First Thoughts on Vocational Awe in Academia

Do you ever read 'quit-lit'? 

For the past few years, essays written by someone who has left academic employment about why they did so have resonated with me. I work in a university but am not on a research or teaching contract, which sometimes matters not at all and sometimes matters very much. Sometimes I am grateful that my work still allows me access to a number of resources I can use to write history, sometimes I am frustrated that I don't have access to some of the resources, time, and respect I took for granted as a PhD student. 

I am one of the lucky ones. A month before submitting my PhD, in September 2016, I moved to my current city because my then-partner got a job here. After a year of putting together part-time jobs as a library assistant, associate lecturer (British for TA) at two universities, short-term early career researcher, part-time research administrator, in September 2017, I was simultaneously offered a permanent job as an academic librarian, and a one-year postdoc researching late antique saints. I chose the permanent job and three years later, with the world gone to hell, I am still here.

For the first year and a half, I didn't appreciate my good fortune. The other side of academic libraries was and is an eye-opening experience, and so too was the response of most academics: oh, they said, are you able to make time for your research and writing during your work day? (As though being a librarian was a job they could not imagine actually taking eight hours a day.) The fact that I have a PhD, and not an MLS/MLIS, was similarly baffling to many librarians. At one of the first library conferences I ever went to, a fellow attendee introduced herself to me by demanding to know where I went to library school. Finding Chris Bourg's blog post on feral librarianship was an immense help with my feelings of being, as the saying goes, neither fish nor fowl.

Plus, I was actively applying for the academic jobs and early career research grants, to the point where that was all the writing I did, outside of preparing conference papers. I had a number of interviews, but none resulted in an academic job. In between a few of the more devastating rejections, I came across Dr Erin Bartram's essay on her experience of leaving academia. I read the following paragraphs and finally found words for something I had been feeling but unable to articulate:

Quit-lit exists to soothe the person leaving, or provide them with an outlet for their sorrow or rage, or to allow them to make an argument about what needs to change. Those left behind, or, as we usually think of them, those who “succeeded”, don’t often write about what it means to lose friends and colleagues. To do so would be to acknowledge not only the magnitude of the loss but also that it was a loss at all. If we don’t see the loss of all of these scholars as an actual loss to the field, let alone as the loss of so many years of people’s lives, is it any wonder I felt I had no right to grieve? Why should I be sad about what has happened when the field itself won’t be?

Even in our supportive responses to those leaving, we don’t want to face what’s being lost, so we try to find ways to tell people it hasn’t all been in vain. One response is to tell the person that this doesn’t mean they’re not a historian, that they can still publish, and that they should. “You can still be part of the conversation!” Some of you may be thinking that right now.

To that I say: “Why should I?”

Being a scholar isn’t my vocation, nor am I curing cancer with my research on 19th century Catholic women. But more importantly, no one is owed my work. People say “But you should still write your book – you just have to.” I know they mean well, but actually, no, I don’t. I don’t owe anyone this book, or any other books, or anything else that’s in my head.

“But your work is so valuable,” people say.  “It would be a shame not to find a way to publish it.”

Valuable to whom? To whom would the value of my labor accrue? And not to be too petty, but if it were so valuable, then why wouldn’t anyone pay me a stable living wage to do it?

I don’t say this to knock any of my many colleagues who write and publish off the tenure-track in a variety of ways that they find fulfilling. I just want us to be honest with ourselves about who exactly we’re trying to comfort when we offer people this advice and what we’re actually asking of those people when we offer it.

Dr Bartram goes on to write about the fact that a PhD in History trains those who earn it to be a history professor and nothing else. My own PhD programme only started running events where alumni came and talked about their careers, let alone talks on how to apply for academic jobs, in the last year I studied there--and even the careers events were tailored towards academic work.  (Professors' biographies and departmental webpages list former students who have gained academic jobs, but no other alumni.) Even PhDs don't know what else you do with a PhD...

Even with all the stars aligned to keep writing: a stable job, healthcare, good internet, a safe place to live, decent (but not great) access to paywall-protected academic databases and journals, and excellent alumni library access through one of my former universities, I struggled with the question Dr Bartram asks. If producing academic writing is not part of my employment--and there is an excellent piece, here, about the fact that historians don't typically make money for this sort of writing--why do it? If you want to be a writer who specialises in history, you don't need a degree that trains you to be a history professor. Most trade nonfiction about the past is not written by authors with history PhDs; and a doctorate doesn't typically train its recipients to write well. 

I moved halfway around the world to become a historian, I didn't earn a PhD so I could write (unpaid) in my spare time. The degree was my entry ticket into the profession, neither a hobby project nor the sum total of my life (shout-out here to everyone who advised, in my first two years of librarianship, that I should spend my evenings and weekends writing in order to maximize my chances of academic employment). When I read Fobazi Ettarh's article on vocational awe in librarianship, it felt like I finally had the words to express some of what I saw and felt about academic work--the emphasis on teaching and research as a calling, the framing of the academic community as a sacred space, the endless job-creep of publishing expectations and student satisfaction, and more. 

The fact that I have chosen to resurrect this blog and produce academic and hopefully other kinds of writing, seems to fly in the face of all that I have just written. Quit lit, after all, is about quitting. Being done. Finished.

And yet.

No one is owed my work. I used to find the W.H. Auden quote 'You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at' a source of inspiration when I was working on job applications. Now, thinking these things through, it grates. No one is owed my work.

I am uneasy with the idea that I am writing for my own fulfillment--once more for the folks at the back, I did my PhD as a professional degree. And I struggle with the idea of my writing as a historian being useful to myself or anyone else, a question the following poem raised for me when I stumbled across it.

To be of use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

~ Marge Piercy

From Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). Available online at the Poetry Foundation, here

For now, the only answer I have come to is that I owe it to myself to keep writing, and I owe it to others to keep learning, and extend help and welcome however I can.

Weaving Words

How does one describe the process of writing? At the moment, trying to overcome my fears and finish editing an article I want to publish, I would mostly reflect on its emotional challenges. Someone who has just published a book might think of what they learned along the way. Late antique authors turned to textile metaphors, using language of spinning or weaving to describe the writing process. In the mid-sixth century, the Merovingian poet Venantius Fortunatus wrote an acrostic poem for the bishop Syagrius of Autun, as a gift to accompany a plea for the bishop's help ransoming an anonymous man from captivity. At the beginning of the letter, he describes casting about for a poetic subject with a textile metaphor:

...my reading seemed to be as neglected as my practice went to waste, I found no opportunity from any subject that could be turned into poetry, and, so to speak, no fleece could be sheared to card into verse. (Venantius Fortunatus, 5.6, trans. Michael Roberts)

 When a man came to the poet begging for help freeing his son from captivity (like a lot of medieval vignettes, we begin and end in media res--the poet never gives the name of father or son or his captors; nor do we know what happened next), the poet had found his subject, and determined to write something as a Thank You in Advance for the bishop's help. He settled on a poem as a suitable gift but it had to be special.

What then should my modesty offer as a gift? As I was hesitating to decide, in my inertia the words of Pindaric Horace came to mind: 'Painters and poets have always enjoyed equal sanction to dare anything.' In pondering the verse, I wondered, if each artist intermingles whatever he wants, why should not their two practices be intermingled, even if not by an artist, so that a single warp be set up, simultaneously a poem and a painting?

Accordingly when I wished to make representations for the captive in verse, bearing in mind the lifetime of the Redeemer and Christ's age when he set us free, I wove a poem of just that number of verses and letters. Consequently what was I to do or where was I to go, deterred, as I was, immediately by the difficulty of the task or rather in difficulties because inhibited by the constraints of meter and the restraints on the number of letters? By a novel calculus the limit on numbers expanded my limitations, because once a boundary was set amplitude could not give itself room nor brevity be constricted and because of the check imposed by the verses read vertically the texture allowed no free movement. For in this weave it was not possible to disrupt or slacken the threads by adding a letter lest by exceeding the number it throw the warp into disarray. And so I carefully strove that two complete verses be read at the either end, two diagonally, and one running through the middle. A further element remained, what letter I should set among them all in the very middle that would be so welcoming to everyone as to offend no one.

Accordingly, after I had computed numerically the strands of this warp, once I started to weave, the threads broke both themselves and me. I began to be bound by a task undertaken for a man to be freed, and with a reversal of roles, I enchained myself as I sought to remove the captive's ties. The difficulty of this task can be estimated from the following: if you add whenever you wish, the line grows in length; subtract, and it loses its charm; make changes and the acrostics are awry. You set a letter in place and you cannot escape it. And so when this warp was set as a trap for me in verse, so that if I escape two times I would not evade a third, like a reckless sparrow I flew through the deceptive clouds into a net, because I was caught by the wing in what I sought to avoid...

...each letter that is colored in the vertical verse both retains its place in one sequence and enters into another and, so to speak, stands as a warp and goes ahead as a weft, so that the page becomes a lettered loom. Lest we be troubled that we seem to intertwine coloured threads with the art of an Arachne, in the books of the prophet Moses, as you well know, a fine-weaving artist wove the priestly vestments. So since there is no scarlet here, the text has been woven with red. The verses, however, that run from the corners downward at an angle are stable in meaning, if inclined in stance.  (Venantius Fortunatus, 5.6, trans. adapted from Michael Roberts)

A ninth century manuscript of the poem. British Library, Add MS 24193, f. 30r

As Brian Brennan notes in a recent article, this wasn't the only time Fortunatus used metaphors of weaving in his work, and his writing of ekphrasis (an exercise in classical rhetorical writing which focused on detailed description), tended to pay particular attention to lavish textiles. At the end of his four-book poem about the life of the fourth-century saint Martin of Tours, Fortunatus contrasted the quality of his writing with the worthiness of his subject in explicitly textile terms:

The thread having been unraveled is making many rucks and the disjointed fibers with their knots make a rough cloth like that carded from harsh camel hair, whereas it was fitting for Martin to be given a silken cloak with a border shining with an interweave of twisted gold thread or a toga where ran purple, intermixed with white.(Venantius Fortunatus, Life of Martin, 4.621-7, trans. Brian Brennan, lightly adapted)

There were no camels in sixth-century Gaul, so the fact that the poet assumes his audience knows what camel-hair yarn and cloth feels like is intriguing. There are two possibilities: one is that, like so many late antique authors he, his simply hearkening back to what some poet he read in school says about camel hair yarn and cloth (having knitted with yarn made in part from the hair of baby camels, I assure you that it is among the softest fibers I have ever had the pleasure of handling). And secondly, in order to make sense to their audience, poets choose relatable metaphors, so this could be a reference to an actual textile familiar to his audience.

Just a metaphor?

We tend to think of textile work as done primarily by women but the more I read about the history of spinning, weaving, knitting, lace-making, tapestry, and embroidery, the more it becomes clear that this work was not restricted by gender. (If you, too, are interested in such things, I highly recommend Piecework magazine.) Indeed, in the late Middle Ages, the great tapestry-weaving workshops were run by men, and the male professional embroiderer is not the exotic creature modern prejudices might think him. When scholars say that Fortunatus' metaphors of weaving are just literary language, they dismiss textile production as 'unofficial art from the domestic sector' (in the words of a book on late antique textiles), something divorced from the high culture of poetry.

Yet textiles and poems were closer than we might think. The weavings of the fourth-century noblewoman Sabina were the subject of a number of epigrams by her husband Ausonius: 

LIII.—Lines woven in a Robe

Let the proud Orient extol its Achaemenian looms: weave in thy robes, O Greece, soft threads of gold; but let fame equally renown Ausonian Sabina who, shunning their costliness, matches their skill.

LIV.—A Second Set

Whether thou dost admire robes woven in Tyrian looms, or lovest a motto neatly traced, my mistress with her charming skill combines the twain: one hand—Sabina’s—practises these twin arts.

LV.—On the same Sabina

Some weave yarn and some weave verse: these of their verse make tribute to the Muses, those of their yarn to thee, O chaste Minerva. But I, Sabina, will not divorce mated arts, who on my own webs have inscribed my verse.

(Ausonius, Epigrams, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn White, Ausonius, Vol II (Cambridge and London, 1921). Note that in Roger Green's edition and numbering of the epigrams, these are Epigrammata 27-9.)

Square Panel from a Furnishing with Bust of Spring
ca. 5th– 6th century CE
H. 21.6 cm; W. 19.7 cm
Tapestry weave of dyed wools and undyed (?) wool
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of George F. Baker, 1890 (90.5.848)

Aside from textile metaphors, one of the other things late antique poets appropriated was female personas--a poet writing in the voice of his wife is not unusual in late antique writing. This epigram, however, stands out as an instance were the two are combined to show a woman herself as artist and creator. 

Seeking A Fine-Weaving Artist

One of the assumptions people commonly make about late antique history is that there are few sources. An exciting thing about working on this period, though, is that that's absolutely not the case--as the amazing textiles presented in the exhibitions, 'Textiles of Late Antiquity' (1996) and 'Designing Identity: The Power of Textiles in the Late Antiquity' (2016) clearly show! What we sometimes don't have is the daring and imagination to put different types of information together--to imagine a world, for instance, where a mischievous young Venantius Fortunatus was given a drop spindle and a basket of camel's hair and told to make himself useful for a change, producing a lumpy, scratchy yarn he later used as a metaphor for struggling to write beautifully. When scholars relegate textiles to the domestic sphere, it sometimes feel like they are saying 'women made this so we don't have to worry about it'. And yet, textiles had such a powerful hold on the imagination of late antique writers that they turned to them when trying to express what writing was.

 

One of my dream projects is to join forces with a multi-media textile artist to imagine what Sabina's poem actually said. And simply to explore the metaphor of weaving with words, warp, weft, golden thread, and all.

Further Reading

 Brian Brennan, 'Weaving with words: Venantius' Fortunatus' figurative acrostics on the Holy Cross' Traditio 74 (2019), 27-53

Adolfo Salvatore Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993). Available from https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Medieval_Tapestries_in_The_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art [accessed 20 September 2020]

'Designing Identity: the Power of Textiles in Late Antiquity', Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, February 25-May 22 2016, Available from https://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibitions/design-identity [accessed 20 September 2020] 

Michael Roberts, Venantius Fortunatus Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Anne Marie Stauffer, Textiles in Late Antiquity (New York: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995). Available from https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Textiles_of_Late_Antiquity [Accessed 20 September 2020]

Jane Stevenson, Women in Latin Poetry (Oxford, 2005)

A Personal Chronology in Sock Knitting

The last time I left my city overnight was in late February, and among other things that means that my knitting time has changed. Previously, I strongly associated my sock knitting with two things: travel (especially on trains, airplanes, and buses), and meetings where I could get away with toting needles.

 

I started knitting socks as a high school and university student, as part of my regular attendance at knitting classes with my mother and sister. The teacher was one of the best I have ever had at anything: patient, kind, vastly knowledgeable, and generous with sharing what he knew. No matter what everyone was working on, he began each class by teaching a short stitch pattern, usually one he had made up--even if one of his student knitters was determined to make the same thing over and over, he was determined to share the joy of the things knitting can make. Curious and opinionated (he believed in the Gospel of Wool, and didn't have much truck with novelty yarns), he also didn't take himself or his craft too seriously--I can still hear him saying, with a laugh in his voice, 'it's just sticks and string, it all comes apart'. I learned to make socks in his class, and nearly fifteen years later, that first pair is still going strong.

 

The first pair of socks I ever knit

 My sock knitting habit really kicked off in college, where I managed to carve out regular knitting time during the various meetings that the student groups I joined required. Like countless the knitters before me, I discovered that plain socks are a useful meeting-companion: they are small, portable, discreet, and can mostly be made without full attention.

The second pair of socks

When I studied abroad in Oxford, in 2009-2010, I brought a pair of socks with me. I still remember bringing them on trains and trips around the country, as I explored on my own and with visitors. During my PhD I began to travel regularly, and discovered that I LOVE to knit on trains. By 2014, the time the photos below were taken, I would rarely get on a train without a sock project in my bag. My collection grew accordingly!

My undergraduate socks

 

Socks knitted while I was an MPhil and first year PhD Student

My sock production up to 2014...

I started to give socks as gifts--beginning with a pair for my college boyfriend, whose size 13 feet marked the largest pair of socks I have made to this day (he and I aren't in touch anymore, but I hope they have lasted), and starting a tradition of giving members of my family, and close friends, socks as birthday presents, Christmas presents, or because I wanted to presents. Handknitted socks last for years, and so after a few years of steady knitting, my sock production shifted to being mostly for myself to being almost exclusively for other people. These days, I only keep a pair of socks if they, or the yarn, have particularly special memories attached.

I couldn't write out a list of all of the socks I've knitted--after over two dozen pairs, I can't remember them all at once--but put scraps of the yarn in front of me, or the socks themselves, I can tell you roughly when or where I was making them, sometimes in great detail. Knitters sometimes talk about how what we make is a vessel of our love for the recipient of our knitting, and when I gift socks to loved ones I like to think about this, but for me, they are also vessels of memory, capturing the time I spent on trains, or my first visit to a particular place, or something significant that was going on in my life at time.

Like a lot of people in the pandemic, I have found myself spending a lot of time at home. I have watched a lot of television, which for me is prime knitting time (a former housemate, watching Kill Bill with me, joked that I don't watch TV, I listen to it). The items below aren't all socks--I branched out to a pair of fingerless gloves, which are the purple item in the centre; and three of them were knitted in the autumn and winter of 2019, and blocked during quarantine. By now I have my teacher's simple sock pattern memorized, and a pretty good sense of what needles to use, and how many stitches to cast on, to get an appropriate size.

Socks of the Pandemic, May 2020. I have knitted two more pairs since taking this photo.

I make some hilarious mistakes. Those green socks in the centre are of great length in the leg and the foot (sometimes, if I am anxious while knitting socks, I keep going for awhile and end up with long legs or feet, and apparently, in times of special stress, both). Occasionally, a particular combination of skinny yarn and relaxation will mean that no matter how many stitches I cast on or what size of needles I use, the sock still ends up enormous; conversely, I have sometimes made socks of slightly different lengths--funnily enough, it's usually the second sock I'll make longer than the first!

Over the pandemic I have stumbled upon a new problem--I tried one of my teacher's patterns while watching TV, not looking at the pattern very much, and ended up with a beautiful textured effect. 

textured blue sock, summer 2020

I have not yet succeeded in making the second sock look like the first--attempts to follow the pattern as written have produced a very different-looking sock, so my task for the next few weeks is going to be to figure out my own knitting so I can produce the second sock! 

All of socks I have made during the pandemic will be things I remember as having produced sitting at home, rather than on trains or airplanes as usual. More than ever, those I keep and give away will have love and memory tangled in every stitch.

 

I associate James O'Donnell's brilliant book The Ruin of the Roman Empire with the following poem:

Waiting for the Barbarians

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.

C. P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Available from the Poetry Foundation, here

 

Constantine Peter Cavafy (1863-1933), was a Greek poet who was born and died in Alexandria, Egypt; he spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Liverpool and Constantinople. He was fascinated by the history of the ancient world and described himself as a 'poet-novelist' or 'poet-historian'. Although 'Waiting for the Barbarians' sounds like it is set in the city of Rome it seems that the civilisation Cavafy actually had in mind was ancient Greece. Yet it very much reads as a poem about late antiquity--particularly in its picture of the barbarians ceasing to exist through assimilation. 

 

The poem's picture of barbarians as simultaneously outsiders, insiders, and leaders is perfect for The Ruin of the Roman Empire. The main thesis of O'Donnell's book is that it was the eastern Roman emperor Justinian's attempts to reconquer Italy and North Africa in the 530s that really wrecked the western Roman Empire. Had the western Roman world been trusted to the hands of its competent barbarian rulers, O'Donnell argues, its unified empire would not have come to an end. O'Donnell's book was published in 2008, when contemporary events lent the subject of unnecessary and unjust war urgency in the minds of American intellectuals. The point of this post is not to engage with contemporary analogies and the effects of Justinian's wars, but to explain why I highly recommend The Ruin of the Roman Empire, and how 'Waiting for the Barbarians' helps us think through late antique history.

There are many things The Ruin of the Roman Empire does well, and for friends and family who want a readable account of late antiquity, it is the first book I recommend. O'Donnell's choice to trace the history of the sixth century through the stories of three of its major players--the Ostrogothic king of Italy, Theodoric, Justinian, and pope Gregory the Great--turn late antiquity into compelling drama. Structurally, these three sections also correspond to stages in the history of the end of the western empire: the point where it seemed like the empire would persist, the process of decline and transformation, and the first stages of the post-imperial world. For some historians, comment on what the people of the past thought and felt is anathema; for readable history it is indispensable. O'Donnell turns Theodoric, Justinian, and Gregory the Great into characters in an epic story, giving the new reader something to care about outside of the abstractions of threadbare academic debates.

I call debates over the barbarians threadbare (and some of them seem to go over the same ground over and over and over), but the end of the western empire is one of the Big Stories that many western artists and journalists use to make sense of the world. The use of the late antique past in the present matters. As Guy Halsall and others have pointed out, the story that the barbarians wrecked the Roman Empire turns people who were an integral part of the later Roman world into outsiders, opening the door for additional othering in the use of the barbarian migrations narrative to demonise modern day migrants. Cavafy's poem presents the barbarians as a solution for a decadent ancient society tired of making its own laws and governing itself, seeking the relief of handing over the reins to a people who may not be impressed by rhetoric, but who are dazzled by gems and rich clothing, and value the pomp of imposing offices and titles. Without the barbarians playing their traditional role, we--like the speaker of the poem--have to look for other solutions. O'Donnell's book takes Cavafy's question and answer literally: the barbarians were the solution. This is what makes both poem and book a compelling summation of late antiquity.

Further Reading

Paul Bailey, 'C.P. Cavafy: the Complete Poems Review' The Guardian 31 May 2013 available from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/31/cp-cavafy-complete-mendelsohn-review accessed on 6 September 2020.

Guy Halsall, 'Why do we need the barbarians?' Historian on the Edge 15 July 2011 available from https://600transformer.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-do-we-need-barbarians.html accessed on 6 September 2020.

James O'Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

Poetry Foundation, 'C.P. Cavafy', available from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-p-cavafy accessed on 6 September 2020.