The Heart of a Stranger Read online

  But grief and rage alternate wound my breast

  For brave Ulysses, still by fate oppress’d

  Amidst an isle, around whose rocky shore

  The forests murmur, and the surges roar,

  The blameless hero from his wish’d-for home

  A goddess guards in her enchanted dome;

  (Atlas her sire, to whose far-piercing eye

  The wonders of the deep expanded lie;

  The eternal columns which on earth he rears

  End in the starry vault, and prop the spheres).

  By his fair daughter is the chief confined,

  Who soothes to dear delight his anxious mind;

  Successless all her soft caresses prove,

  To banish from his breast his country’s love;

  To see the smoke from his loved palace rise,

  While the dear isle in distant prospect lies,

  With what contentment could he close his eyes!

  And will Omnipotence neglect to save

  The suffering virtue of the wise and brave?

  Must he, whose altars on the Phrygian shore

  with frequent rites, and pure, avow’d thy power,

  Be doom’d the worst of human ills to prove,

  Unbless’d, abandon’d to the wrath of Jove?”

  Translated from Greek by Alexander Pope

  SAPPHO

  Fragment 98B

  but for you Kleis I have no

  spangled—where would I get it?—

  headbinder: yet the Mytilinean[

  ] [

  ]to hold

  ]spangled

  these things of the Kleanaktidai

  exile

  memories terribly leaked away

  Translated from Greek by Anne Carson

  XENOPHANES

  Fragment 22

  When a stranger appears in wintertime,

  these are the questions you must ask,

  as you lie reclined on soft couches,

  eating nuts, drinking wine by the fire:

  “What’s your name?”, “Where do you come from?”,

  “How old were you when the Persians invaded?”

  Translated from Greek by André Naffis-Sahely

  SENECA THE YOUNGER

  from Moral Letters to Lucilius

  To enable yourself to meet death, you may expect no encouragement or cheer from those who try to make you believe, by means of their hair-splitting logic, that death is no evil. For I take pleasure, excellent Lucilius, in poking fun at the absurdities of the Greeks, of which, to my continual surprise, I have not yet succeeded in ridding myself. Our master Zeno uses a syllogism like this: “No evil is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is no evil.” A cure, Zeno! I have been freed from fear; henceforth I shall not hesitate to bare my neck on the scaffold. Will you not utter sterner words instead of rousing a dying man to laughter? Indeed, Lucilius, I could not easily tell you whether he who thought that he was quenching the fear of death by setting up this syllogism was the more foolish, or he who attempted to refute it, just as if it had anything to do with the matter! For the refuter himself proposed a counter-syllogism, based upon the proposition that we regard death as “indifferent”, one of the things which the Greeks call ἀδιάφορα. “Nothing”, he says, “that is indifferent can be glorious; death is glorious; therefore death is not indifferent.” You comprehend the tricky fallacy which is contained in this syllogism — mere death is, in fact, not glorious; but a brave death is glorious. And when you say, “Nothing that is indifferent is glorious”, I grant you this much, and declare that nothing is glorious except as it deals with indifferent things. I classify as “indifferent” — that is, neither good nor evil — sickness, pain, poverty, exile, death. None of these things are intrinsically glorious; but nothing can be glorious apart from them. For it is not poverty that we praise, it is the man whom poverty cannot humble or bend. Nor is it exile that we praise, it is the man who withdraws into exile in the spirit in which he would have sent another into exile. It is not pain that we praise, it is the man whom pain has not coerced. One praises not death, but the man whose soul death takes away before it can confound it. All these things are in themselves neither honourable nor glorious; but any one of them that virtue has visited and touched is made honourable and glorious by virtue; they merely lie in between, and the decisive question is only whether wickedness or virtue has laid hold upon them. For instance, the death which in Cato’s case is glorious, is in the case of Brutus forthwith base and disgraceful. For this Brutus, condemned to death, was trying to obtain postponement; he withdrew a moment in order to ease himself; when summoned to die and ordered to bare his throat, he exclaimed: “I will bare my throat, if only I may live!” What madness it is to run away, when it is impossible to turn back! “I will bare my throat, if only I may live!” He came very near saying also: “even under Antony!”. This fellow deserved indeed to be consigned to life!

  Translated from Latin by Richard Mott Gummere

  PLUTARCH

  from The Life of Cleomenes

  Cleomenes, when day came, published a list of eighty citizens who must go into exile, and removed all the ephoral chairs except one; in this he purposed to sit himself for the transaction of public business. Then he called a general assembly and made a defence of his proceedings. He said that Lycurgus had blended the powers of senate and kings, and that for a long time the state was administered in this way and had no need of other officials. But later, when the Messenian War proved to be long, the kings, since their campaigns abroad left them no time to administer justice themselves, chose some of their friends and left them behind to serve the citizens in their stead. These were called ephors, or guardians, and as a matter of fact they continued at first to be assistants of the kings, but then gradually diverted the power into their own hands, and so, ere men were aware, established a magistracy of their own. As proof of this, Cleomenes cited the fact that, down to that day, when the ephors summoned a king to appear before them, he refused to go at the first summons, and at the second, but at the third rose up and went with them; and he said that the one who first added weight to this office, and extended its powers, Asteropus, was ephor many generations later. As long, then, he said, as the ephors kept within bounds, it had been better to bear with them; but when with their assumed power they subverted the ancient form of government to such an extent as to drive away some kings, put others to death without a trial, and threaten such as desired to behold again in Sparta her fairest and most divinely appointed constitution, it was not to be endured. If, then, it had been possible without bloodshed to rid Sparta of her imported curses, namely luxury and extravagance, and debts and usury, and those elder evils than these, namely, poverty and wealth, he would have thought himself the most fortunate king in the world to have cured the disease of his country like a wise physician, without pain; but as it was, he said, in support of the necessity that had been laid upon him, he could cite Lycurgus, who, though he was neither king nor magistrate but a private person attempting to act as king, proceeded with an armed retinue into the marketplace, so that Charillus the king took fright and fled for refuge to an altar. That king, however, Cleomenes said, since he was an excellent man and a lover of his country, speedily concurred in the measures of Lycurgus and accepted the change of constitution; still, as a matter of fact Lycurgus by his own acts bore witness to the difficulty of changing a constitution without violence and fear. To these, Cleomenes said, he had himself resorted with the greatest moderation, for he had but put out of the way the men who were opposed to the salvation of Sparta. For all the rest, he said, the whole land should be common property, debtors should be set free from their debts, and foreigners should be examined and rated, in order that the strongest of them might be made Spartan citizens and help to preserve the state by their arms.

  Translated from Latin by Bernadotte Perrin

  DARK AGES AND RENAISSANCES

  WHEN ROME SLOWLY BEGAN to convert to Chri
stianity, the ensuing ecumenical wars for the empire’s soul led to high-ranking clergymen often conspiring to have their rivals exiled, pressuring emperors to intercede on their behalf and stamp out dangerous heresies, thus ensuring the empire’s stability. Socrates Scholasticus (c.380–c.439) relates how, acting under the influence of Bishop Lucius of Alexandria, the Emperor Valens exiled Macarius the Elder and Macarius the Younger to an island off the coast of the Nile inhabited solely by pagans. Disconnected from their communities and fellow worshippers, it was thought the monks would be forced to abandon their faith, a wish that was irremediably dashed when the Macariuses instead converted the island’s entire population to the teachings of Christ. While bishops vied with one another and the Constantinian Church acquired a lust for gold and bureaucracy, purging all forms of anti-authoritarian thought from their liturgy, monastic communities sprang up all along the Nitrian Desert, in Lower Egypt. It is interesting to note here that while exile from the civilized world was considered a most horrible fate in Greek and Roman society, the Christian world instead taught that to remove oneself from the world’s concerns was to attain a level of spiritual purity unavailable to those mired in the corrupting influences of everyday life.

  The isolation of these communities afforded the Desert Fathers and Mothers, early-third-century Christian hermits who lived in the deserts of northern Egypt, the opportunity to retreat from the increasingly complex, violent and disordered world around them and to devote themselves to God, building upon foundations laid out by earlier mystics such as Saint Anthony of Egypt and Saint Pachomius. The Egyptian desert — which abounded in what Abba Andrew dubbed the three things most appropriate for a monk, “exile, poverty and endurance in silence” — would also eventually welcome the long-maligned Nestorius (c.386–450). Following Nestorius’s defeat at the Council of Ephesus in 431, when his proposition that Christ’s human and divine natures were separate was denounced as irredeemably heretical, Emperor Theodosius II banished him to Hibis in Egypt’s Western Desert, nevertheless probably ensuring the spread of his teachings to the east, which they did, first to Persia and then on to India and China. Elsewhere, Saint Patrick converted Ireland, alongside Saint Columba, the founder of Iona Abbey, while Saint Aidan established Lindisfarne Priory off the coast of Northumberland. Islands, once home to inconvenient orators and political rivals, became safe havens for the servants of God, where exile, like in the Ramayana, transformed into a form of religious asceticism, a means to purify oneself. Of course, merely withdrawing from the world provided no certainty of instant holiness, as the Desert Father Abba Lucius recognized: “One day Abba Longinus questioned Abba Lucius about three thoughts, saying first, ‘I want to go into exile.’ The old man said to him, ‘If you cannot control your tongue, you will not be an exile anywhere. Therefore control your tongue here, and you will be an exile.’”

  The world the Desert Fathers and Mothers had known would be forever changed by the early Muslim conquests of the seventh century, and not long after Tariq ibn Ziyad (670–719) conquered the rock that now bears his name, the notion of exile would be again revisited by Abd al-Rahman I (731–88), an Umayyad prince from Syria, with whom the rich tradition of exilic writing in Spain arguably begins. Among the high-ranking survivors of the Abbasid slaughter of the Umayyads in 750, Abd al-Rahman spent several years roaming the cities of North Africa before amassing a small army, landing in al-Andalus and conquering Córdoba, which he made his capital, much to the chagrin of the Abbasid ruler in Baghdad, who reigned, if only nominally, as caliph over the entire Muslim world. Abd al-Rahman’s most famous poem, or rather the most famous poem attributed to him, is “The Palm Tree”, which takes as its subject a tree that, like the new Emir of Córdoba, has “sprung from soil” in which he is a “stranger”, becoming a memento of Abd al-Rahman’s lost homeland in Syria, which by then was ruled by his enemies.

  Although Islam expanded its territory rapidly in the first three centuries of its existence, it would not ultimately retain many of its farthest outposts. While al-Andalus — or Muslim Spain — would last roughly from 711 to the fall of Granada in 1491, Siqilliyat, or the Emirate of Sicily, proved even more short-lived (831–1091). This might explain why, in the words of the Italian writer Giuseppe Quatriglio (1922–2017), many of the works of the Siculo-Arab poets we know are imbued with “the pain of eternal exile from Sicily”. Ibn Hamdis (1056–1133) was born halfway through the Norman conquest of Sicily, and after the fall of Syracuse he relocated to Sfax in North Africa, before eventually making his way to al-Andalus, drawn by the reputation of its rulers as indefatigable patrons of the arts. It was during this period of exile in al-Andalus that Ibn Hamdis’s Sicily finally fell to the Norman invaders for good. In one of the most complete fragments of his work still extant, Ibn Hamdis imagines Siqilliyat as a lost “paradise”, the land of his “youth’s mad joys”, which has now become a “desert” he cannot bring himself to “bear witness to”.

  During the Tang Dynasty in China (620–905), exile was likely the most popular of the “five punishments”, which included death by decapitation, a long sentence of hard labour or a beating with either a thin or a thick rod, compared to which banishment to remote, barbarous regions of the empire seemed like a far easier choice. Much like Ovid, the poet Bai Juyi (772–846) got himself in trouble at the Tang court over some controversial poems, which, as he explains in his preface to his poem “The Song of the Lute”, led to him being “demoted to deputy governor and exiled to Jiujiang”. The poem begins as Bai Juyi sees a friend off at the river, at which point he hears the sound of a lute being played by a woman, and, since finding refined music in distant provinces was uncommon, it reminds him of his old life in the sophisticated capital. With echoes of the interactions between Scheherazade and Shahryar in The Thousand and One Nights, Bai Juyi begins to ask the female musician a series of questions about her life, to which she answers:

  My brother was drafted and my Madam died.

  An evening passed, and when morning came my beauty was gone.

  My door became desolate and horses seldom came,

  and as I was getting old I married a merchant.

  My merchant cared more about profit than being with me.

  A month ago he went to Fuliang to buy tea.

  Although the source of their loneliness is different, they are “both exiled to the edge of this world”, and finally brought together by the sound of music, which is minutely described throughout the course of the poem.

  While the Tang Dynasty’s central government banished unpopular officials, the power to exile even the most influential citizens lay in the hands of Florence’s masses, thereby truly earning its sobriquet as the “Athens of the Middle Ages”. Failed wars, economic instability and unpopularity could easily get Florence’s leaders exiled from their own city. In fact, a spell in exile caused by one’s political allegiances occurred so often in Renaissance Italy that one had to have a sense of humour about it, as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) clearly did. In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli gives us an anecdote involving two of the city’s most famous sons, Rinaldo degli Albizzi (1370–1442) and Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), the patriarchs of two of Florence’s most powerful families, who played an exilic game of cat and mouse with one another for much of their lives. “In 1435,” Machiavelli tells us, “while Rinaldo degli Albizzi was in exile from Florence and scheming to start a war against the Florentines in the hope of returning home and chasing out Cosimo de’ Medici, he sent this message to Medici: ‘The hen is hatching her eggs.’ Cosimo’s reply was: ‘Tell him she’ll have a hard time hatching them outside the nest.’” Indeed, it was Cosimo the Elder who had the final laugh, given that, due to Cosimo’s political perspicacity, Rinaldo’s plot to have Florence invaded by Filippo Maria Visconti, the Duke of Milan, came to naught and Rinaldo never saw his native city again.

  Long before Machiavelli’s time, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), another great Florentine, was chased out of his city, an epis
ode from which we can perhaps draw most meaning by reading a few cantos situated roughly halfway through his Paradiso. Although Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory and heaven throughout The Divine Comedy is studded with characters who appear incapable of speaking in anything but riddles, the poet is finally met by one of his ancestors, Cacciaguida, a warrior who was knighted during the Second Crusade (1147–49), and who, unlike anyone else in Dante’s epic, does not mince his words. Cacciaguida tells Dante that his beloved Florence has been corrupted. Once a sturdy, honourable republic, its institutions have been polluted by the internecine warfare caused by greedy, competing clans — like the Albizzi and the Medici — who continually plotted and schemed to undermine the city’s government to the detriment of its citizens’ welfare. Before long, Cacciaguida warns his descendant that his own banishment won’t be long in coming: “So you are destined to depart from Florence”, he tells him, “You shall leave everything most dearly loved” and “You shall discover how salty is the savour / Of someone else’s bread”. Of course, luckily for Alighieri, this is paradise, where hope reigns supreme, and Cacciaguida tells his descendant that those who have exiled him will eventually be exiled themselves.

  Some, of course, are fated to be exiled before they are even born, and the Byzantine poet Michael Marullus (1453–1500) was certainly one of them. Marullus was still inside his mother’s womb as Constantine XI Palaiologos (1405–53) led the last desperate effort to keep the walls of the old imperial capital of Constantinople from being breached. An aristocrat with links to the former ruling family, Marullus came of age amidst the ashes of the Byzantine world, which had endured for 1,000 years after the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Growing up in the maritime Republic of Ragusa, an old Venetian vassal state, Marullus later moved to Italy, where he spent periods of time in Ancona, Padua, Venice and Naples. Aged seventeen, he took up arms as a mercenary and headed off to fight the Ottomans in the Black Sea region; but upon his return to Italy years later, he began to write poetry and forged a number of friendships with some of the peninsula’s most distinguished inhabitants, including Pico della Mirandola and Sandro Botticelli, who painted his portrait. Regardless of where his dromomania led him, however, Marullus always betrayed his true roots by signing each poem with the word Constantinopolitanus.