Waiting For The Barbarians

I would have to disagree with the analysis of Mr Hodge. Cavafy had no intention to criticise the leaders or the leadership of his time. The meaning of the poem can be better understood if one takes into account the time that was written (in January 1899, just six months after the poem Monotony). The major question is here again the same insufferable boredom that always hunted the poet (he was after all a civil servant in the same office for 33 years!). The Romans depict the kind of people that after a triumphal course of centuries, reaching the peak of their power, civilisation and knowledge, suffer from the same old routine of repeating the same life, a life without anything new or exciting. And it is this kind of people that are drawn towards anything extreme that could bring a change in their lives, provide some spice and kill this intolerable boredom. This extreme in the poem is of course the barbarians, those who reaching Rome, will bring a violent and sudden change. They will simplify the lives of the Romans, and for this change the Romans are happy to fully relinquish their national pride and their sense of selfcontrol. This poem is certainly one of the most symbolic of all the poems written in the Greek language ever, and certainly one of the finest of Cavafy.

I personnally think tha t the barbarians here would signify the other as entity rather than the Romans, the Africans or what-so-ever. The other that we always need to identitfy ourselves. This is why perhaps that the barbarians do not arrive at the end of the poem. It is important noethe less to say that the political institutions and the ones who sustain them are dependent on the 'existence', at laest in the imaginary of the community, of those others to establish their cohesion, authority and sense of being united. Because to be united is mainly to be againt someone else. So for me the barbarians is tha t entity that any society holds to be its opposite so that to set itself as 'one'. While i truth no society is one,but instead it is always and ever many, heterogene and diverse.

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published "The End of History," a political treatise in which he argues that ideological revolutions will come to an end in the modern era. Before the end of the Cold War, there were always conflicts between seemingly plausible forms of government and rule (e.g communism, democracy, fascism), but after the Soviet Union fell, Fukuyama argues that Liberal Democracies became the only logical form of government left to the world. Over the next decades, Fukuyama predicted that liberal democracies would become the only form of government tenable in modern countries (much like Marx predicted that communism would eventually supplant all governments).

I mention this because it is the poem's political implications that most interest me. In the early to mid Roman Empire, there was always the recognizable conflict of ideologies between the Romans and their barbarian counterparts. Rome was the self-professed beacon of civilization and considered barbarians backwards peoples without manners or proper customs. Imagine Cold War America and Russia and their attitudes towards each other: the parallels of thought are inescapable.

Part of the reason that Rome became so great was that its glory consisted of constantly defining itself in contrast to its barbarian counterparts: the whole city of Rome, in the poem, only comes to life when they learn that the Barbarians are coming. Rome was paradoxically a civilization that was both xenophobic and inclusive (again, think America): they despised the customs of others, but were more than happy to allow ex-patriated foreign peoples to become Roman citizens.

As a result of these two conflicting views, the later Roman Empire began to have an identity crisis. Rome of the 4th century consisted of an extremely heterogenous people (Diocletian, for instance, was formerly a barbarian), but Romans still maintained a hostility towards outsiders. But who were these 'outsiders?' The Roman Empire covered much of Europe and with the inclusion of many former barbarians peoples into positions of power it became extremely difficult for the Romans to conceptualize their enemies. The world had become Roman; no conflicts existed to motivate the people who viewed everyone as the same and, as a result, the Empire ironically began to decline.

The major question of this poem is the following: how can a dominant regime keep its power without enemies?

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