There is something almost elusive about Cavafy that attracts researchers and encourages them to identify the rebellious and unclassifiable element of his poetry by linking it to various literary currents.

Would we understand Cavafy better by comparing him to his decadent contemporaries? Could we establish a connection between his mythological constants and the obsessions of the late 19th century? What is the originality of Cavafy and the unique tone of his voice?

Why does his discourse seem so singularly strange in relation to that Greek literary landscape which, fifty years after the war of 1821, remains infatuated with its past, still seduced by the narcissistic memory of its own glories?

Would it suffice to simply pinpoint the different phases of Cavafy's stubborn and painful evolution, and then integrate them into the benign context of a literary history to elucidate the enigma of his poetry, so familiar yet obscure at the same time?

What place does the poet grant to the myths of femme fatales (Salome, Sphinx) and how do historical figures such as Nero or Marc Antony, emblematic figures of the fin-de-siècle imagination, populate the Cavafian universe while betraying their own legend?

And how does the adventure of Julien, inseparable from the theological questioning of a transitional era, reflect the in-between that has never ceased to challenge the poet?

How do the themes of barbarism and the illusion of progress, closely related to that of the death of the gods, converge in the imagination of the Greek poet, as well as in that of the Lithuanian O. V. Milosz?

In this atmosphere of collective decline, how do Cavafy's epitaphs, written in the manner of the Palatine Anthology and dedicated to the young men of Alexandria, recall the verses of Pierre Louys and the prose of Marcel Schwob?

How can we account for the fact that all these chronologically distant works find their place in the same poetic project of admirable mystification?

By moving away from the study of themes traditionally linked to fin-de-siècle literature such as the triumph of the artificial, the exasperated egotism, or satanic mythology, the present work aims to establish a network of analogies between the poet's personal mythography and the decadent perception of antiquity, a perception that seems to determine the wager of modernity in Constantin Cavafy.