Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Commentary
Translated by Edmund Keeley.
An empire awaits its end, its ruling class awash in all the trappings of opulence but rudderless without a guiding moral compass, and dissipating under the weight of boredom and finery. Cavafy’s poem tells hauntingly of the ultimate hollowness of tyranny - an apt theme for our times. The novelist JM Coetzee adopted the title of this poem for his 1982 novel “Waiting for the Barbarians”, a scantily-veiled denunciation of the apartheid regime. If you enjoy the mythical landscape of this poem, you might also enjoy the vivid imaginary empire created in that book.
— Zubaer
Minstrels Links
Constantine Cavafy:
Poem #217, Ithaka
Poem #296, Footsteps
Poem #522, In Harbor
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Robert Kedney · 2 September 2004
This poem has been used by American Socialists to justify paring the Defense establishment of the United States; though the events of 11 September 2001 clearly point there are an endless number of barbarians outside the gates.
A quote from Hamlet (Act V, scene II) best characterizes the need to prepare to defend the nation: “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”
One thing the author never addresses is how does one deal with the barbarians born within the walls - those who have been convinced by American Socialists - that they are entitled to have their fellow citizens to take care of them.
Rok
Anil Menon · 27 July 2005
There’s a classic essay by Antonio Candido that discusses this poem with some insight.
“Four Waitings”, Antonio Candido (tr. Howard S. Becker), Sociological Theory, Vol 10, No. 1 (1992), pp. 21-42.
It’s probably worth adding that the essay is not about past or current American foreign policy, though of course, it could be read that way.
Candido (citing Bowra) mentions several co-temporaneous poems (40s, 50s) with the same theme. Valery Briusov’s “The Arrival of the Huns” and Stefen George’s “The Burning of the Temple.”
Arthur Herman’s “The Idea of Decline in Western History” is a good antidote to these doom ‘n gloom poets.
–Anil Menon