Читать книгу The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 106

“Seeing, then, that there is great indifference

among us toward the gods”—he says with that solemn affect.

Indifference. But what then did he expect?

Let him organize religion as much as he pleased,

let him write the high priest of Galatia as much as he pleased,

or to others like him, exhorting, giving directions.

His friends weren’t Christians: that much is certain.

But even so they weren’t able to

play the way that he did (brought up as a Christian)

with the system of a new religion,

ridiculous in theory and in practice.

In the end they were Greeks. Nothing in excess, Augustus.

[1923?; 1923]