Waiting for the Barbarians Day

What the day is

Waiting for the Barbarians Day is observed on November 4. The name comes from a poem by Constantine Cavafy, the Greek poet of Alexandria, written in 1898 and published in 1904.

Origin and background

The poem describes a city that has stopped functioning. The senate does not legislate, the emperor waits at the gate in his finest robes, the orators stay silent, and everyone explains that the barbarians are coming today. At the end, travelers arrive from the frontier with the news that there are no barbarians, and the crowd disperses in confusion. The closing lines observe that those people were, in a way, a kind of solution.

The idea has outlived its occasion. A society can organize itself so thoroughly around an expected threat that the expectation becomes the organizing principle, and the absence of the threat is destabilizing rather than welcome. The poem is regularly invoked in discussions of political rhetoric for exactly that reason, and the title has been borrowed repeatedly, most prominently by J. M. Coetzee for his 1980 novel.

Cavafy himself worked most of his life as a civil servant in the Egyptian irrigation department and published little in his lifetime, circulating poems privately among friends. His reputation grew substantially after his death in 1933, and he is now among the most translated modern Greek poets.

The day's presence on holiday calendars with the instruction to stand around awaiting the inevitable is a joke at the poem's expense, and a fair one.

How to take part

• Read the poem. It is about forty lines and takes three minutes.
• Read two translations side by side. Cavafy's plainness is deceptively hard to carry into English.
• Notice where the structure applies in current argument, without assuming every warning is hollow.
• Read Coetzee's novel if the idea holds your attention.
• Look up Cavafy's other work, particularly Ithaka, which is his most quoted.