The texts which are being published here for the first time are part of a group of drafts conserved in the Cavafy Archive, which George Savidis first brought to light; they are poems ‘which Cavafy did not have time to finish, and which he was considering with distress during the last months of his life. Carefully preserved by the poet himself in makeshift dossiers, each with its provisional title and the date, they cover the period from 1918 to 1932 and, together with the nearly completed drafts of a few already published poems… and of some unpublished but completed poems, offer us a unique, unexpected, extremely moving image of the stages of Cavafy’s creation’. Among these unfinished poems, which number approximately thirty in all, there are five that treat of the emperor Julian the Apostate; these are the ones which we are presenting here, with the dual aim of making accessible in the future this new evidence of Cavafy’s interest in Julian (about which Professor Bowersock writes in this same volume), and of offering a sample of the complete edition of the drafts, which Professor Savidis has authorized me to prepare.