Cavafy- Waiting for the Barbarians

“Cavafy read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1893 and 1899. He left notes of his disagreements with the historian, who to his displeasure had a low opinion of Byzantium and Christianity. At the same time, as has been pointed out, Gibbon’s ironic view of history became Cavafy’s own. Irony cured him of both Romantic historiography and Symbolist mysticism and made him a modern poet. In ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, which is still an apt description of any state that needs enemies, real or imaginary, as a perpetual excuse, the defenders capitulate morally even before the enemy shows up. ‘I am a poietes historikos,’ a historical poet or poet-historian, Cavafy said of himself. What the poet notices – and the historian averts his eyes to – is the degree to which folly, that child of absolute power, rules events; in other words, a world in which a fatal self-delusion that is both comic and tragic is always with us.” Charles Siminic