SOURCE: “Arrogance and Intoxication: The Poet and History in Cavafy,” in Eighteen Texts: Writings by Contemporary Greek Authors, edited by Willis Barnstone, Harvard University Press, 1972, pp. 117-34.

In the following essay, Maronitis provides a close textual and historical study of Cavafy's poem “Darius.”

In times like ours, when history is produced and written by machines with human appendages, of what use can the poet's voice be?

In a small, poor country like ours, where land, seas, and men are transformed by the electronic computers of the powerful into programs of war, economic, and tourist policies, what can be salvaged by the few words selected by the poet's diffused senses?

In such a critical time as that of our land today, when the daily word is paid for dearly, why should the poet's voice make his and our guilty survival official?

I ask these three naive questions not to...