“Waiting for the Barbarians” and the Government Shutdown

—Why is there such great idleness inside Senate house?
Why are the Senators sitting there, not passing any laws? >

Because the barbarians will arrive today.
Why should the Senators still be making laws?
The barbarians, when they come, will legislate.

We like to think that all great poetry has perennial significance, is “for the ages”; but these lines, written in Greek in 1898 and first published, in Egypt, in 1904, seem particularly prescient this week. They were written by the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, in a poem whose title, at least—“Waiting for the Barbarians”—is the best known of any that the enigmatic, sardonic figure gave to his three-hundred-some-odd verses.

Cavafy’s best-known poem is undoubtedly “Ithaca,” a sentimental 1911 work whose familiar setting and characters (it’s ostensibly addressed to Odysseus as he makes his way home from the Trojan War) and rather Hallmark-y message (that it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts) has endeared it to millions—particularly after it was read at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who knew a thing or two about Greeks bearing gifts. But the gimlet-eyed, hard-headed “Waiting for the Barbarians,” with its jaundiced appreciation of cultural torpor and political stagnation, is far more characteristic of Cavafy, a self-described “poet-historian,” whose lifelong immersion in Greek history, from the fall of Troy to the fall of Byzantium, left him with few illusions about the possibilities for political progress—and make him the perfect poet to be reading just now.

“Waiting for the Barbarians” begins with a CinemaScope spectacle of imminent national decline. In an enormous square in an unnamed city (Rome? Constantinople? It doesn’t matter, because it keeps happening everywhere, after all), a throng has gathered in anxious expectation of the arrival of some (also unnamed) “barbarians.” The government, as those opening lines make clear, has ground to a halt—not least because the most powerful men in the land, starting with the head of state himself, the emperor (who has “taken his position at the greatest of the city’s gates / seated on his throne”) and including his toga-wearing, jewel-encrusted officials, are also milling around waiting for the barbarians. (Cavafy cannily opens the poem with the image of the stilled Senate house and idle legislators in order to pique our curiosity; only after does he pan to the bustling plaza whither the action—or rather, anticipation—has shifted.)

There is a vaguely sinister suggestion that some kind of appeasement is on the menu: we’re told that the emperor is prepared to present a “parchment scroll” that will confer “many titles and honorifics” on the barbarian leader—not, you strongly suspect, that the brutish foreigner will care; clearly the barbarians are in a position to take what they want. This may be why the only group not represented in the welcoming delegation are wordsmiths: the “worthy orators” who would normally “deliver their addresses, each to say his piece” at such a major occasion. We sense that things have moved past the stage of discussion or debate—even staged discussion and debate. Anyway, as Cavafy observes, barbarians “are bored by eloquence and public speaking.” In the ensuing silence, we notice only the disturbing images that precede the poem’s famously surprising ending: the faces of the crowd, suddenly serious, the streets emptying, the citizens shambling home “deep in contemplation.”

Why is the square suddenly emptying out, the crowd dispersing? “Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.” It’s only in the last two lines that the poet springs his unexpected finale: that the crowd was, in fact, waiting eagerly for the barbarians (“what’s to become of us without barbarians?”)—and, in fact, “those people were a solution of a sort.”

Cultural exhaustion, political inertia, the perverse yearning for some violent crisis that might break the deadlock and reinvigorate the state: these themes, so familiar to us right now, were favorites of Cavafy. He was, after all, a citizen of Alexandria, a city that had been an emblem of cultural supremacy—founded by Alexander the Great, seat of the Ptolemies, the literary and intellectual center of the Mediterranean for centuries—and which had devolved to irrelevancy by the time he was born, in 1863. When you’ve seen that much history spool by, that much glory and that much decline, you have very few expectations of history—which is to say, of human nature and political will. In poem after poem, in verses that take both ancient myth and ancient history as their subjects, the poet charted the inevitable failure of our best efforts. These lines from “Trojans” (the reference is to the “Iliad”) written in 1900, are typical:> We imagine that with resolve and daring

we will reverse the animosity of fortune,
and so we take our stand outside, to fight.

But whenever the crucial moment comes,
our boldness and our daring disappear;
our spirit is shattered, comes unstrung;
and we scramble all around the walls,
seeking in our flight to save ourselves.

The grandiose promise, the sordid reality: this, for Cavafy, was the inevitable cycle of human affairs. What’s interesting and distinctive about this poet is that he doesn’t necessarily sit in judgment. This is simply the way people are.

Indeed, Cavafy had tremendous sympathy for ordinary people who are the victims of that terrible cycle. There’s a marvellous poem, “The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria,” about a small-time peddler who happens to arrive in Egyptian capital soon after the Battle of Actium, in which the future emperor Augustus decisively defeated Antony and Cleopatra. Trying only to sell his incenses and perfumes, he staggers around the city buffeted by the crowd, unable to figure out what “the tremendous stir” in the city means; in the end, he must accept the royal palace’s official version—that Antony and Cleopatra have won. The joke is that, at the single most important moment in their history, the people are being lied to by a leadership interested only in saving face.

Those whom the poet does judge—and judge harshly—are leaders who abdicate their responsibilities, to principle and to their people. Cavafy had little patience for those whose self-interest (and, often, self-satisfaction) lead them to dangerous delusions. In a tart 1915 poem called “Nero’s Deadline,” based—as most of Cavafy’s historical poems were—on primary sources (in this case, an anecdote related by the Roman historian Suetonius), the notorious emperor receives an oracle warning him to beware the age of seventy-three. Smugly, the thirty-year-old Roman reflects that “he still had time to enjoy himself”—blithely unaware the one of his great generals, who in fact ended up being part of the coup d’état that deposed Nero, was seventy-three years old.

The cardinal sins in Cavafy’s vision of history and politics are complacency, smugness, and a solipsistic inability to see the big picture. What he did admire, extravagantly, were political figures who do the right thing even though they know they have little chance of prevailing: the great “losers” of history, admirable in their fruitless commitment to ethical behavior—or merely sensible enough to know when the game is up. In “The God Abandons Antony,” one of his best-known poems (adapted by Leonard Cohen as “Alexandra Leaving”), about one of his favorite historical figures, Cavafy exhorts the defeated Roman not to “uselessly mourn” his “plans … which turned out wrong,” not to “fool yourself / don’t say it was a dream.” Instead, he must “listen with deep emotion” to the passing crowd and bid farewell to the city—symbol of the imperial dream—“whom you are losing.” Another poem, about the Macedonian king Demetrius, who simply walked away when his troops deserted him for another leader, approves the way in which the former monarch “left: doing just as an actor does / who, when the performance is over, / changes his attire and departs.”

Even greater is the poet’s admiration for the so-called “reluctant emperor” of Byzantium, John Cantacuzenus (circa 1295-1383). Cantacuzenus, a nobleman who became involved in a bitter power struggle with a corrupt and destructive empress regent, was briefly emperor, but eventually entered a monastery, where he wrote history for the rest of his life. In a 1925 poem called “Of Colored Glass,” Cavafy recounts how the emperor and his wife were forced to wear regalia made of glass at their crowning, because the imperial crown jewels had been sold off by his avaricious enemies. But for this poet, there was no shame in the worthless adornments, which indeed they wore as a badge of honor:

They are the symbols of what was fitting for them to have,
of what above all it was right for them to have
at their crowning…

Quiet acceptance and realism were, for this historical poet, the greatest of all virtues in political life—particularly in defeat. It’s no accident that the four Cantacuzenus poems were written in the early to mid-nineteen-twenties, during and just after Greece's disastrous military effort to recapture lands in Turkey that had long ago been Greek. Cavafy may have steeped himself in history books, but he also read the newspapers: the political consequences of personal and national delusion were all too real to this poet who, from his geographical and intellectual vantage point in a very ancient city, knew that such delusions are paid for in lives. That much, certainly, has not changed with time.

Inaction, of course, can be as destructive as ill-advised action. This is why the aimless standing around and waiting that Cavafy so brilliantly evokes in “Waiting for the Barbarians” is so contemptible. The vigor of the leaders, the effectiveness of their oratory, the political will of the citizens have been so atrophied by indolence and luxury and complacency that they can only hope for disaster as a means of renewing the state. Depending on your politics, you may be tempted to map the current political crisis onto “Waiting for the Barbarians” in any number of ways: Are the barbarians the Democrats or the Republicans? Is the “emperor” Obama or Boehner—or Reid? To Cavafy, those details would have been of little interest. The point was that these things happen again and again, and that whatever else they may mean, they are always, always tests of character—for individual politicians and for whole nations. It is even—or rather, especially—when the barbarians (whoever they are) are at the gates, when crisis is inevitable or even imminent, that right action is the only option, whether or not it’s likely to succeed. Even in politics, it’s the journey that counts, not just the destination.

* * *

“Waiting for the Barbarians”
By Constantine Cavafy

—What is it that we are waiting for, gathered in the square?

The barbarians are supposed to arrive today.

—Why is there such great idleness inside Senate house?
Why are the Senators sitting there, not passing any laws?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.
Why should the Senators still be making laws?
The barbarians, when they come, will legislate.

—Why is it that our Emperor awoke so early today,
and has taken his position at the greatest of the city’s gates
sitting on his throne, in solemn state, and wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.
And the emperor is waiting to receive
their leader. Indeed he is prepared
to present him with a parchment scroll. In it
he’s conferred on him many titles and honorifics.

—Why is it that our consuls and our praetors have come out today
wearing their scarlet togas with their rich embroidery,
why have they donned their armlets with all their amethysts,
and rings with their magnificent, glistening emeralds;
why is it that they’re carrying such precious staves today,
maces chased exquisitely with silver and with gold?

Because the barbarians will arrive today;
and things like that bedazzle the barbarians.

—Why do our worthy orators not come today as usual
to deliver their addresses, each to say his piece?

Because the barbarians will arrive today;
and they’re bored by eloquence and public speaking.

—Why is it that such uneasiness has seized us all at once,
and such confusion? (How serious the faces have become.)
Why is it that the streets and squares are emptying so quickly,
and everyone’s returning home in such deep contemplation?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some people have arrived from the borderlands,
and said there are no barbarians any more.

And now what’s to become of us without barbarians.
Those people were a solution of a sort.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author, most recently, of “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture,” a collection of his essays for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, which was runner-up for the 2013 PEN Art of the Essay Award and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two memoirs, “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million” and “The Elusive Embracea translation of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy; and a study of Greek tragedy. He teaches at Bard College.

Photograph: Unidentified Author/Alinari via Getty.