My contribution to these sessions is essentially to sum up by asking you one big question: why do we need the barbarians? For it seems that we really do need the barbarians. The answer was found, or at least suggested, in 1904 by C.P. Cavafy in his famous, much quoted, poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (even quoted, inexplicably, in the names of chic jewellery boutiques in the 7me arrondissement in Paris, as left):
“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 the barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”
Those people were a kind of solution.”
He was right; the bigger question, a hundred years on from Cavafy, is probably ‘a solution to what?’ As far as I can see, the problem which they solve cannot be ‘why did the Roman Empire fall?’ The barbarians’ role in any analysis of the Empire’s collapse must surely be sought under ‘consequences’ or ‘effects’ or – perhaps better – ‘components’, rather than under ‘causes’. If one looks at the matter in simple descriptive terms, the number of provinces or amount of territory actually conquered by barbarians during the fifth century is minimal.
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Why, then, are people so wedded to the barbarians as the major cause for any and all change in the late antique west? For they are.
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The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. ‘He’ is not like ‘us’, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians in the vision of Peter Heather, are peoples with ‘coherent aims', which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well – none other than the barbarians anyway.
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