If you are one of the truly elect, be careful how you attain your eminence. However much you are acclaimed, however much the cities praise the great things you have done in Italy and Thessaly, whatever honors your admirers decree for you in Rome, your elation, your triumph will not last, nor will you feel yourself superior—superior indeed!— when Theodotos brings you, in Alexandria, on a blood-stained tray, miserable Pompey’s head. And do not be too sure that in your life— restricted, regulated, prosaic— spectacular and horrible things like that do not happen. Maybe this very moment Theodotos— bodiless, invisible— enters some neighbor’s tidy house carrying an equally repulsive head.
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