek Melbourne has devoted extraordinary energy to defining Hellenism and identifying the attributes that certify authenticity. Language, Orthodoxy, family, national symbols, traditional costume, historical memory, food and dance are genuine expressions of a living culture, carrying meanings accumulated through experience, belief and transmission. The difficulty begins when these expressions are converted into proofs, their presence taken to establish authenticity and their absence to place it in doubt. Callistratus and the Syrian courtiers become uncomfortable companions because they too possess complete command of the vocabulary appropriate to the identity they celebrate.

The elevation of Ελληνικός also alters the status of everything Callistratus has already said about Antiochus. His justice, wisdom and courage are asserted without incident or example, whereas Greekness requires no demonstration beyond its naming. Cavafy thereby exposes a more troubling reversal within the encomium: instead of Antiochus’s conduct giving substance to his Greekness, Greekness is made to confer substance upon the portrait of Antiochus. The cultural category begins to authenticate the virtues attributed to the man.

Almost two millennia later, the little kingdom has disappeared, its royal household has vanished and the virtues attributed to its king remain beyond verification. The adjective survives: Ελληνικός. Cavafy leaves it suspended between conviction and flattery, cultural achievement and commemorative excess, belonging and attribution, each possibility remaining alive because the poem declines to resolve the word into any single meaning. Perhaps this polyvalence, rather than another prescription of the qualities that constitute Hellenism, offers the more fruitful inheritance for Melbourne. A culture formed through transmission, mixture and reinterpretation can revel in the capacity of Ελληνικός to contain several meanings at once, including the contradictions between them. The task then becomes less one of determining who or which practices satisfy the inscription than of inhabiting its ambiguities, allowing Hellenism to remain sufficiently capacious for successive generations to live within it differently. After all Callistratus’s magnificent certainty, Cavafy leaves us with something far more enduring: a single adjective whose meanings refuse to stand still.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 November 2026