Eminent sophist, now that you are leaving Syria with plans to write a book about Antioch, it’s worth your mentioning Mevis in your work— the famous Mevis, unquestionably the best looking, the most adored young man in all Antioch. No one of the others living his kind of life, no one of them gets paid what he gets paid. To have Mevis just for two or three days, they often give as much as a hundred staters. I said in Antioch; but in Alexandria as well, in fact in Rome even, you can’t find a young man as attractive as Mevis.
Reprinted from C.P. CAVAFY: Collected Poems Revised Edition, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. Translation copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton University Press. For reuse of these translations, please contact Princeton University Press.
The Canon