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Waiting for the Barbarians

Entry updated 29 September 2025. Tagged: Theme.

The title of a poem by the major Greek author C P Cavafy (1863-1933). Periménontas toủs Varvárous ["Waiting for the Barbarians"] (written 1898; 1904 pamphlet) is famous for this title, for its structure, and for the sting in its tale. The title itself has become a Meme, although it is a tag almost impossible to pin one firm meaning to. Not unusually for Cavafy, the text of the poem is constructed as an almost realized narrative, unpacked in this case through a ominous progression of questions and answers, a formula often found in folk songs, usually in order to build a sense of dread, a hovering proleptic suspensefulness which, when found particularly in stage examples, where the question and answer are restricted to one foregrounded line each, is called stichomythia. It is a device that inclines to hint at and gradually to uncover something too terrible to say. W H Auden's "O What Is That Sound" (written 1932; December 1934 New Verse) – "Only the scarlet soldiers, dear, / The soldiers coming" – may be the best known twentieth century use of the formula; Auden, who had been familiar with Cavafy's work from the late 1920s, early (see Checklist below) recognized the immanent forcefulness of Cavafy's deadpan saudade, the apodictic bare bones of his style, which conveyed a patent awareness that the world before World War One was doomed, his supernaturally serene clarity.

Cavafy himself does seem less distressed than Auden about what is to come: "Waiting for the Barbarians" begins the question-and-answer almost calmly: "--What are we waiting for, gathered in the agora? / The barbarians are arriving today", an interchange that is conveyed chorally: it is not a single narrator in the skin and bone but an entire Decadent culture anticipating something they cannot bear to describe as apprehension mounts. But the terror become evident: the agora lies at the heart of an unnamed, paralysed City, a civilized world (see Zone) at the end of its tether (see Entropy) like the dead bole of a tree: all the sap that had invigorated a once green world has drained to dead silence. The End of the World is nigh, a Long Night approaches, night and silence: like entrapment in a Stasis Field, as in many twenty-first century works of Fantastika, where depictions of the Near Future exude an almost haptic impress of sepulchral waiting: a held breath staving off something very bad indeed that has not yet happened.

It is here, at the poem nears its end, that the world-facing burden of "Waiting for the Barbarians" fully reveals itself. The day has passed in apprehensive Q&A, night has fallen, but "the barbarians have not arrived," in fact they may never come to blow the gates of the city down, the agora may never in fact tremble to the purgative beat of the new (for beat see again Fantastika). Indeed, in the poem, and in most works influenced by it, the Barbarians never arrive. There will be no renewal of the civitas at the end of its tether in 1898. Or later. The last lines of the poem have become famous: "Now what will become of us without barbarians? / Those people were some kind of solution." (All translations by Aliki Barnstone.)

As a recognition before the fact, as a held breath between now and the Near Future, "Waiting for the Barbarians" has penetrated deeply into the muscle tone of Western writing since the early 1920s, when Cavafy translations began to appear in The Criterion and elsewhere; (E M Forster knew of his work earlier, but did not publish translations). Various authors of the Scientific Romance may or may not have encountered the poem directly, though it is entirely likely that some did so; but tales in which bricolage-choked last redoubts of civilization fail to keep barbarians at bay clearly share with Cavafy a sense of the paralysis of the West. That this sense extends beyond Cavafy's direct influence may be assumed. The Byzantium poems of William Butler Yeats (whose vicarious Hellenism might have attracted Cavafy) radically intensify the grammar of defiance: in a properly fortified West, no barbarian will sing of things to come. The reversal of this grammar in America is not the subject of this entry.

Some fictions are specific. Dino Buzzati's Il deserto dei Tartari (1940; trans Stuart C Hood as The Tartar Steppe 1952; new trans Lawrence Venuti as The Stronghold 2023) is set in the hallucinated torpor of an outpost of the Empire, its contingent of soldiers doomed to stand guard for decades over a desert empty until a sudden wave of foes. The protagonist of Julien gracq's Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951; trans Richard Howard as The Opposing Shore 1986) longs to leave a guardian castle and penetrate the desert beyond the borderline, risking a resumption of an interminable War and the collapse of civilization. In Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot (1952; trans by author as Waiting for Godot 1953), Godot (who is always imminent but never comes) can be understood as a dream of the salvationary arrival of a Mysterious-Stranger barbarian bearing cargo. J M Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) initially takes its tone and subject from both Cavafy and Buzzati, but radically darkens the Meme through its description of the capture and Torture first of some desert barbarians, followed by the torture of the torturers: for the centre does not hold. Philip Glass's opera Waiting for the Barbarians (performed 2005) is faithful to Coetzee's novel. The protagonists of tales as superficially dissimilar as Mark S Geston's Lords of the Starship (1967), Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969), Theodore Judson's The Martian General's Daughter (2008) or César Aira's Fulgentius (2020; trans Chris Andrews 2022 ) exude an apprehension that if they abandon their roles, however meaningless those may be, civilization will implode. There are others.

A term so fluid and charismatic, so susceptible to binary associations, is perhaps dangerous to tinker with. The thought of citizens in the City mirroring barbarians in the world, and vice versa, needs no tag to identify it as a commonplace. That Identity and its Doppelganger are twins is a Cliché central and perhaps necessary to most Fantastika, including Genre SF. Waiting for the Twin is perhaps what we cannot help but do. Traditional sf should not therefore be held wholly to blame for its reiterating of the bromide. It is perhaps enough to recognize the near universality of the topos that exposes the inevitable but storyable reveal that in the end the Barbarians – as Isaac Asimov implies in Second Foundation (fixup 1953), volume three of his Foundation sequence – are us. [JC]

further reading

Editions of Cavafy's poems are selected; there are many.

previous versions of this entry



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