Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete 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,
and 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 come forward 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 restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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Related quotes
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
quote by Thomas Sowell
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Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
quote by Matthew Arnold
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Untitled Poem - I
Once, one of my students read a book we had.
She was doing a history assignment on
the decline and fall of the Roman Empire
and crying. When I asked her why
she said Because. All those people died.
I said that if you start to cry for the dead
You won’t have much time for anything else.
Besides, after all the city people were killed
or died off, because their cultures got too high,
the barbarians kept some peasants alive
for their food value. Some barbarian raped
some peasant woman who produced
a child who ultimately produced you
and me, so there is this family continuity,
so don’t cry, it’s obvious, look around!
This is the reason why we Americans
are a nation of peasants and barbarians,
poem by Alan Dugan
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Frontiers
Oh yeah
Progress flys, into our lives
Got to find time, find time
Talk digit talk
Youre doin find
Machines never mind
They never mind
Out on the border
Of a changing skyline
We put hope in front of fear
And all the heroes
Have gone east of eden
We all need new frontiers
Ooh its a 3d rise
All tech-na-ca-jive
Talk a video dive
War is for fools
Crisis is cool
Barbarians play
(chorus)
New, new, frontiers
Barbarians play away, away, away...play
song performed by by Journey
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Waiting on the barbarians (a reply to C.P. Cavafy)
Called up for armed military service
hundreds of thousands white boys
are forced into a war
of whom I am but a single one
and with all battles won and even the war,
with the enemy forces shattered,
thousands of Cubans killed,
almost a hundred enemy tanks shot out,
hundreds of enemy armoured cars destroyed,
even the soviets admitting that no victory
against us is possible
the man with the bold polished head
doesn’t surrender, doesn’t even sell out,
no, he gives the whole country away
and gets a Nobel Prize for it
he opens the prison doors for the leaders
of bomb planting killers
to walk to freedom
and we and the world expect the barbarians
who used burning tires as necklaces
to appear
and out steps a man, dignified
and also receives a Nobel Prize
for his charity
and now years later the damage is done
with affirmative action
and nobody that is white who still has a job
realizes the impact of it,
that it is just another kind of racial discrimination
and slowly but surely in the long run
every white person is forced to into poverty
and the bold man sees himself
as a hero,
is viewed as a type of messiah by some
and the utmost traitor by others
and I wonder where the barbarians are
who torched living people?
Since they did not come but for one
who was the leader of our own ranks
whose actions are forcing everyone
slowly but surely into the gutter
and now the present government
wants to implement a law
to take away freedom of speech
to quench, to sensor, to scrap all poems all stories,
all news articles like this.
[Reference: Waiting on the Barbarians by C.P. Cavafy.]
poem by Gert Strydom
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It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
quote by Garrison Keillor
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?
quote by Angela Carter
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War is the business of barbarians.
quote by Napoleon Bonaparte
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Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.
quote by Isaiah Berlin
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.
quote by Pierre Schaeffer
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Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.
quote by Jacques Yves Cousteau
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Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.
No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money.
quote by Samuel Gompers
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Ziyi Song
Chang-an -- one slip of moon;
in ten thousand houses, the sound of fulling mallets.
Autumn winds keep on blowing,
all things make me think of Jade Pass!
When will they put down the barbarians
and my good man come home from his far campaign?
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
quote by Thomas Sowell
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Of course the barbarians' aim of world domination has not escaped the attention of the Europeans, perhaps because unlike us they are closer to the walls.
quote by Barbara Amiel
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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But Paul, in his preaching of the Gospel, is a debtor to deliver the word not to Barbarians only, but also to Greeks, and not only to the unwise, who would easily agree with him, but also to the wise.
Here in Canada, in the Western world, we are inside the walls. Outside the walls are the barbarians.
quote by Barbara Amiel
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Here to Disperse
And the last conflict comes.
With the winning of it...
Not done by Earth inhabitants.
But by beings around the universe.
Here to disperse...
Misunderstandings of 'who' commands.
To stun the barbarians.
And bridge with a healing.
That spreads a peace...
Upon all lands.
With a removal of diseased minds!
So magnificent and bright.
Descend the colorized lights!
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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