Age

Cavafy’s poetry brings to life aging personae who are troubled by the changes time brings. Their thoughts center on their bodies’ deformation, the loss of beauty, loneliness, and death. Against the force of time, art is an antidote that aids in the recovery of beauty and the seduction of younger readers.

Portrait of a middle-aged man Encaustic on wood Roman, Flavian (AD 69–138) Kelsey Museum 26803

Melancholy of Jason Kleander, Poet in Kommagini, AD 595 The aging of my body and my beauty is a wound from a merciless knife. I’m not resigned to it at all. I turn to you, Art of Poetry, because you have a kind of knowledge about drugs: attempts to numb the pain, in Imagination and Language. It is a wound from a merciless knife. Bring your drugs, Art of Poetry— they numb the wound at least for a little while. Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Tomb of Lanis The Lanis you loved, Markos, isn’t here in this tomb you come to weep by, lingering hours on end. The Lanis you loved is closer to you when you’re in your room at home and you look at his portrait— the portrait that still keeps something of what was valuable in him, something of what it was you used to love. Remember, Markos, that time you brought in the famous Kyrenian painter from the Proconsul’s palace? What artistic subtlety he used trying to persuade you both, the minute he saw your friend, that he absolutely must do him as Hyacinth. In that way his portrait would come to be better known. But your Lanis didn’t hire out his beauty like that: reacting strongly, he told him to portray neither Hyacinth nor anyone else, but Lanis, son of Rametichos, an Alexandrian. Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Modern Fayum portrait Paint on wood Kelsey Museum 1797