ABSTRACT
In October 1930, at the age of seventy-one, Kostis PaJamas addressed an international Byzantine congress held in Athens. His theme: 'The Byzantine Inheritance in Modern Greek Poetry'. 'Whether they like it or not,' he said on that occasion, 'the modern Greek poets are heirs to the Byzantines. >1 PaJamas seems to allow the possibility of a degree of reluctance in the acceptance of this heritage, and both PaJamas and Cavafy were, I believe, among Byzantium's somewhat reluctant heirs. But heir to Byzantium Cavafy too certainly acknowledged himself to be. He believed his family to be of Byzantine origin;2 and in his poetry, as Diana Haas points out, the use of the possessive pronoun 'our' in conjunction with 'nation', 'race' and 'language' is largely confined to Byzantine contexts. 3
It is easy to see why Byzantium appealed to Cavafy. He was a Greek of the diaspora, born in 1863 to a Constantinopolitan family in Alexandria, and Alexandria was his home throughout his adult life. Greece, which as a political and physical reality, and as a concept, is perhaps the most prominent subject in modern Greek poetry, from Solomos to Elytis, hardly figures in the poetry of Cavafy. It was too restricted a concept to encompass either his actual or his imaginative world, whereas Byzantium, as successor to the 'great Panhellenion',4 the Greek world stretching around the Mediterranean from Sicily to Egypt, was capable of representing for Cavafy what it was that
he belonged to in being Greek. And the Byzantine empire had once incorporated the area of the Hellenistic kingdoms of Syria and Egypt, in which the greater part of his historical poetry is located.
