Ithaca and love: another reading of Cavafy’s poem

Cavafy’s Ithaca, probably his best-known poem, has been praised and criticised for its peculiar literary texture. By highlighting its relationship with Cavafy’s 1894 poem Second Odyssey, as well as with the ancient and Byzantine tradition of Homeric allegory, this paper attempts to unravel the meaning of the «high thoughts» and the «elect emotion» advocated by the author as the key to a wise life. If the new Odysseus’ real ‹enemy› is the irrational and sentimental thrust of the human soul, the comparison with a passage of the 4th-century orator Themistios might provide an interesting term of comparison for some lines of Ithaca, and perhaps a new, hidden source of this celebrated lyric.