ABSTRACT
C. P. Cavafy was a careful reader of Gibbon, and the cluster of qualities he endows the Alexandrians with includes those discerned by Gibbon: disdain, raillery, tumult, and 'the ungoverned rage of their passions'. Alexandria in the various poems cited, though sketched only by implication, possesses the qualities of the artistic and the excitable; both threads run through the other poems in which Cavafy's Alexandria is built up. The idea to T. S. Eliot's that 'tradition can only be inherited with great labour'; and it also strikes an echo with Cavafy's position as the great developer among Greek poets. The usage of Cavafy's contemporaries provides a hint that the Alexandrian is associated with the decadent, the refined, and the fin de siecle. The changing notions of Alexandrianism, and Cavafy's response to them, need investigation.
