Waiting for the Barbarians

Written: 1898 • Published: 1904

dramatic-monologue civilization political-decay social-crisis fear waiting existentialism anxious ironic contemplative unsettling

Public Domain

This poem is in the public domain and may be freely reproduced.

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

  The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

  Because the barbarians are coming today.
  What’s the point of senators making laws now?
  Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown?

  Because the barbarians are coming today
  and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
  He’s even got a scroll to give him,
  loaded 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, 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 turn up 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 bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought?

  Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
  And some of our men just in from the border say
  there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

Curator's Note

Cavafy's masterpiece of political irony presents a society paralyzed by the expected arrival of 'barbarians,' only to discover that without the external threat, they've lost their sense of purpose. Written in Alexandria as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, this poem has resonated through every subsequent era of political uncertainty. The final devastating line—'those people were a kind of solution'—reveals how societies sometimes need an enemy to maintain coherence, making this eerily relevant to modern politics.