When one of them moved through the center of Seleukia just as it was getting dark-- moved like a young man, tall, extremely handsome, the joy of immortality in his eyes, his hair black and perfumed-- the people going by would gaze at him, and they would ask each other who he was, if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger. But some who looked more carefully would understand and step aside; and as he disappeared under the colonnade, among the shadows and the evening lights, going toward the quarter that lives only at night, with orgies and debauchery, with every kind of intoxication and desire, they would wonder which of Them it could be, and for what suspicious pleasure he'd come down into the streets of Seleukia from the August Celestial Mansions.
C.P. Cavafy, “One of Their Gods,” from Selected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
