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.