ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses "Priam's Night-Journey," an early poem by the modern Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, who lived from 1863-1933. "Priam's Night-Journey" was composed in 1893 but was never published in Cavafy's lifetime; it first appeared in print only in 1968. In "Priam's Night-Journey," Cavafy simply leaves out everyone and everything mentioned by Homer in Book 24 of the Iliad, except for Priam and the dead Hektor, and concentrates attention on the king, his actions, and his thoughts. In focusing his poem on Priam alone, Cavafy eliminates other details of Homeric action. In Cavafy's poem, Priam simply "hates the uselessness" of the Trojan grief and the dirge for Hektor, and takes action in the face of "this uselessness," bringing out the ransom and piling it on his chariot. Cavafy endows the night-time and the night-journeying king with a symbolic and psychological depth in a way that can be called lyrical and "modern", in contrast to Homer's traditional epic manner.
