What Is a “Poet-Historian”?

Having previously established (in Chap. 2) that E. R. Bevan’s 1902 history of the Seleucids was Cavafy’s main source for “Orophernes,” we may now examine the way in which the poet worked with the historical texts he consulted. Cavafy’s primary source was the only reliable study of the Seleucid kingdoms available at the time of the poem’s writing and remained “still the only comprehensive work on the Seleucids in English” almost a century after it was published (Magill et al., 1998, p. 87). Bevan was the first scholar to attempt a thoroughly researched and comprehensive account of a slice of ancient history on which ancient sources are particularly scarce and fragmentary.